A person who has not been born again by the Spirit of God will tell you that the teachings of Jesus are simple. But when he is baptized by the Holy Spirit, he finds that “clouds and darkness surround Him . . . .” When we come into close contact with the teachings of Jesus Christ we have our first realization of this. The only possible way to have full understanding of the teachings of Jesus is through the light of the Spirit of God shining inside us. If we have never had the experience of taking our casual, religious shoes off our casual, religious feet— getting rid of all the excessive informality with which we approach God— it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence. The people who are flippant and disrespectful in their approach to God are those who have never been introduced to Jesus Christ.
I am not certain that God desires formality ad much as He responds to our honest and open cxommunication that is led by His Spirit. And His Spirit leads us into a relationship that is at once respectful, and overwhelming, if not formal. In our contemporary American culture we have learned that we can be respectful, and totally connected with God without formality. When we cry out Abba, Father, we cry out in an informal way as demonstrated by our Savior. Formality is not called for, but intimate connection is…JDV
Only after the amazing delight and liberty of realizing what Jesus Christ does, comes the impenetrable “darkness” of realizing who He is.
Jesus said, “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). Once, the Bible was just so many words to us — “clouds and darkness”— then, suddenly, the words become spirit and life because Jesus re-speaks them to us when our circumstances make the words new. That is the way God speaks to us; not by visions and dreams, but by words. When a man gets to God, it is by the most simple way— words.
And as the Bible teaches us,(Matthew 19:14) our relationship to Him should be like that of a child, and we need not truly understand everything; the Spirit of God within us when connected to the Holy Spirit of God, and the word of God, provides peace and reassurance and the knowledge we need exactly when we need it…JDV
Have you ever “gone out” in this way? If so, there is no logical answer possible when anyone asks you what you are doing. One of the most difficult questions to answer in Christian work is, “What do you expect to do?” You don’t know what you are going to do. The only thing you know is that God knows what He is doing. Continually examine your attitude toward God to see if you are willing to “go out” in every area of your life, trusting in God entirely. It is this attitude that keeps you in constant wonder, because you don’t know what God is going to do next. Each morning as you wake, there is a new opportunity to “go out,” building your confidence in God. “. . . do not worry about your life . . . nor about the body . . .” (Luke 12:22). In other words, don’t worry about the things that concerned you before you did “go out.”
Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do— He reveals to you who He is. Do you believe in a miracle-working God, and will you “go out” in complete surrender to Him until you are not surprised one iota by anything He does?
Believe God is always the God you know Him to be when you are nearest to Him. Then think how unnecessary and disrespectful worry is! Let the attitude of your life be a continual willingness to “go out” in dependence upon God, and your life will have a sacred and inexpressible charm about it that is very satisfying to Jesus. You must learn to “go out” through your convictions, creeds, or experiences until you come to the point in your faith where there is nothing between yourself and God.
“. . . my earnest expectation and hope that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ will be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death” —Philippians 1:20
My Utmost for His Highest. “. . . my earnest expectation and hope that in nothing I shall be ashamed . . . .” We will all feel very much ashamed if we do not yield to Jesus the areas of our lives He has asked us to yield to Him. It’s as if Paul were saying, “My determined purpose is to be my utmost for His highest— my best for His glory.” To reach that level of determination is a matter of the will, not of debate or of reasoning. It is absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will at that point.
And like the gift of conviction, make no mistake this level of determination is also a gift of God provided us by the Holy Spirit of God. JDV
An undue amount of thought and consideration for ourselves is what keeps us from making that decision, although we cover it up with the pretense that it is others we are considering. When we think seriously about what it will cost others if we obey the call of Jesus, we tell God He doesn’t know what our obedience will mean. Keep to the point— He does know.
And when we are connected we know as well, this obedience will mean peace and harmony within. We cannot avoid the call of the Spirit and have true peace ahdn happiness. JDV
Shut out every other thought and keep yourself before God in this one thing only— my utmost for His highest. I am determined to be absolutely and entirely for Him and Him alone.
Our determination means nothing. It is false hope, just like a New Year’s resolution we know we will break in days, weeks or months. Real determination comes from the Spirit of God as we surrender and stay connected to Him. JDV
My Unstoppable Determination for His Holiness.
Our determination is only unstoppable when it is the Spirit of God and the person of Jesus living inside of us that offers up the determination. JDV
“Whether it means life or death-it makes no difference!” (see Philippians 1:21). Paul was determined that nothing would stop him from doing exactly what God wanted. But before we choose to follow God’s will, a crisis must develop in our lives. This happens because we tend to be unresponsive to God’s gentler nudges.
We can hear the more gentle “nudges” when we are connected to God. And if we can hear and respond to these gentle “nudges” then we may avoid the impending crisis that will surely arrive when we are unresponsive to God’s earlier nudges. JDV
He brings us to the place where He asks us to be our utmost for Him and we begin to debate. He then providentially produces a crisis where we have to decide— for or against. That moment becomes a great crossroads in our lives. If a crisis has come to you on any front, surrender your will to Jesus absolutely and irrevocably.
As DJR has said, “We come to Him out of need and stay connected out of love”…JDV
Here I am a sinner
Broken and in need of You
Take my life and wash my fears away
For You are the Great I AM
Rest assured, I feel Your hand
Holding me until the darkness clears
A Father to the fatherless
Redeemer of my soul
My Life is Yours forever
I want the world to know
Your mercy saved me
Mercy made me whole
Your mercy found me
Called me as Your own
Here I stand a child of Yours
Broken and in need of You
Break these chains and wash my guilt away Healer of my brokenness
My weary soul will find its rest
You are my strength, the lifter of my head
You’re greater than my yesterdays
You hold me close today
You’re the Lord of my tomorrows
My heart will always say
You’re greater than my yesterdays
You hold me close today
You’re the Lord of my tomorrows
My heart will always say
You called me as Your own
You called me as Your own
Thank You for Your mercy
Thank You for Your mercy
You called me as Your own
Your own
You shall not go out with haste, . . . for the Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rear guard —Isaiah 52:12
Security from Yesterday. “. . . God requires an account of what is past” ( Ecclesiastes 3:15 ). At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise when we remember our yesterdays. Our present enjoyment of God’s grace tends to be lessened by the memory of yesterday’s sins and blunders. But God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present.
Security for Tomorrow. “. . . the Lord will go before you . . . .” This is a gracious revelation— that God will send His forces out where we have failed to do so. He will keep watch so that we will not be tripped up again by the same failures, as would undoubtedly happen if He were not our “rear guard.” And God’s hand reaches back to the past, settling all the claims against our conscience.
Security for Today. “You shall not go out with haste . . . .” As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, forgetful delight, nor with the quickness of impulsive thoughtlessness. But let us go out with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us. Our yesterdays hold broken and irreversible things for us. It is true that we have lost opportunities that will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ.
Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
Help provide facility for the gift of conviction that can lead to direction from the Holy Spirit
Our Lord never “patches up” our natural virtues, that is, our natural traits, qualities, or characteristics. He completely remakes a person on the inside— “. . . put on the new man . . .” ( Ephesians 4:24 ). In other words, see that your natural human life is putting on all that is in keeping with the new life. The life God places within us develops its own new virtues, not the virtues of the seed of Adam, but of Jesus Christ. Once God has begun the process of sanctification in your life, watch and see how God causes your confidence in your own natural virtues and power to wither away. He will continue until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through this drying-up experience!
I have misenterpreted this “drying-up experience” of my life on a number of occasions. Whenever I find my own best efforts begin to fail, I wonder if God has deserted me. A former and historically positive virtue, characteristic, or skill that worked for me in my past suddenly does not work anymore. I wonder if God has abandoned me, but no, He has only abandoned MY virtue, MY talent, MY characteristic. He cannot support me or any of the ‘old me”. He can only give life and growth to the Jesus inside of me. His Spirit connected to the Holy Spirit within me through the cross of Jesus. JDV
The sign that God is at work in us is that He is destroying our confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ— a life that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely on what they have by virtue of heredity. God does not take our natural virtues and transform them, because our natural virtues could never even come close to what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every part of our natural bodily life into harmony with the new life God has placed within us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.
From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more —John 6:66
So this is what if feels like to walk the wilderness
and this is what if feels like to come undone
So this is what if feels like to loose my confidence
unsure of anything or anyone
So this is what if feels like to walk the desert sand
and this is what if feels like to hear my name
and to be scared to death cause I’m all alone
but feel love and peace just the same
And this may not be the road I would choose for me
but it still feels right somehow
And I have never felt you as close to me as I do right now
So this is what if feels like to be led
So this is what if feels like to have it fall apart
to be totally unglued
and find out if I accept my brokenness
I get more of me, I get all of you
If this is what if feels like to be on shaky ground
Careful of every step I take
Realizing as I stop to look around
I look around and see everything a different way
and this may not be the road I would choose for me
but it still feels right somehow
cause I have never felt you as close to me as I do right now
So this is what if feels like to be led
and this is what if feels like to be led
So this is what if feels like to just walk away
from everything I thought kept me safe
to depend just on you for every meal
and find it’s better this way
oh it’s better this way
And this may not be the road I would choose for me
but it still feels right somehow
And I have never felt you as close to me as I do right now
like i do right now
And this may not be the road I would choose for me
but it still feels right somehow
And I have never felt you as close to me as I do right now
And this is what if feels like to be led
And this is what if feels like to be led
And this is what if feels like…… Ffh
When God, by His Spirit through His Word, gives you a clear vision of His will, you must “walk in the light” of that vision ( 1 John 1:7 ). Even though your mind and soul may be thrilled by it, if you don’t “walk in the light” of it you will sink to a level of bondage never envisioned by our Lord. Mentally disobeying the “heavenly vision” ( Acts 26:19 ) will make you a slave to ideas and views that are completely foreign to Jesus Christ. Don’t look at someone else and say, “Well, if he can have those views and prosper, why can’t I?” You have to “walk in the light” of the vision that has been given to you. Don’t compare yourself with others or judge them— that is between God and them. When you find that one of your favorite and strongly held views clashes with the “heavenly vision,” do not begin to debate it. If you do, a sense of property and personal right will emerge in you— things on which Jesus placed no value. He was against these things as being the root of everything foreign to Himself— “. . . for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses” ( Luke 12:15 ). If we don’t see and understand this, it is because we are ignoring the underlying principles of our Lord’s teaching.
If and when we are connected to the Spirit of God, we are not only attuned to the leading of the Spirit of God we are closely aligned with Jesus. Connected, we “know” what God wants from us as we gladly and eagerly move off in that direction. In fact, we are even strong enough “in the Lord” to wait for Him to reveal His plan for and to us, a step at time. JDV
When we are not connected…….
Our tendency is to lie back and bask in the memory of the wonderful experience we had when God revealed His will to us. But if a New Testament standard is revealed to us by the light of God, and we don’t try to measure up, or even feel inclined to do so, then we begin to backslide.
And it seems we will always “backslide” if we rely on our own strength, because when we are “connected” to God we realize we do not have the capacity to “measure up”. We can only measure up when we let Jesus live through us. JDV
When we are not connected directly to the Spirit of God in an area of our lives……
It means your (our) conscience does not respond to the truth. You (we) can never be the same after the unveiling of a truth. That moment marks you (us) as one who either continues on with even more devotion as a disciple of Jesus Christ, or as one who turns to go back as a deserter.
We have all been both; discipile and deserter, and often we wonder if we can ever make the courageous decision when it truly counts. Yes we can, when we understand that the Spirit of God that lives in us can and will make the right choice on our behalf (just as Jesus did on the cross) when we simply give up (surrender) ourselves and allow the Spirit of God to provide all we need. We may feel uncomfortable, and the experience may seem strange, but when we are truly connected, we simply know we are right where Jesus wants us to be…..As the song says…JDV
And this may not be the road I would choose for me
but it still feels right somehow
. . . unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven —Matthew 18:3
These words of our Lord refer to our initial conversion, but we should continue to turn to God as children, being continuously converted every day of our lives. If we trust in our own abilities, instead of God’s, we produce consequences for which God will hold us responsible. When God through His sovereignty brings us into new situations, we should immediately make sure that our natural life submits to the spiritual, obeying the orders of the Spirit of God. Just because we have responded properly in the past is no guarantee that we will do so again. The response of the natural to the spiritual should be continuous conversion, but this is where we so often refuse to be obedient. No matter what our situation is, the Spirit of God remains unchanged and His salvation unaltered. But we must “put on the new man . . .” (Ephesians 4:24 ). God holds us accountable every time we refuse to convert ourselves, and He sees our refusal as willful disobedience.
I wonder about Oswald’s use of fear here, “God holds us accountable every time we refuse to be obedient. ” Was it the time, my own reaction to fear and “rules” as incentives to “do right” or is it in fact the way of continuous conversion….”if we don’t, God will get us?” It is here I need to remember that Oswald was simply Oswald, and not the Holy Spirit. During his time, fear and obligation were often used by spiritual teachers as leverage. However, the Holy Spirit today seems to be taking a different tack. “We can arrive out of fear, but we stay out of love. (quote by DJR)”….JDV
Our natural life must not rule— God must rule in us.
To refuse to be continuously converted puts a stumbling block in the growth of our spiritual life. There are areas of self-will in our lives where our pride pours contempt on the throne of God and says, “I won’t submit.” We deify our independence and self-will and call them by the wrong name. What God sees as stubborn weakness, we call strength. There are whole areas of our lives that have not yet been brought into submission, and this can only be done by this continuous conversion.
And often this is less pride than it is simply not being connected to the Spirit of God. When we are connected, the Holy Spirit makes us aware of our lack of conversion in a particular area of our lives, and gives us the gift of conviction and submission. JDV
Slowly but surely we can claim the whole territory for the Spirit of God.
If we walk in the light as He is in the light . . . the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin —1 John 1:7
To mistake freedom from sin only on the conscious level of our lives for complete deliverance from sin by the atonement through the Cross of Christ is a great error. No one fully knows what sin is until he is born again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced at Calvary. The evidence that I have been delivered from sin is that I know the real nature of sin in me. For a person to really know what sin is requires the full work and deep touch of the atonement of Jesus Christ, that is, the imparting of His absolute perfection.
The Holy Spirit applies or administers the work of the atonement to us in the deep unconscious realm as well as in the conscious realm. And it is not until we truly perceive the unrivaled power of the Spirit in us that we understand the meaning of 1 John 1:7 , which says, “. . . the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” This verse does not refer only to conscious sin, but also to the tremendously profound understanding of sin which only the Holy Spirit in me can accomplish.
I must “walk in the light as He is in the light . . .”— not in the light of my own conscience, but in God’s light. If I will walk there, with nothing held back or hidden, then this amazing truth is revealed to me: “. . . the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses [me] from all sin” so that God Almighty can see nothing to rebuke in me. On the conscious level it produces a keen, sorrowful knowledge of what sin really is. The love of God working in me causes me to hate, with the Holy Spirit’s hatred for sin, anything that is not in keeping with God’s holiness. To “walk in the light” means that everything that is of the darkness actually drives me closer to the center of the light.
’Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,’ which is translated, ’God with us’ —Matthew 1:23
His Birth in History. “. . . that Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God ( Luke 1:35 ). Jesus Christ was born into this world, not from it. He did not emerge out of history; He came into history from the outside. Jesus Christ is not the best human being the human race can boast of— He is a Being for whom the human race can take no credit at all. He is not man becoming God, but God Incarnate— God coming into human flesh from outside it. His life is the highest and the holiest entering through the most humble of doors. Our Lord’s birth was an advent— the appearance of God in human form.
His Birth in Me. “My little children, for whom I labor in birth again until Christ is formed in you . . .” (Galatians 4:19 ). Just as our Lord came into human history from outside it, He must also come into me from outside. Have I allowed my personal human life to become a “Bethlehem” for the Son of God? I cannot enter the realm of the kingdom of God unless I am born again from above by a birth totally unlike physical birth. “You must be born again” ( John 3:7 ). This is not a command, but a fact based on the authority of God. The evidence of the new birth is that I yield myself so completely to God that “Christ is formed” in me. And once “Christ is formed” in me, His nature immediately begins to work through me.
God Evident in the Flesh. This is what is made so profoundly possible for you and for me through the redemption of man by Jesus Christ.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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