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For Those Seeking The Truth
& Dynamic Living Christ is Victor |
September/October 2010
Volume 23, Number 5
“Faith in Our
All Sufficient Saviour”
“Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though you know them and be established in the present truth.” 2 Peter 1:12
We must weigh closely our thoughts, plans and our present walk with God. I notice that many are not really learning to have more faith and to walk it in faith. Having faith in our ALL-SUFFICIENT SAVIOUR teaches us to trust Him, saying, “He will make a way, where there is no way. He will walk before me.” There is a confidence in the heart of a converted man and he knows the Lord will not abandon him.
I hope my readers are keeping some kind of record of all the many ways in which our precious Lord delivered you in your distresses and at critical moments in your lives. We must remind ourselves of these things. Our ungrateful hearts tend to forget too readily and easily the many mercies of God. Our thoughts are based very much on our faith. Thoughts of fear and unfaith can have a devastating effect on your whole personality and cause you to deviate from God’s best.
When you go to the Bible and pray over God’s word, it translates into uplifting thoughts and faith-driven actions. The above scripture speaks of being “established in the present truth.” Many are failing to hold fast to the truth which they know. Satan suddenly gets people into the feeling that they are missing out on the wonderful things of life which their friends and relatives are enjoying. Instead of dispelling Satan’s thoughts and suggestions they accommodate those thoughts for a season. Darkness soon fills them and their communion with God is cut asunder. For such people to recover lost ground and to get back to the solid ground of truth and obedience to the truth, involves humbling and confession that they had grieved God’s Spirit. The loss in God’s glory is great. We never seem to think of repenting for our sins of omission either. When the Holy Spirit applies God’s word and truth to our hearts, He has a way of making it most palatable. You long to lay fast hold of it. My study of God’s word has filled me with yearnings for those higher things.
My wife rarely mentions the privations she went through, when she had to take care of our children in places where she was little known and was left alone during my short or long absences from home. One of those incidents which took place comes to mind. On one occasion when she had no money for food for the children, she heard a welcome cry from the street. It was the cry of the now- extinct tradesman who would buy bottles and disused cans. She had some empty cans to sell. The trader, who was himself a poor man, paid a few small coins for them. But what a God-send they were! With that small sum she managed to feed the children that day. There was no fridge of course in our home for many years. We learnt to be contented and happy with very little, always aware that there were many who had far less.
In my boyhood home, I helped my mother sell old newspapers which fetched a mere pittance, wherewith to keep the kitchen fires burning. But there was never any grumbling or looking at our well-to-do relatives or asking others for help. The truths which God taught us and His promises were our treasures.
Now that God has given us a wider field of labour, when we are using expensive means to reach the lost, such as the television and radio, I do not know how much you pray or feel a burden for the souls of the millions who are being reached by the message of hope and of salvation.
ASK GOD FOR A BURDEN OF PRAYER WHICH TRULY REFLECTS YOUR BELIEF IN THE WORD OF GOD.
-Joshua Daniel
“Reality Check”
“Praise ye the LORD. Blessed is the man that feareth the LORD, that delighteth greatly in his commandments. His seed shall be mighty upon earth: the generation of the upright shall be blessed.” Psalm 112:1,2
“The Greatest Gift”
“Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.” (I Corinthians 12: 4)
This is a very enlightening chapter to guard against false teaching. You cannot call Jesus Lord with your heart but by the Holy Spirit. If you say it with your heart, He will be Lord and you will be His servant. He will take charge of you, of your whole personality, in such a way that your services reach a higher plane and begin to get far reaching consequences.
A certain teacher was seeking God with repentance after a series of revival meetings. At midnight she suddenly found herself calling Him ‘Lord’ with her heart. It gave her great joy. You may say “Lord” with your lips. It will not bring you any joy. If He is truly “Lord”, your life will be superhuman. You will be filled with a new spirit of love, which will make you spend yourself for your Creator.
When you do not cling to your money, or education or relatives as your own, a new grace will come into you. God will entrust you with His gifts. You are entitled to all His gifts but it is rather dangerous to have all. To show that you are His chosen servant He gives you some gift. Let God choose for you the gift that is good. It is not good to ask for any particular gift. The greatest gift is Jesus. You must desire Him. When God gives you a gift, it will be such that God can keep you from being spoilt by it.
“I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images.” (Isaiah 42:8) “For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: for how should my name be polluted? and I will not give my glory unto another.” (Isaiah 48:11) It is dangerous for us to touch God’s glory. Ann Preston wanted to honour a hen, which God used to give her eggs when she was ill. But she could not recognize the hen. She prayed that God should help her to recognize it. Then God said, “I created that hen. I will not give my glory to another.”
When a child in
your home is ill, God can use you in healing even though healing is not the
pronounced gift in you. All the gifts are within the power of the Holy Spirit.
Philip had the boldness to talk to the big officer of
A fully yielded life is a fully guided life. Your life is highly valuable to God. There will be no competition among us or rivalry because each one has her own or his own part to do and each will be like Jesus. Each will excel in his or her own part. Each star has its own glory. God will honour us also. But we must not do God’s work for honour. We must always seek His glory and do His will. If God tells us to give up this work and take up another, we must be willing. You must all pray for me. I am always praying that I may not be accursed by neglecting the work He has given me. God has given you a privileged place of responsibility. You do not know where God will place you later and use you. You have a very honourable place in Him. You are the body of Christ.
God is only praiseworthy and never blameworthy. God always wants to pour out His full blessing upon us, but our bag is full of holes and cannot hold it. Hence God wants to build our character first, put us in His discipline so that we may retain His blessings and be an example to those around. The faithful God whose nature is faithfulness, the loving God whose nature is love, cannot go against His own nature. “… that ye also are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish one another.” (Romans 15:14) Those who talk to us must go back with the impression that there is goodness in us. Though we may correct them they must feel our goodness. Goodness is a fruit of the Spirit.
We often err and need correction. Some of us are ill-informed. Beginners miscalculate their strength and become proud. They commit many mistakes. They must be patiently corrected with love. They must see goodness in us. Romans 15:2, “Let everyone of us please his neighbour for his good to edification.” Do you edify others? You must be prepared to do good to edify your neighbours.
Our Fellowship must be holy. There must be no anger, hatred or jealousy in us. These will undermine the work. Ultimately there must be only goodness in us. Let each one of us so function in our places that people who look at us may see Christ in all of us. As you take responsibility in His work, you will see that He will involve Himself fully in your affairs. The deeper you are interested in His work, the more your life will be effective to win your relatives whom you love. When you sorrow for a perishing relative, God takes note of it. Serve the Lord with all you heart. This is the secret of happiness. Joshua found. “As for me and my house we will serve the Lord.” God has an all-round interest in you. Zechariah 2:8, “For thus saith the LORD; for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye.” What an emphatic and expressive statement of His love and concern.
— N. Daniel
“Triumphant Faith”
Because her family had provided a safe shelter for Jewish refugees, Corrie ten Boom was captured and forced to endure horrendous atrocities in a Nazi concentration camp. Following her sister’s death in Ravensbruck she writes, “A great loneliness filled my heart. Alone! Alone in Ravensbruck! No more of those wonderfully encouraging conversations, no longer that lively spirit and that childlike faith to buoy me up! But suddenly a sense of peace came over me; yes, more than that, a feeling of sheer joy...
“I went to the washroom, where the dead were laid out. There I saw eleven bodies lying on the floor. People who wanted to wash had to step over them. The ‘regime’ had no respect for the dead. “I fled from the room. A few minutes later I returned and then saw the face of Betsie, full of peace, and happy as a child. She looked incredibly young. It was a bit of heaven in the midst of the surrounding hell. I saw how blessed she was and thought of her present state of happiness. Joy flooded my soul and remained there, triumphant over the grief of my loss...
“How dark and burdensome days can be! My soul was the battleground of a struggle between light and darkness. Would joy for Betsie’s release, or grief for my own loss, win the battle? I prayed:
“Teach me, Lord to bear the burden,
In this dark and weary day.
Let me not complain to others
Of a hard and lonely way.
Every storm to Thee is subject,
Storms of earth, or mind and heart.
Only to Thy will submitting
Can to me Thy peace impart.”
—Selected
“No One is Too Weak for God!”
D.L. Moody was innocent of formal education. His letters, many of which have been preserved, are full of grammatical errors. His physical appearance was not impressive. His voice was high pitched and his tones nasal. But these handicaps did not prevent God using him to shake two continents!
A reporter was
sent by his newspaper to cover Moody’s campaign in
It
is a secret joy to find
The
task assigned beyond our powers,
For
thus, if ought of good be wrought,
Clearly
the praise is His, not ours.
An important spiritual principle is involved, which must be mastered by all who wish to be their best for God. God is not confined to the greatly gifted and exceptionally clever for the fulfilment of His purposes. He can use them only as they abandon reliance on their purely natural abilities. All through history God has chosen and used nonentities, because their unusual dependence on God left room for the unique display of His power. When they are content to be nothing, He can be everything. He chooses and uses the richly endowed only when they renounce dependence on their own abilities and resources. God will not use us in spite of our weakness and inadequacy but actually because of them. He refuses to use our most spectacular gifts and unique qualifications until we are weaned from reliance on them. Human weakness provides the best backdrop for the display of divine power.
This is the strategy of God that the world should know that Christianity—all the triumphs of faith in individual lives and the onward march and mission of the Church—is not to be explained by anything in man, any human virtue, prowess, ability. “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (II Cor. 12:9) is God’s message to Paul. “When I am weak, then I am strong” was Paul’s testimony.
“It is a thrilling discovery to make,” writes J.S. Stewart, “that always it is upon human weakness and humiliation, not human strength and confidence that God chooses to build His kingdom; and that He can use us not merely in spite of our ordinariness and helplessness and disqualifying infirmities, but precisely because of them. Nothing can defeat a church or soul that takes, not its strength but its weakness, and offer it to God to be His weapon. It was the way of Francis Xavier and William Carey and Paul the apostle. This is the strategy to which there is no retort.”
Our trouble is not that we are too weak but that we are too strong for God.
—Selected
“Suffering Precedes Blessing”
World War II brought unparalleled suffering and death to humankind. Experts estimate some fifty-five million people died, among them roughly six million Jews in concentration camps. Families and nations were shattered. Clearly this was a time of great, great evil.
But all was not evil. During the war, medical researchers intensified their efforts to fight disease and infection and as a result made great breakthroughs. Up until 1941, for example, doctors could not reverse the course of infection. “They could do little more than offer a consoling bedside manner as patients sank toward oblivion,” writes Stevenson Swanson.
But the war
caused
But as the
probability of war increased in the late 1930s, all that changed. Research
began in earnest in
In 1941 English
researchers brought samples of penicillin to
The discovery of the fermentation process for penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, triggered a rush by pharmaceutical companies to develop other antibiotics. Selman Waksman of Rutgers University soon discovered streptomycin, which treated tuberculosis. One antibiotic followed another until in the mid 1990s, well over one hundred antibiotics were available.
“Probably
more than any other discovery in the history of medicine, the discovery of
antibiotics has done the most to improve the lives of humans,” said Dr.
Gary Noskin, an infectious-disease specialist and
professor of medicine at
Millions of
people died in World War II, but out of the war came the drugs that have saved
millions of lives and will go on saving lives. Dr. Russell Maulitz,
a medical historian and professor at the Medical College of Philadelphia and
Just as good came from bad during World War II, so God is able to make great good come from the bad events of our lives.
This
newsletter is produced six times per year by the Laymen’s Evangelical
Fellowship International. It is printed and distributed in the
This Fellowship is an inter-denominational missionary and
prayer group working for revival in churches and amongst students in several
countries. We invite every layperson to become God’s ally in changing his
or her corner of the world. We train people in evangelistic work and to be
self-supporting missionaries.
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