Article of the Month
July
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Article of the Month July | |
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| Establishing
the Foundation of our Spiritual Experience In
Philippians 3:5-10, Paul gives expression to the fact that there is
much that can be apprehended and experienced beyond that which he had
previously known. That
I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship
of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death ... not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect:
but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am
apprehended of Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:10, 12 He
has come to know that the Lord can be personally, intimately known. The Jews of his day did not have this concept,
as they saw only the structured religious system which they sought to
protect. Paul
said, That I might know Him.
This is a knowing that transcends all religious doctrine
and activities, and finds its fulfillment in deep personal communion
with the Lord. It includes not
only information about Jesus, but an ongoing involvement with Him, as
He leads and directs. We must first come to Jesus, before we can be
sent. Come,
My beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages. Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us
see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and
the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give you My loves. Song of Solomon 7:11-12 The
power of His resurrection can only be experienced after we have
surrendered the totality of our being to the Lord, and died to our self-life
and ways. Only then can we identify
ourselves with Jesus in the power of His resurrection. This
will lead us toward a place of identification with Jesus that few experience
- The fellowship of His sufferings.
Examples of this are the sufferings of the Lord over lost humanity,
and the dullness of our spiritual hearing.
He desires our fellowship and longs that we come to Him. He has a purpose for each of our lives. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to good
works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10 We
may not understand how the Lord becomes personally interested in us
- as though we were the only person in the universe, and how He has
a special purpose and calling for each of us.
It is not necessary that we understand these things, but it is
vitally important that we respond to Him as He seeks to become personally
involved in our lives. When
we are too dull of hearing to respond, and as a result, come short of
all He intends, He suffers; for as a loving Father He longs for us to
come into the best, just as we desire the best for our children. When
Paul became aware of the possibility of entering into an active relationship
with the Lord in communion and fellowship, he counted all else as refuse
and began to seek that for which he had been apprehended by
the Lord. The desire for spiritual reality became the
priority of his life. If
by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead. Philippians 3:11 Paul
was not expressing a concern about losing his salvation. Rather, there is a much deeper meaning that
speaks of an out resurrection from the natural course of our
life experience, into the realm where the Lord uniquely puts His hand
upon us and lifts us into an active cooperative relationship with Him. For
example, many years ago I owned a television cable system which I sold
to attend Before
long, our food was gone. One
of my children discovered that a quantity of squash had been sent to
the school dump. We took it home
and began a diet of squash, three times a day.
This was all we had to eat. A
great reduction took place, as my pride and all self-sufficiency were
being dealt with, as the cable system had been very successful. During
this time, I was given money to go home for a weekend. When I saw the man to whom I had sold the business,
he showed me a new Cadillac and told me he had paid cash for it. Then he showed me a large boat and said he had
paid cash for it. He had purchased
the very home we had intended to buy and extensively remodeled it; he
told me that he had also paid cash for these improvements. All
this stung as nothing else could. We
were eating squash from the I
had grown up in a small coal mining town in Feeling
that I should do this, I used a compass to mark off a twenty mile circle
around my home town so I could be close to them to fulfill my responsibility. Gradually the Lord worked on me until I felt
that I was more willing to go to one of the poles, or to the equator,
than I was to stay within the circle I had drawn. During
this time, I began to understand that the Lord had a purpose for my
life, and that He would provide for my needs and make a way for the
ministry He would impart into my being.
In the Lords time, I was led to establish a bible school, After
this diet of squash for several weeks, the Lord directed me to work
at a factory that made frames for furniture.
I was hired for $1.05 per hour.
Night after night I was sent alone with a large truck to a railroad
siding to unload rough cut hard wood lumber from a railroad boxcar. Early one Saturday morning while unloading lumber
in the freezing rain from a large truck, I met the Lord in a depth beyond
anything I had known. Later,
I was released from this, and my life was transformed during a visitation
that came to the Bible school during 1958. I
would never trade any of this for all I might have had through owning
a TV cable system. Nor would
I bypass the experience of eating squash from the school dump, or the
pressures of the extremely difficult work I had experienced.
My inner being was changed and prepared to become a usable vessel
in the hands of the Lord - that the riches of His presence, with the
transformation of lives that is presently taking place, might have its
full outworking. For
many are called, but few are chosen. Matthew 22:14 There
is another way to say this. Many
are called, but few will pay the price in order to be chosen. Your circumstances might be quite different
than those I faced. The Lord
does not duplicate His workings. But
if we are to come into that which He has reserved for us, we must submit
to His dealings, and come His way. We
may say, This is not fair, others are being blessed and are prospering. In our natural, self-centered life experience,
this may be true. But once we
have submitted all to Jesus, and made Him our personal Lord, we have
no rights. There is an out-resurrection
from all we had known into that which He has prepared for us. Except we first go down in death, there will
be no rising. The extent to which
we are willing to go down, will determine the distance we will be brought
up. Some
time ago, I saw a picture of some high rise buildings in Basil that
were leaning, about to fall over. They
were so anxious to build, that they forgot to first go down to build
a substantial foundation. Therefore
whosoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him
unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: And the rain descended,
and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and
it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
And every one that hears these sayings of Mine, and does them
not, shall be likened to a foolish man, which built his house upon the
sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew,
and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. Matthew 7:24-27 It
is so important that we allow the Lord to do all that He desires in
the establishing of the foundation of our spiritual experience. We must allow the Lord to bring us through even
difficult things that we, nor others, seemingly understand. But
the Lord understands, and we must trust Him in all things, knowing that
He knows what He is doing. And
we know that all things work together for good to them that love God,
to them who are the called according to His
purpose.
Romans 8:28 |
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