No More

God speaks in Job 38.11, "Here shall thy proud winds be stayed"

It is interesting that the waves are associated with pride
- uplifting and advancing with resistless force.

What a picture of the enemy - 
     unstoppable in his pride and destructive force until God decrees.

Here at the bottom of Argentina lies Cape Horn,
where the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Antartic Oceans meet.
     Here the winds blow unchecked across the thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean.
          Here gigantic waves are formed and it has been estimated that in these seas 800 ships and over 10,000 men were lost between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries.

What a picture of destruction is there.
And what a picture of the waves which arise against the child of God.
     The waves are unchecked until God says, "Enough."

When God marks the spot and says "here,"
     the waves cannot advance one step more.
          When He says "here" the destructive power is no more. 

How great is God,
how great is His power, and His mercy.
     It is for us to believe,
          to take hold, 
               to stand firm.

 It is for us to repeat His declaration of promise,
      to say with Him, in faith, 
          "here shall thy proud waves be stayed."

This is the calm God bestows upon His own,
     a calm which is absolute and inviolable,
          a calm beyond the power of the enemy to desecrate.

             This is the place of our Comfort, our Safety and Renewal.

 

Oh, to Stand

The little word "stand" calls my attention today...
How many times, and in how many ways, the Bible calls us to stand.

From the time of Abraham we read of God's people standing up.
     It seems, of course, to speak of something more than a mere physical standing.
          It seems to be a statement of faith, commitment, and determination.

Paul in the New Testament exhorts us to  " withstand.. and having done all to stand." (Eph. 6.13)

It is the result of a quickening within that rises in the face of challenge.

     It is a standing to commence the battle,
          a standing throughout the battle.
               and a standing at the  end of the battle.

It is a rising up from things below,
     up from the mire and clay of earth,
          from weakness and apathy,
               from the impossibilities which would hem us in,
                    from the fears, the uncertainties, and the pressures of darkness.

It is a standing in the power of the Living Spirit within,
     it is a quickening of our mortality by the Immortal One.

It is a gathering to ourselves all that we have known and experienced of God.
     It is an unshakeable determination to hold that which has been given to us.
          It is a reaching out to "Thy Kingdom come." (Mat. 6.10)

      To Stand is to possess.
          To stand with God, is to possess the  Kingdom for which we pray.

 

The Task

I'm stuck. There is a word we use here, and I can't find an exact translation.
The word is "Tramite." 
"Tramite" is the procedure necessary in order to attain to a result.

I was impressed today with the fact that in my facing of the challenges of life the result has not to do with the visible things themselves 
          but with the invisible barriers which hinder accomplishment.

And so my task (tramite) has to do with the One Who disposes all things in heaven and earth.
     Nothing more and nothing less.

But it is not merely today's challenges which find their solution in God,
it is all the battles, all the wearing trials, of all my life.

In every circumstance of every day of my life, throughout the years,
     God holds the key, God disposes the results.
          All my dealings are with God. 

In short: All life's Answers are found in God.

The first verse of an old hymn says:
     Pray always pray;
     the Holy Spirit pleads
     within thee all thy daily,
     hourly needs.

And the last verse says:

     All earthly things  
     with earth 
     shall fade away;
     pray, always pray.

All that is earthly is but for a moment,
and only as we are able to see beyond that which surrounds us 
can we understand the true value of things,
can we begin to understand the heavenly realm.

"We wrestle not against flesh and blood" says the apostle. (Eph 6.12)
     And so all through our years, 
           we find life in the measure in which we find of God.

That Which is to Come

One thing about the word "greater" ... when it refers to God, 
     it refers to something far beyond the ability of our minds to grasp.

Even if we look at created things (which is the smallest part of God's working)
     Someone has estimated the number of stars at          1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. 
     At the other end of the scale there are perhaps 
  43,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in a grain of sand - 
God put all those atoms in a grain of sand ... 
so how many atoms are there in the universe???

Now, as the chorus says, "How great is God?"
How great distance which His condescension led Him to stoop to man?

God calls us to Himself. How great is that call?
How great is the power which works to make it possible?
How great is the Love, the Mercy, the Tenderness of God's seeking?
How unfailing the undergirding which comes with this call to our hearts?

With God nothing is impossible. (Lk. 1.37)
     If our hearts reach out then
          God's gift of faith will meet us.

As a church we have gone back from the time when the streams of Salvation, Healing, and Holy Ghost baptism met at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Glory, the Freshness and the Power of those days are no longer amongst us.
God Himself is no longer the All in All in our midst,
as He was for those who experienced the outpouring of the Spirit of God 
those years ago.

Someone told me of those early days, "We KNEW that God would come and manifest Himself every time we were in a meeting."
Today? Where are we today?

Today we are structured and bound by our conventions.
Today we have substituted programs for vision.
Today we have taken our eyes off God and are looking for men to guide us.

We think we know when we know nothing.
Man looks for the "latest and greatest" 
     but God desires that we humble ourselves 
          that He might do His work.

Isaiah 2 speaks of that which will be in the Last Days,
     the days when man's pride will be humbled and God alone exalted,
          the days when God's Call to man will Culminate in Fulfillment.

It is a time to cease to try to understand the future through the eyes of the past.
     It is a time to seek the Lord alone.
          It is a time to go up to the mountain of the Lord,
               to the place where He will teach us of His ways,
                    where we will walk in His paths. (vs 3)

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Hearing for Life

I had wanted to write about Psalm 78,
and the theme of the Word and the Works of God.

But there is something which arrests me as the psalm begins:
     The first verse of the Psalm says "Give ear ... incline thine ear."

Sometimes the mind lags behind the understanding ... 
     and here there is a world of difference 
          between "hearing" and "inclining the ear."

To hear is to understand the meaning of the words.

But to hear with an ear which bows before the words, 
     is to grasp the significance of the message, 
          and to absorb it, at the deepest level of our being.
 
It is to give that message a place of preeminence -
     above all that we knew before.
It is to replace every other thing which our understanding and our experience has taught us - 
     with the new Word from the lips of God.
It is to allow that Word to expand and fill our whole awareness, 
     and to change us according to its message.

In the world of mankind, a language is never truly possessed, at the very deepest level, when it has not been learned in the first five years of life.

So also, when we come to the things of God unless there is a true work of new creation we cannot truly know the things of God.
We may hear, and think we perceive, but full understanding escapes us ... 

1Cor. 2.12 shows us the only way, "Now we have received, ... the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." 

     God's Word makes all things new, 

          and only as we embrace that New Creation can we really hear,

               and find our lives Complete.

A World Lit by God

"I am the Way." said Jesus. (Jn. 14.6)

Lifting one's eyes to the One Who is above, above and above all,
     one sees Him inhabiting an eternal world of order,
          and purpose and fulfillment.

It is a world so different from the chaotic world of humankind.
     Man puts his world together with pieces,
          and it is always incomplete.

And yet there is within the soul of man a calling to find God's perfect world,
to find the fulfillment, the completion, of that world.
 In our world there is something which first saw light in the garden of Eden -
     an ignorance and insufferable pride,
          of man thinking he is capable of understanding God,
               of finding the way, 
                    of knowing the answers.

Men both in the world and in the church,
     get incredibly stupid ideas - 
          about how everything works,
               about what everything means. 

There are very few who sit down to question:
     Do I really know anything?
          Do I hear anything?
               Do I see anything?

Zacharias, the father of John Baptist says,
"The Dayspring from on high hath visited us." (Lk. 1.78) 
     Here is Light.
          Here is Life.
               Here is the Way.

It takes strength and courage,
     to question everything we see around us,
          to judge all things by the Bible alone,
               and to bring our own selves to the judgement bar.
                    It is far easier to live an unquestioning existence.

It takes strength to leave behind all that is unreal,
     to let go of all that is mere words and emotion -

Let us lift our eyes to a world lightened only by the Light of God.


    And there we will find the quickening life which flows from God.