2 Timothy 1:7

For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.

What of Today’s Verse…

Power! We like that concept.  When it is godly power, might does make right, because godly power is accompanied by love and self-discipline.  These three together make a person’s life effective.  Live life to its fullest: not as a closet Christian, afraid of standing true and firm, but one who lives by God’s power, shares God’s love, and displays God’s virtues.

Let Us Pray:

Heavenly Father, you are without comparison in your majesty and might.  I have no right to come into your presence, and yet you have invited me here by your love and your grace.  You are my Rock, my Fortress, and my Strength.  I depend upon your guidance and your mercy to sustain me through my storms and to reclaim me from my stumbles.  Holy God, you are without comparison and I worship you.  In Jesus name.  Amen.

Words of Wisdom

ABANDONMENT

Our Lord replies in effect, that abandonment is for Himself, and not for what the disciples themselves will get from it.  Beware of an abandonment which has the commercial spirit in it – “I am going to give myself to God because I want to be delivered from sin, because I want to be made holy.”  All that is the result of being right with God, but that spirit is not of the essential nature of Christianity.  Abandonment is not for anything at all. We have got so commercialized that we only go to God for something from Him, and not for Himself.  It is like saying, “No, Lord, I don’t want Thee, I want myself; but I want myself clean and filled with the Holy Ghost;  I want to be put in Thy show room and be able to say – ‘This is what God has done for me.'”  If we only give up something to God because we want more back, there is nothing of the Holy Spirit in our abandonment; it is miserable commercial self-interest.  That we gain heaven, that we are delivered from sin, that we are made useful to God – these things never enter as considerations into real abandonment, which is a personal sovereign preference for Jesus Christ Himself.

When we come up against the barriers of natural relationship, where is Jesus Christ?  Most of us desert Him – “Yes, Lord, I did hear Thy call; but my mother is in the road, my wife, my self-interest, and I can go no further.”  “Then,” Jesus says, “you cannot be My disciple.”

The test of abandonment is always over the neck of natural devotion.  Go over it, and God’s own abandonment will embrace all those you had to hurt in abandoning.  Beware of stopping short of abandonment to God.  Most of us know abandonment in vision only.

“Then Peter began to say unto Him, Lo, we have left all, and have followed Thee. . . .” Mark 10:28