Saturday, March 27, 2010

God's Invitation Leads to a Crisis of Belief

"God-Sized Assignments

God wants the world to know Him. That way, people will come to understand what God is like when they see Him at work. They will know His nature when they see it expressed in His activity.

Some people believe God will never ask them to undertake anything that seems impossible. They believe God will never lead a church to attempt something they cannot afford, ask someone to do something outside their giftedness, or lead someone to do something they are afraid of doing. Yet if people are going to see God at work, they must witness more than just sincere Christians doing the work, they must witness more than just sincere Christians doing the best they can. People must see God at work in Christians' lives....

Scripture indicates that God will ask us to attempt things that are impossible apart from divine intervention. While some church leaders believe this is irresponsible, the fact is that when we accomplish things that can only be explained by God, we provide a powerful witness to God's presence and guidance. The God-sized assignments in the Bible are how He demonstrated His nature, strength, provision, and love to His people - and to a watching world. Those who witnessed God powerfully at work through His people saw what God is truly like.

Consider a few of these God-sized assignments. God told Abraham to father a nation when Abraham had no son, and Sarah was long past the age to bear children. He told Moses to deliver the children of Israel, to cross the Red Sea, and to provide water from a rock. He told Gideon to defeat a Midianite army of a hundred and twenty thousand with three hundred men. God told a virgin that she would give birth to the Messiah. Jesus told the disciples to feed the multitudes and to make disciples of all the nations. Not one of these things was humanly possible. But when God's people and the world see something happen that only God can do, they come to know God. ...

The Early Church

Christians in the early church followed the directions of the Holy Spirit, and here is the testimony of the impact God had on their world:
  • The disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in foreign languages they had not learned. Peter preached and "those who accepted his message were baptized, and that day about 3,000 people were added to them." (Acts 2:41)
  • Peter and John healed a crippled beggar in the name of Jesus. They preached, and "many of those who heard the message believed, and the number of men came to about 5,000." (Acts 4:4)
  • God used Peter to raise Dorcas from the dead. "This became known throughout all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord." (Acts 9:42)

What our world often sees are devoted, committed Christians serving God to the best of their ability. But they are not seeing God. They comment, "Well there's a dedicated, faithful group of people." But they don't witness anything happening that can only be explained in terms of God's activity. Why? Because we aren't attempting anything that only God can do!

The World Comes To Know God

Our world is not attracted to Christ because we don't allow them to see Him at work. They don't hesitate to attack the Christian position on morality because they have no fear of the God we serve. They see us doing good thing for God and say, "That's fine, but that's not my thing." The world passes us by, not wanting to become involved because they are merely seeing people at work, not God.

Let the world see God at work, and He will attract them. Let Christ be lifted up - not in words, but in life. Let them see the difference the living Christ makes in a life, a family, or a church, and this will affect how they respond. When the world sees things happening through God's people that cannot be explained except that God Himself has done them, then people will be drawn to God. Let world leaders see the miraculous signs of an all-powerful God, and they, like Nebuchadnezzar, will declare that He is the one true God.

The world comes to know God when they see God's nature expressed through His activity. When God starts to work, He accomplishes something only He can do, and both God's people and the world come to experience Him in ways they have never known Him before. That is why God gives God-sized assignments to His people. ...

The reason much of the world is not attracted to Christ and His church is that God's people lack the faith to attempt things only God can do. If you or your church are not responding to God and pursuing things only He can accomplish, then you are not exercising faith. "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews 11:6). If people in your community are not responding to the gospel as they did in the New Testament times, one possible reason is that they do not see God in what you are doing as a church."

Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, and Claude King; "Experiencing God"

The Parable of the Train Tracks

"Suppose the eye could say to the body, "Let's walk down these train tracks. The way is clear. Not a train is in sight." So the body starts down the tracks.
Then the ear says, "I hear a whistle coming from behind us." The eye argues, "But nothing is on the track as far as I can see. Let's keep on walking." The body listens only to the eye and keeps on walking. Soon the ear says, "That whistle is getting louder and closer!" Then the feet say, "I feel the vibration of a train coming. We'd better get our body off these tracks!" If this were your body, what would you do?

  • Would you try to ignore the conflict between the body parts and hope it passed?
  • Would you take a vote of all your body members, and let the majority rule?
  • Would you trust your eyes and keep on walking since sight is an extremely important sense?

No - you would get off the train tracks. God gave our bodies many different senses and parts. When each part does its job and when each part pays proper attention to the others, the whole body works the way it should.

A church is the body of Christ. It functions best when all of its members are able to share what they sense God is doing and saying. Members of a congregation can't fully know God's will for their lives apart from the testimony of other members. A church needs to hear the whole counsel of God through its members. Then it can proceed in confidence and unity to do God's will."

Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, Claude King

Sunday, March 21, 2010

God's Purposes Versus Our Plans

"We often dream our dreams of what we want to do for God. We formulate plans based on our priorities. Then we pray and ask God to bless our efforts and to help us accomplish our goals. (After all, we're doing it for Him!) We mobilize fellow believers to make our schemes successful. What is really important, however, is what God plans to do where we are and how He wants to accomplish His purposes through us. Here is what the Scriptures say about our plans and purposes: "The LORD frustrates the counsel of the the nations; He thwarts the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of His heart from geneartion to generation" (Ps. 33:10-11). "Many plans are in a man's heart, but the LORD's decree will prevail" (Prov. 19:21).
If your agenda is not the same as God's, you will not experience God working through you. God reveals His purposes so you will know what He plans to do. Then you can join Him. His plans and purposes will not be thwarted. They will succeed. The Lord foils the worldly plans of the nations, but His plans come to pass.
Planning is a valuable exercise, but it can never become a substitute for hearing from God. Your plans only have merit when they are based on what God has told you He intends to do. Your relationship with God is far more important to Him than any scheming you can do. The biggest problem with planning is when we try to carry out in our own wisdom what only God has a right to determine. We cannot know the when or where or how of God's will until He tells us.
God intends that we follow Him. He expects us to get our directives from Him, and He wants to equip us to do the assignment he gives. If we try to spell out all the details of His will in a planning session, we'll have a tendency to forget the need for a daily, intimate relationship with God. We may accomplish our objectives but forgo the relationship. It is possible to achieve all of our goals and yet be outside God's will. God created us for an eternal love relationship. Life is our opportunity to experience Him at work in us and in our world.
Planning is not wrong. Just be careful not to plan more than God intends for you to. Let God interrupt or redirect your plans anytime He wants to. Remain in a close relationship with Him so you can always hear His voice when He speaks to you. I have found that the best planning meetings are prayer meetings where we spend time with our Father finding out what He is up to. If churches are really serious about doing God's will, they will spend more time seeking God's will and less time arguing and debating about what each member thinks the church ought to be doing."

Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, Claude King

Friday, March 19, 2010

"God Guides Specifically"

"A popular teaching says God does not give people specific directives. It claims He gave us brains and the Bible, and these two are sufficient to guide us in all decision making. This position implies that a Christian always thinks correctly, according to God's will. It doesn't take into account that the old nature is constantly at odds with the spiritual nature (see Rom. 7), and it neglects the important fact that our ways are not God's ways (see Isa. 55:8).
After God spoke to Noah about building an ark, Noah knew the size, the type of materials, and how to put it together. When God spoke to Moses about constructing the tabernacle, He was extremely specific about the details. When God became flesh, He gave specific directions to His disciples - where to go, what to do, how to respond to people who accepted or rejected their message, and what to preach.
God called Abraham and said, "Go out from your land, your relatives, and your father's house to the land that I will show you" (Gen. 12:1). Since He was not very specific at first, God's instructions required faith on Abraham's part. But God did promise to reveal His plans as Abraham obeyed. God always provides enough specific directions so you can do what He wants you to do at the moment. When you need to know more, He will guide you. As time went on, God revealed to Abraham that a son would be born to him. He also spoke to Abraham about the number of his descendents, the territory his people would inhabit, and He revealed that Abraham's descendents would go into bondage, eventually to be delivered.
The Holy Spirit continues to give clear directives today. He will give you unmistakable guidance for your life. You may say, "That has not been my experience." But be careful not to let your personal experience become the measure of what the Christian life is supposed to be like. Rather than dismissing anything you read in the Bible that does not match what you have experienced, ask the Lord to raise the level of your experience to the standard presented in Scripture.
If you have not received instructions from God on a matter, pray and wait. Learn patience. Depend on God's timing, for His agenda is always best. Don't be in a hurry. Don't try to skip over the relationship to get on with the activity."

Henry Blackaby, Richard Blackaby, Claude King

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Dust, Drudgery, and Deity

"God made man a mixture of dust and Deity - "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being" (Gen. 2:7). The dust of a man's body is his glory, not his shame. Jesus Christ manifested Himself in that dust, and He claims that He can presence any man with His own divinity. The New Testament teaches us how to keep the body under and make it a servant. Robert Browning, of all the poets, is the one who insists that we make headway not in spite of the flesh, but because of the flesh, and in no other way.
Drudgery is the outcome of sin, but it has no right to be the rule of life. It becomes the rule of life because we ignore the fact that the dust of the earth belongs to God, and that our chief end is to glorify God. Unless we can maintain the presence of Divinity in our dust, life becomes a miserable drudgery. If we live in order to hoard up the means of living, we do not live at all, we have no time to, we are taken up with one form of drudgery or another to keep things going."

Oswald Chambers