Poster | Thread | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 6[/b]
[u]The Bible: More Than a Volume of Facts[/u]
[i]All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. 2 Timothy 3:16[/i]
CHARLES G. FINNEY BELIEVED that Bible teaching without moral application could be worse than no teaching at all and could result in positive injury to the hearers. I used to feel that this might be an extreme position, but after years of observation have come around to it, or to a view almost identical with it. There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake. Theology is a set of facts concerning God, man and the world. These facts may be and often are set forth as values in themselves; and there lies the snare both for the teacher and for the hearer. The Bible is more than a volume of hitherto unknown facts about God, man and the universe. It is a book of exhortation based upon these facts. By far the greater portion of the book is devoted to an urgent effort to persuade people to alter their ways and bring their lives into harmony with the will of God as set forth in its pages. Actually, no man is better for knowing that God in the beginning created the heaven and the earth. The devil knows that, and so did Ahab and Judas Iscariot. No man is better for knowing that God so loved the world of men that He gave His only begotten Son to die for their redemption. In hell there are millions who know that. Theological truth is useless until it is obeyed. The purpose behind all doctrine is to secure moral action!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/6 10:48 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 7[/b]
[u]The Flock of God: Safe in Jesus Christ[/u]
[i]Feed the flock of God which is among you And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away. 1 Peter 5:2, 4[/i]
THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KNOW GOD and walk with God, those who have learned to recognize the voice of the good Shepherd, will always be at home in a Spirit-filled congregation. It is sad indeed that some have never heard the voice of the Shepherd. His voice is as tender as a lullaby and as strong as the wind and as mighty as the sound of many waters. The people who have learned to hear and recognize the voice of Jesusthat healing, musical, solemn, beautiful voice of Jesus in His churchare always at home where everything centers around Him. The true Christian church can be a conglomeration of everything under the sun. That is, we may have Calvinists and Arminians and Methodists and Baptists and all sorts of others, and yet we are all together on one thingJesus Christ is wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption! He is All in all, and the people of the Lord who have learned to hear the voice of the Shepherd gravitate towards that kind of church! They may not be so sure about who else is present, but they know the Lord is present and they are sensitive to that. Do you find your own heart sensitive to the Lords presence or are you among those who are samplers and nibblers? God help you if you are, for the child of the king is a sheep who loves his Shepherd and he stays close to Him! Thats the only safe place for a sheep. Stay close to Jesus and all of the wolves in the world cannot get a tooth in you!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/7 10:02 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 8[/b]
[u]True Worship: Fully Seeking the Lord We Adore[/u]
[i]O come let us worship and bow down Psalm 95:6[/i]
AN OLD CREED SAYS THAT WE WORSHIP one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. If we could set forth all of Gods attributes and tell all that He is, we would fall on our knees in adoring worship. The Bible tells us that God dwells in light that is unapproachable, whom no man can see or has seen, and whom no man can see and live. It says that God is holy and eternal and omnipotent and omniscient and sovereign, and that He has a thousand sovereign attributes. And all of these should humble us and bring us down! I have come to believe that no worship is wholly pleasing to God until there is nothing in us displeasing to God. If there is anything within me that does not worship God, then there is nothing in me that worships God perfectly. Note that I am not saying that God must have a perfection of worship or He will not accept any worship at all. I would not go so far; if I did, I would rule myself out. But, I do say that the ideal God sets before us is to worship as near to perfectly as we can. Faith and love and obedience and loyalty and high conduct of lifeall of these must be taken as burnt offerings and offered to God! True worship seeks union with its beloved, and an active effort to close the gap between the heart and the God it adores is worship at its best!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/8 10:11 | Profile | lwpray Member
Joined: 2003/6/22 Posts: 3318 Sweden
| Re: | |
I have come to believe that no worship is wholly pleasing to God until there is nothing in us displeasing to God. If there is anything within me that does not worship God, then there is nothing in me that worships God perfectly. Note that I am not saying that God must have a perfection of worship or He will not accept any worship at all. I would not go so far; if I did, I would rule myself out. But, I do say that the ideal God sets before us is to worship as near to perfectly as we can. Faith and love and obedience and loyalty and high conduct of lifeall of these must be taken as burnt offerings and offered to God!
- A thorough summary of what growth unto Priestliness contains.
_________________ Lars Widerberg
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| 2004/1/8 10:25 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 9[/b]
[u]Believe the Right Thing about the Right Person[/u]
[i]Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost. Romans 15:13[/i]
THERE IS A NEBULOUS IDEA ACCEPTED by many in our day that faith is an almighty power flowing through the universe which anyone may plug into at will! It is conceived vaguely as a subrational creative pulsation streaming down from somewhere Up There, ready at any time to enter our hearts and change our whole mental and moral constitution as well as our total outlook on man, God, and the cosmos.
When it comes in, supposedly out go pessimism, fear, defeat and failure; in come optimism, confidence, personal mastery and unfailing success in war, love, sports, business and politics.
All of this is, of course, a gossamer of self-deception woven of the unsubstantial threads of fancy spun out of minds of tenderhearted persons who want to believe it! What is overlooked in all this is that faith is good only when it engages truth; when it is made to rest upon falsehood it can and often does lead to eternal tragedy.
For it is not enough that we believe; we must believe in the right thing about the right One!
To believe in God is more than to believe that He exists. To a right faith knowledge is necessary. We must know at least something of what God is like and what His will is for His human creatures. To know less than this is to be thrown back upon the necessity of accepting the affirmations of the soul and substituting Thus saith my soul for the biblical Thus saith the Lord, and no man has any right to pick and choose among revealed truths.
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/9 11:25 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 10[/b]
[u]Every One Must Pray as if He Alone Could Pray[/u]
[i]And he spoke a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. Luke 18:1[/i]
THOMAS Á KEMPIS WROTE that the man of God ought to be more at home in his prayer chamber than before the public. It is not too much to say that the preacher who loves to be before the public is hardly prepared spiritually to be before them. Right praying may easily make a man hesitant to appear before an audience. The man who is really at home in the presence of God will find himself caught in a kind of inward contradiction. He is likely to feel his responsibility so keenly that he would rather do almost anything than face an audience; and yet the pressure upon his spirit may be so great that wild horses could not drag him away from his pulpit. No man should stand before an audience who has not first stood before God. Many hours of communion should precede one hour in the pulpit. The prayer chamber should be more familiar than the public platform. Schools teach everything about preaching except the important part, praying. The best any school can do is to recommend prayer and exhort to its practice. Praying itself must be the work of the individual. That it is the one religious work which gets done with the least enthusiasm cannot but be one of the tragedies of our times! In true prayer, every man must be an original, for true prayer cannot be imitated nor can it be learned from someone else. Everyone must pray as if he alone could pray!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/10 11:17 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 11[/b]
[u]A Calamity: Accepting This World as Our Home[/u]
[i]Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 1 John 2:15[/i]
OF ALL THE CALAMITIES THAT HAVE BEEN VISITED upon the world, the surrender of the human spirit to this present world and its ways is the worstwithout doubt! No oriental monarch ever ruled his cowering subjects with any more cruel tyranny than thingsvisible things, audible things, tangible thingsrule mankind. That we who were made to communicate with angels and archangels and seraphim and with the God who made them allthat we should settle down here as a wild eagle of the air come down to scratch in the barnyard with the common hensthis I say is the worst of anything that has ever come to the world! It seems incredible that we who were made for many worlds should accept this one world as our ultimate home. Man was made in the image of God and is now a fallen being that has left its place in the celestial world and has plummeted down like a falling star. Now, in this world, he has all but forgotten the place from which he came. That is why the devil sees to it that we seldom get alone with time to think and meditate on the reality of the other world. For when a man really gets alone, he senses often that this life in this world is not the answerit is not the end. Actually and simply, a Christian is one who dedicates himself to God to inhabit another and better world!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/11 10:58 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 12[/b]
[u]Satan Would Bind Us in Our Own Grave Clothes[/u]
[i]For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. 1 John 3:8[/i]
IT IS PART OF THE DEVILS BUSINESS to keep the Christians spirit imprisoned. He knows that the believing and justified Christian has been raised up out of the grave of his sins and trespasses. From that point on, Satan works that much harder to keep us bound and gagged, actually imprisoned in our own grave clothes! He knows that if we continue in this kind of bondage we will never be able to claim our rightful spiritual heritage. He knows also that while we continue bound in this kind of enslavement we are not much better off than when we were spiritually dead. This is one reason why the Christians in todays churches are behaving like a flock of frightened sheepso intimidated by the devil that we cant even say Amen! I am sure that it is not glorifying to our God that Christians should be so intimidated and silenced in our day. It was Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, who came down and took our human body for Himself. He was a man, born of a woman, a man wearing our own naturebut He was also God! He went out to the cross and they sacrificed Him there. The Father, God Almighty, accepted His sacrifice as the one, final fulfillment and consummation of all the sacrifices ever made on Jewish altars. After three days, He came out of the grave, then ascended as Victor over death and hell! Believing this, we ought to be the most fearless, the happiest and most God-assured people in the whole world!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/12 9:45 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 13[/b]
[u]Learn to Love God for Himself Alone[/u]
[i]We love him, because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19[/i]
THE PHRASE, THE LOVE OF GOD, when used by Christians almost always refers to Gods love for us. We must remember that it can also mean our love for God! The first and great commandment is that we should love God with all the power of our total personality. Though all love originates in God and is for that reason Gods own love, yet we are permitted to catch and reflect back that love in such manner that it becomes our love indeed! The Christians love for God has by some religious thinkers been divided into two kinds, the love of gratitude and the love of excellence. But we must carry our love to God further than love of gratitude and love of excellence. There is a place in the religious experience where we love God for Himself alone, with never a thought of His benefits. There is, in the higher type of love, a suprarational element that cannot and does not attempt to give reasons for its existenceit only whispers, I love! In the perfection of love, the heart does not reason from admiration to affection, but quickly rises to the height of blind adoration where reason is suspended and the heart worships in unreasoning blessedness. It can only exclaim, Holy, holy, holy, while scarcely knowing what it means. If this should all seem too mystical, too unreal, we offer no proof. But some will read and recognize the description of the sunlit peaks where they have been for at least brief periods and to which they long often to return. And such will need no proof!
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/13 9:29 | Profile | crsschk Member
Joined: 2003/6/11 Posts: 9192 Santa Clara, CA
| Re: Renewed ~ Day By Day ~ Devotional | | [b]January 14[/b]
[u]Feeling Right: Not the Same as Being Right[/u]
[i]The lord of that servant shall come and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites. Matthew 24:50, 51[/i]
IT APPEARS THAT TOO MANY CHRISTIANS want to enjoy the thrill of feeling right but are not willing to endure the inconvenience of being right!
The glaring disparity between theology and practice among professing Christians is a more destructive evil in its effect upon the Christian religion than communism, Romanism and liberalism combined.
So wide is the gulf that separates theory from practice in the church that an inquiring stranger who chances upon both would scarcely dream that there was any relation between them.
An intelligent observer of our human scene who heard the Sunday morning sermon and later watched the Sunday afternoon conduct of those who had heard it would conclude that he had been examining two distinct and contrary religions!
Christians habitually weep and pray over beautiful truth, only to draw back from that same truth when it comes to the difficult job of putting it in practice.
The average church simply does not dare to check its practices against biblical precepts. It tolerates things that are diametrically opposed to the will of God. This can be explained only by assuming a lack of integration in the religious personality. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along!
And since Christ makes His appeal directly to the will, are we not justified in wondering whether or not these divided souls have ever made a true commitment to the Lord?
_________________ Mike Balog
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| 2004/1/14 10:15 | Profile |
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