Greater

Because Greater...
    is He...
        that is in you... 1Jn. 4.4

Somewhere along the line we have lost the concept of greatness, and our lives are petty and darkened.

We have lost sight of the God Who all nature obeys,
   the One Who holds the stars in their courses,
            the One Who rotates the seasons,
              Who commands the wind and the rain and    the waves.

How much do we know of this dimension "Greater"? 

Have we seen Him greater than time ... greater than yesterday, and today and all our tomorrows?
...greater than all measure?

Do we know Him as the One Who is uncontainable,
the One Who overflows all our definitions?

Can we see Him as the "in you" greater?

Our challenge is to see this, to believe this, to reach out and seek until we find this.
Our challenge is to live in the place of God's measure, and not our own.

Our Need is to find the real dimension of the Kingdom of God.

God was the Creator at the beginning and God is the Creator at the end.

As my father used to say "The Christian is not a football for the devil to kick around."
God has provided "some better thing for us".
Let us reach for His provision.

The spiritual deserts of this world await transformation.
Creation awaits the presence of God in the lives of His children.

Perdition...or Prophet?

Even within The Way of Salvation we have managed to provide an alternative.

We speak of Spiritual Life, and yet treat it as if it were to be found by following a set of rules.
We follow Teachers who offer us a road map of conduct - a "how to" manual for successful Christian living.

Leaving the guidance of the Spirit which brought us to birth, we enter a wasteland of Law without Life.
A realm of joyless obedience, and weakening faith.
We thrash around as a drowning man caught up in forces beyond his strength.

When Israel escaped ..."by a prophet the Lord brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a prophet was he preserved." Hos.12.13

Exactly!

Deliverance came by the Spirit of God operating in a man.

If we are to be saved, we enter into that salvation only by the Spirit of God.
And if we are to continue in the path of salvation, we must continue only by the Spirit of God - "the flesh profiteth nothing" 

The rules could not save in the time of the Old Testament and the rules cannot carry us today.

All our dependence on anything other than the working of God's Spirit in our lives is vain.

All the efforts of our aching souls hammering against the rock of our nature can only produce a broken cistern...
Years of effort can only produce a cracked recipient incapable of holding the Water of Life.

The world is lost.
How sad if the Christian is lost in the Way!

Oh, that we might find freedom in the ceaseless flow of the Life of God ministered through the Spirit of God.

SALVATION...How Saved are we?

Man is more concerned with the avoiding of Loss than to obtaining Gain.
It is said that many times at the end of life, people lament more what they did not do than the things they did do.

Sadly, we seem to have carried this thinking over to our understanding of Salvation.
We look more at what we are saved "from" than at what we are saved "to"...
Salvation "from" becomes the end of what we look for from God.
Maybe we would not express it this way - but we do live this way.

For God what we call Salvation is merely the door.
Our call is to possess a Kingdom.
The "to" is always greater than the "from".
The positive is always greater than the negative.
That which is ahead is always greater than that which is behind.

Salvation is God's door to infinite realms and to liberty without limits.

As Israel journeyed to the promised land, so before us there is a destiny, a place of wide horizons to be explored and possessed.

All our earthly journey is to that place where it is "on earth as it is in heaven"...a place where the powers of the Kingdom are Real and are Present.

God also gave them up...Rom. 1:24

A terrible fate...

How many times, in how many areas, does God give man up to the destruction of their sins?
How many times does He withold His hand and let man reap what he has sown?

This time, this day of ours, is not the same as other times.

Christian values, and simple moral values, are bleeding out in the streets of our cities.
Today there  is a total unawareness of what surrounds us.

Around our world everything human is being shredded, and we are living in the midst of the complacency of obliviousness.

As my father used to say, "when are we going to get serious about being serious?"

Is it perhaps because we have never really caught a glimpse of the true nature of the kingdom of God?

Is it that we have heard the words but never felt the passion?
...never felt the force that is always driving things forward toward the day of His appearing?
...never sensed the dimension of Reality?

Isaiah says, "we all do fade as a leaf...our iniquities like the wind have taken us away...there is none that stirreth up himself to take hold of Thee."

Can we "take hold" for a lost generation, for a lost world, for our children and our children's children?

Samaria...

I continue to be amazed at Jesus in Samaria.
His commission and His anointing was to bring the message of the Kingdom of God to Israel.
Yet here...He makes an intermission in His time of ministry and finds "He must needs go" through Samaria.

It is as though for a momentary interlude Israel did not exist.

Here in Samaria He speaks to an Outcast among the Outcasts...and His message is understood and received.

    Here He opens the depths of the gospel message.                      
        Here He speaks of an inner well ever springing.

The Beauty and the Pathos of the moment are overwhelming...

While Israel saw only the external, the superficial, here in a land beyond Israel's limits the truth was made bare.
A lost multitude without any of the clinging forms of religion heard with a needy hearts and opened their lives to the Words of Life.

The doors of revelation were flung open and the Secret of Eternal Life was made manifest.

The Word echoes within me today, "a well of water springing up into Eternal Life".

Our Time...Our Place..

"for such a time as this..." Esther 4:14

As with a pile of rotting compost, at the beginning of the twentieth century the fermentation of society produced a spontaneous combustion, which after anarchy and uprising, led to the consuming fires of the first World War.

Today, as it was a hundred and twenty years ago, systems of government and commerce cease to be viable.
And today, as then, there are no answers on the horizon.
Today the temperature in the pile of compost which we call civilization is reaching critical heat... and no one knows how or when it will explode into flame.

Our day is fraught with crisis, it is not a time for apathy.
There is no status quo ... everything is in a state of flux.

The God of Measure (the God whose atom oscillating at 430 trillion times a second is accurate they tell us within a second in 15 billion years), this God of Perfect Measure, knows perfectly our out-of-control world, and He knows His own.

Ours is the responsibility to pray, obey and trust until His kingdom becomes clear to us...until in His light we see Him eternally Sufficient to sustain His purposes.

We have:
        A responsibility to Stand while all is falling,
                A responsibility to Show Forth a Salvation which rises high and firm over the chaos of man's endeavors, man's world.

Unless we find this, our position in God, we have No Message... No Word... and No Authority in the midst of the coming cataclysm.

Now shalt thou see what I shall do...  Ex. 6:1

Now shalt thou see what I will do...

There was an unrealized ''what" in the life of Moses.
    There was a  ''what'' 
                      that was a Call 
                          and a Commission.

Moses had endured forty years of desert preparation.
He had seen the beginning of his ministry but, so far
nothing of the Fulness ... no real unfolding of what God had spoken.

Moses' last words before this word from God was a cry of "wherefore'' and ''why?''
He found himself at the end of his faith, and resources ... blind to the way forward... Egypt all around, and the people still enslaved.

Moses question is 
    ''How about Now? 
        What is going on Now?''

Is it hard to see the parallel in our lives...our own ''what''... the God given word, vision, dream?

How long will our hope remain unrealized?
The processes of God have led us to vision, can they lead us to fulfilment?

In our lives, can we see the dimension of God's ''What'' and not our own?
     Can we see beyond earth's horizons and our own      human limitations?
     Can we start to see the limitless realms of God?
     Can we, dare we, reach out to possess realms            which are not dependant on our natural abilities?

As for Moses, so for us there awaits a place where God says, ''Now shalt thou see what I will do.''