GOD'S Pattern For Us

Beloved, here is God’s pattern for our own lives. Here is a Gospel of help for people that have to live in this everyday world with real and ordinary surroundings, and a thousand practical conditions which have to be met in a thoroughly practical way.

God’s promises, and God’s providences do not lift us out of the plane of common sense and commonplace trial, but it is through these very things that faith is perfected, and that God loves to interweave the golden threads of His love along the warp and woof of our everyday experience.

It is most helpful to us to realize that we have a God who thus comes into the most commonplace things.

It is no evidence that He has failed us if He allows ten thousand difficulties on every side to throng us, and if He delivers us in answer to prayer at last through straits so narrow that we seem to be barely delivered at the very point of disaster and from the very jaws of destruction. 

Let us therefore not be discouraged if God lets the way be hard and the path be long and the feet sometimes grow weary.

He is with us still working just as truly as if He was the moving pillar of cloud and flame with us; as He walked with them to Emmaus so simple, so unobtrusive, so like themselves that they never realized it was the Lord until their hearts began to burn within them through His kindling words and wondrous teachings. 

Let us learn to recognize Him in the hard places. Let us learn to see Him in the little things. 

Let us be willing to take the answer to our prayers and the fulfillment of our life purpose in the most commonplace things.

Thus everything shall become sacred and life shall be all sublime, and some day "Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off" (Isa. 55:13). 

~A. B. Simpson~

It Does Not Matter To Me What The World Thinks

Paul says: “Far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.” 

What does he mean? It does not matter to me what the world thinks! 

It does not matter one wit to me the attitude the world takes! Let it persecute! Let it say what it likes! Let the world defame. Let the world misrepresent. Let the world lie. 

Let the whole accepted religious system say what it likes. I have been crucified to this world! I am dead to all that, and that is dead to me! 

The cross of the Lord Jesus means the emancipation from the world in that sense.

We shall have to decide, once and for all, as definitely as Calvary was a once and for all thing, that we are not going to be influenced or deterred one little bit in our utterness of abandonment to the Lord by what the world (even the religious world) says and does. When we recognize that, there will be triumph. 

Paul was not altogether immune from the consciousness of what was going on against him. To him very often these things meant suffering. 

The attitude of the religious world did register itself upon his sensitive spirit, but it was settled with him quite definitely that he could never sacrifice his position one little bit in order to mitigate that suffering, in order to ease up that situation, in order to be more popular with men than he was.

For him the cross meant that if he were to be unpopular universally he was dead to the question of popularity. 

We shall never be thoroughgoing Christians until we are there.

~T. Austin Sparks~

What The Gospel Of Accomodation Does

I see three things in the gospel of accommodation:

1. It is the accommodation of man's love for pleasure.
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers...of pleasures more than lovers of God" (2 Timothy 3:1–4). The Greek for pleasure is "sensuous, lustful, voluptuous, exciting, gratifying, sensual pleasure." 

If you move toward this gospel of accommodation, you are going to have to accommodate the people's lust because they are not going to give up their love for excitement. They've made gods of sports, pleasure, and lust. Unless that is confronted by the gospel of Jesus Christ, unless there is a truth that comes forth, you have to accommodate this lust that is in the American lifestyle.

I was shocked by an article in the New York Times. Philip Wogaman, President Clinton's pastor, said, "Sexual misconduct does not automatically render a leader immoral. Morality should also be judged by indicators like courage, concern for the poor, fostering world peace, running the economy responsibly, and furthering racial equality. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are merely cultural expressions." In other words, Mr. Clinton has been told that he has enough good indicators to overrule another that would be immoral in his life.

God said that men who preach doctrines like these resist the truth; they are men of corrupt minds counterfeiting the faith.

In disbelief I watched a televised Sunday night service of a seeker-friendly church—seeker-friendly by its own admission. To a packed church where thousands attend, the pastor said, "This is fun night, a David Letterman night." The youth pastor came out and did his monologue as David Letterman. Then they showed 10 of the most boring things teenagers do during preaching. Three of the 10 were throwing spitballs, yawning, and picking their noses. The crowd went crazy. After the service, the pastor brazenly announced, "We're not here to offend people, but to make church comfortable for everyone." I wept.

I ask you, how long do you think that audience would stay in church if the pastor was gripped by the Holy Ghost, convicted for "entertaining" people toward hell, and suddenly preached a message entitled, "Be sure your sins will find you out"? How long would people keep coming back if a gospel of holy living and separation from the world was preached? Two things would happen: (1) Those who are misguided, hungry, and didn't know any better would weep and run to the altar. (2) Those who are judiciously blinded by their pleasures in madness would flee from the church and never come again. The church doors would close.

I keep this foremost in my mind and before my eyes, because every minister of the gospel one day has to face it when he stands before the Lord. He will say, "Son of man, I made thee a watchman. You were to hear the words of My mouth and give them warnings from Me. You were to tell the wicked, 'Thou shalt surely die.' And you gave them no warning nor spoke to warn the wicked to turn from their wicked ways to save their lives. These same wicked men died in their sins, but their blood I'll require at your hands.

2. This gospel of accommodation accommodates all man's aversion to self-denial.
 
The gospel of Jesus Christ is one of self-denial. Jesus said, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). Self-denial is not something you give. It's someone you give up—the giving up of yourself, giving up everything you are. It's a living sacrifice to the Lord Jesus Christ to present your body a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. God has every right to say to His church, "If you expect to give Me your body, your resurrected body, all through eternity, I have every right—it's only reasonable of Me and your reasonable service—to ask your body why you're here on earth. I want every part of you. I want you to be spiritually minded. I want to possess you."

The gospel we preach must bring people under the total possession of the Lord Jesus Christ. Otherwise, it's a gospel of accommodation.

The seeker-friendly gospel accommodates the body. The human body belongs to Him. What we see in America is a neognosticism where you take your physical body on one side and do as you please as long as your spirit is right with God. This is coming even out of the White House, this dividing of personality. No, we are one personality, and it all belongs to Jesus Christ. This neognosticism is destroying the faith of many throughout the nation.

3. There is an accommodation of man's offense to the gospel.
The Scriptures state, "Behold, I lay in Zion a stumblingstone and rock of offense." Paul spoke of the offense of the Cross. This is the heart of God's anger. We're not called to the Cross but to go through the Cross—to experience the same thing Jesus did, not only coming to the Cross but dying and going into the grave with Jesus Christ and then being raised from the dead to a newness of life.

It's cruel, pastor, to lead sinners to the Cross, tell them they are forgiven by faith, and then allow them to go back to their habits and lusts of the flesh, unchanged and still in the devil's shackles. If the preaching of grace doesn't have as its goal the producing of a walk of righteousness, then it's another gospel, another Jesus.

I listened in horror to a man, who attended one of the largest seeker-friendly churches, being interviewed by CBS. He said, "I come to this church because I'm comfortable. I'm never made to feel uneasy. I bring my Jewish friends and my business friends, and I know nothing will ever be said that will offend them. The best part of it is, the whole thing only lasts an hour."

Take it from me: You can get your big church and be one of the big boys, but it's going to cost you your soul if you preach with a focus only on earthly things, rather than on the things of God.

I've lived in New York City 35 years. We have 103 nationalities from all walks of life—from the poorest to the richest. Probably 300 or more from the United Nations live there. But I look over a congregation (so does my dear friend, Jim Cymbala, in Brooklyn) and see men who have just walked in from the porno shops and are wild animals. I see a businessman friend who was CEO of a multimillion–dollar company, but he started snorting coke, lost everything, and is now a bum on the street. He sits in the congregation. A little 14-year-old girl with AIDS is up on 8th Avenue performing lewd acts before dirty old men. She comes to church and keeps saying, "Pastor Dave, I've got to get out. I've got to get help."

I'm not about to put up a silly skit and preach a 15-minute message on how to cope to a multitude of people who are dying and going to hell. I tremble at the thought.

People don't like to hear this, but we're headed for perilous times—just a few years away from a collapse like the world has never known. When that happens, all who preached prosperity are going to disappear because the people will say, "Your gospel has failed me." When that time comes, I want to grasp onto Jesus, and I want everyone I've preached to to have faith in the keeping power of Jesus Christ. I want them to know Him in His fullness. I want to know that I've done it in love, in grace, that they would know the difference between the holy and the profane.

If I have ever given a prophetic message in my lifetime that God intended for a purpose, it is now. Many are being deceived. If they are not awakened, what I warn you about will happen.

In New York City, He has proved that the people come to hear a straight gospel, and will come where the Word of God is being preached without compromise and yet with grace. May the young men who are discouraged in the Movement not try for a shortcut but be broken and on their faces before the Lord.

May we get our eyes off growth and onto a new revelation of who Jesus is.

~David Wilkerson~

The Enemy's Opposition

I am sure many of you will bear me out when I say that the one great work  of the enemy is to get us out of  the Spirit when the LORD is going to do something, to make us say, I was not in the Spirit for it, or to feel not in the Spirit.

Sometimes we use another word - 'mood', not in the mood. Well, it is the wrong word, it is not in ourselves at all, it is in the Spirit.

And the enemy has a very shrewd knowledge of anything that is at least possible of the Lord; if he does not know what the Lord is going to say and do, he has a long experience of these things and he can at least put two and two together. 

He senses the movements of God. He is always seeking to anticipate. He has a Herod when Christ is born. 

He always has his preparation to counter something of the Lord, and so it may be days ahead of something of the Lord that is coming, and the enemy tries to get us out of the Spirit, all upset, annoyed, worried, distracted and cast down so that when the time comes we are not in the Spirit.

Something has got to happen with us before the Lord can say or do what He desires.

It is so real that it really does call for a terrible battle. It is so real in ourselves; it is wicked, it is simply evil.

We could not find words strong enough to express this sense of diabolical wickedness in the atmosphere, it seems to get inside of us, to get us upset.

We blame somebody, anything, and then the hour comes and we are out of the Spirit, and nothing but a tremendous battle will get us through.

I say this to make you aware of the meaning of these things. We can put it down to circumstances, we can put it down to people. 

But let us remember that back of these things, more often than not, the enemy is trying to prevent us from being in the Spirit at the crucial moment.

~T. Austin Sparks~ 

The Crisis Reveals What We Are

You see, the point of weakness is not a sudden thing. It is not in the crisis of life that we are made.

The crisis just reveal what we are, what has been slowly built up over a very long period, and when the stormy wind comes it is too late to do anything.

It is no good trying to build up the house suddenly when the stormy wind comes and knocks it down. 

It was too late to separate the tares and the wheat when they had grown to a certain height. 

The point is that we must watch the beginnings, and be very careful about the dangers of small things.

When the seed is small it is very difficult to identify one kind from another, and because things are small there is a tendency for us to disregard their importance.

I suppose those men who were building the wall in Jerusalem said: 'Well, there is only a little bit of cement, but that does not matter. No one will see.' 

When we see small things we must recognize that they have an essential nature, and they have a potential. We must not be deceived by them.

Do you realize that Mao Tse Tung was once a little baby on his mother's shoulder, being cuddled by everyone who saw him? 

We see our pretty little baby boys and girls and we think they are something quite wonderful, failing to take account of the potential that there is in a human life.

Children will play with a cuddly little bear, but what is the nature of that bear when it is fully grown?

You see, there is a certain delusion about things when they are very small. 

We shall see the spiritual meaning of this as we go along, but it is vital for us to recognize the beginnings, the foundations. 

Although the seeds may look very much alike, they differ fundamentally in their nature, and, of course, the outworking will be a vital difference in their fruit.

~W. E Thompson~

Truth And Duty Are Always Wedded

 John 4:34  Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.

And the world of God includes two notions, one of revelation and one of commandment.

Whenever God speaks by any of His voices, it is first to tell us some truth which we did not know before, and second to bid us do something which we have not been doing.

Every word of God includes these two. Truth and duty are always wedded.

There is no truth which has not its corresponding duty. And there is no duty which has not its corresponding truth.

We are always separating them. We are always trying to learn truths, as if there were no duties belonging to them, as if the knowing of them would make no difference in the way we lived. 

That is the reason why our hold on the truths we learn is so weak.

He who takes any new word of God completely gets both a new truth and a new duty He, then, who lives by every word of God, is a man who is continually seeing new truth and accepting the duties that arise out of it.

And it is for this, for the pleasure of seeing truth and doing its attendant duty, that he is willing to give up the pleasures of sense, and even, if need be, to give up the bodily life to which the pleasures of sense belong.

~Phillip Brooks~

The Fire of Provocation

It was the fire of inevitable provocation. No sooner had the Spirit come, the fire fallen and begun to move over the earth, than there was tremendous and terrific uprising of antagonism.

It is inevitable. If you and I are going to be men and women of the Spirit, we are not going to have an easy time. Hell will see to that.
 
At once the clash arises and it is true that the more the Holy Spirit is able to have His way in us and to lead us into all the will of God, the more we find this opposition, this antagonism. 

And it not only comes between us and the world, it sometimes comes in the circle of the Lord's own people. It is inevitable provocation. 

You wonder why, sometimes. As you read the New Testament you wonder, 'What is the matter with these people?

Why should they be so upset and so annoyed? 

And why should it be so spontaneous, this thing? And persistent; so unreasonable?', but there it is. There is the fact. It is inevitable.

You see, this thing that the Lord came to do and is doing, will not allow for any neutrality.

It is going to be one thing or the other. It is going to be for or against.

The eyes of flame (here the fire comes in again) the eyes of flame will not allow lukewarmness or anything that is of the Laodicean character. 

The fire is a positive element always, and it will create positive situations.

If everything is all just nice and quiet, no disturbance, no trouble and no antagonism and opposition, you have reason to question whether the Holy Spirit is doing much, because He does aim at such a positiveness, which is a very, very costly thing.

It is either with the Lord, or not with the Lord, and there is nothing between.

It is going to come out sooner or later and be precipitated.

Now, the Lord says that is what He came to do. 

This is not an accident, a chance or things having gone wrong or miscarried.

This is exactly what He came to do - to scatter fire on the earth and these are the inevitable effects of the fire. They are going to work out.

~T. Austin Sparks~