These are very important words to live by, especially when modern "Christianity" tries to bring personal experience up to the same level as God's revealed word. Oswald Chambers hits this one out of the park - and to think that he wrote this long before the issues that we are currently dealing with surfaced. Sounds like words of prophecy to me.
From My Utmost For His Highest, devotional for December 21, 2010
“We have received … the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God” (1 Corinthians 2:12).
My experience is not what makes redemption real—redemption is reality. Redemption has no real meaning for me until it is worked out through my conscious life. When I am born again, the Spirit of God takes me beyond myself and my experiences, and identifies me with Jesus Christ. If I am left only with my personal experiences, I am left with something not produced by redemption. But experiences produced by redemption prove themselves by leading me beyond myself, to the point of no longer paying any attention to experiences as the basis of reality. Instead, I see that only the reality itself produced the experiences. My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source of truth—Jesus Christ.
If you try to hold back the Holy Spirit within you, with the desire of producing more inner spiritual experiences, you will find that He will break the hold and take you again to the historic Christ. Never support an experience which does not have God as its Source and faith in God as its result. If you do, your experience is anti-Christian, no matter what visions or insights you may have had. Is Jesus Christ Lord of your experiences, or do you place your experiences above Him? Is any experience dearer to you than your Lord? You must allow Him to be Lord over you, and pay no attention to any experience over which He is not Lord. Then there will come a time when God will make you impatient with your own experience, and you can truthfully say, “I do not care what I experience—I am sure of Him!”
Be relentless and hard on yourself if you are in the habit of talking about the experiences you have had. Faith based on experience is not faith; faith based on God’s revealed truth is the only faith there is.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Jesus, The Reason for the Season
Recently, I was in a Bible Study (Men’s Fraternity, Wednesday Night At The Well) and the presenter said something that I thought was the craziest thing I had ever heard of. He said (and I am paraphrasing) “You know, Christmas is all about you. Sure, Jesus is a major part of it, but Christmas is all about you.” I thought “What an odd thing to say. Surely he must be kidding.” I thought that Christmas really was all about Jesus.
And then he took to quoting scripture. He pulled from our lessons that we will read on Christmas Eve, and started with Isaiah 9:6. “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Then he moved to the Gospel of Luke, and the encounter that the shepherds had with the angels. “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11 (ESV)).
As crazy as it sounded at first, Robert Lewis was exactly right. Christmas really is about us. It is about what our Savior Jesus did for us – and it is this that we celebrate during this Christmas season.
Christmas is called an “incarnational feast,” and it is a time when we celebrate the fact that he came down to this earth to save us. He actually took our nature upon Himself when he came down to this earth. He had free will, and he could have sinned, but he chose not to. This is one of the reasons that Holy Scripture refers to him as the “second Adam.” In effect, Jesus came to undo the mess made by the first Adam when he sinned, and introduced original sin into the Creation. By His going through life sinless, and by dying on the Cross for our sins, he made true forgiveness possible for us. By coming to this earth, he made eternal salvation possible. This is what we truly celebrate at Christmas – that by coming down to this earth, we are saved and have an eternity of glory in the presence of our Lord to look forward to. Praise be to God!
During the Christmas season, we have so many things that can distract us – things that are peripheral to the true meaning of Christmas. For the children, there are the presents. For many of us, there is the gift of family. All of these things bring joy to most people at Christmas, but they can also bring pain. Some have very little money, and thus cannot buy presents for their children. Others have lost loved ones at Christmas (as our family has with the death of Lisa’s Uncle Tommy), and so Christmas can be a painful time. There is no magical formula – no way that we can just wave a wand over those hurts and pains and make them just go away. But there is one thing that all of us can do, and it helps tremendously. We should remember the reason for the season.
Christmas is about the true gift that Jesus Christ in His glorious majesty gave to us. It is about the beginning of something really special – something that culminated with Jesus’s death on the cross and His resurrection. Christmas is about the ultimate gift – the gift of eternal life. When we focus on this during the Christmas season, we experience the joy, the peace, and the hope of living redeemed lives, living in the joyful expectation of eternal life made possible by Jesus, our Savior. Merry Christmas to you all!
And then he took to quoting scripture. He pulled from our lessons that we will read on Christmas Eve, and started with Isaiah 9:6. “For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.” Then he moved to the Gospel of Luke, and the encounter that the shepherds had with the angels. “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11 (ESV)).
As crazy as it sounded at first, Robert Lewis was exactly right. Christmas really is about us. It is about what our Savior Jesus did for us – and it is this that we celebrate during this Christmas season.
Christmas is called an “incarnational feast,” and it is a time when we celebrate the fact that he came down to this earth to save us. He actually took our nature upon Himself when he came down to this earth. He had free will, and he could have sinned, but he chose not to. This is one of the reasons that Holy Scripture refers to him as the “second Adam.” In effect, Jesus came to undo the mess made by the first Adam when he sinned, and introduced original sin into the Creation. By His going through life sinless, and by dying on the Cross for our sins, he made true forgiveness possible for us. By coming to this earth, he made eternal salvation possible. This is what we truly celebrate at Christmas – that by coming down to this earth, we are saved and have an eternity of glory in the presence of our Lord to look forward to. Praise be to God!
During the Christmas season, we have so many things that can distract us – things that are peripheral to the true meaning of Christmas. For the children, there are the presents. For many of us, there is the gift of family. All of these things bring joy to most people at Christmas, but they can also bring pain. Some have very little money, and thus cannot buy presents for their children. Others have lost loved ones at Christmas (as our family has with the death of Lisa’s Uncle Tommy), and so Christmas can be a painful time. There is no magical formula – no way that we can just wave a wand over those hurts and pains and make them just go away. But there is one thing that all of us can do, and it helps tremendously. We should remember the reason for the season.
Christmas is about the true gift that Jesus Christ in His glorious majesty gave to us. It is about the beginning of something really special – something that culminated with Jesus’s death on the cross and His resurrection. Christmas is about the ultimate gift – the gift of eternal life. When we focus on this during the Christmas season, we experience the joy, the peace, and the hope of living redeemed lives, living in the joyful expectation of eternal life made possible by Jesus, our Savior. Merry Christmas to you all!
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