Utmost For His Highest Jan 31
…separated to the gospel of God… Romans 1:1
Our calling is not primarily to be holy men and women, but to be proclaimers of the gospel of God.
The one all–important thing is that the gospel of God should be recognized as the abiding reality. Reality is not merely human goodness, or holiness, or heaven, or hell— it is redemption!
The need to perceive this is the most vital need of the Christian worker today. As workers, we have to get used to the revelation that redemption is the only reality.
Personal holiness is an effect of redemption, not the cause of it. If we place our faith in human goodness we will go under when testing comes.
Paul did not say that he separated himself, but “when it pleased God, who separated me…” (Galatians 1:15 ). Paul was not overly interested in his own character.
And as long as our eyes are focused on our own personal holiness, we will never even get close to the full reality of redemption.
Christian workers fail because they place their desire for their own holiness above their desire to know God.
“Don’t ask me to be confronted with the strong reality of redemption on behalf of the filth of human life surrounding me today; what I want is anything God can do for me to make me more desirable in my own eyes.”
To talk that way is a sign that the reality of the gospel of God has not begun to touch me. There is no reckless abandon to God in that. God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character.
Paul was not conscious of himself. He was recklessly abandoned, totally surrendered, and separated by God for one purpose— to proclaim the gospel of God (see Romans 9:3). Read the whole chapter to gain perspective!
BOTTOM LINE WISDOM From Oswald Chambers
“We are not fundamentally free; external circumstances are not in our hands, they are in God’s hands, the one thing in which we are free is in our personal relationship to God. We are not responsible for the circumstances we are in, but we are responsible for the way we allow those circumstances to affect us; we can either allow them to get on top of us, or we can allow them to transform us into what God wants us to be.”
Merlin now:
I have not in the above words inflicted any of my personal interpretation or editing, but I have only desired to visually enhance the impact of its message to you, fresh on the tablet of your mind today, all done merely by breaking up paragraphs into separate sentences, and word appearance by changing letter size, font, etc.
Why do I do this? Perhaps because I believe today we are so visually and audibly oriented, that we’re even handicapped by our failure to read and grasp the impact of typical paragraphs on a page in a devotional as significant as this, not to mention, a familiar scripture passage, UNLESS PERHAPS, we have the desire to access by reading, pondering and delighting in its words, be it in hard copy print or on devices such as our phones multiple times daily in hopes that the Holy Spirit can break thru our brain fog.
I repeat the last sentence from the Chamber’s reading above, strictly for emphasis that “Paul was not conscious of himself. He was recklessly abandoned, totally surrendered, and separated by God for one purpose – to proclaim the gospel of God (see Romans 9:3, actually, read the whole chapter for perspective).
I recall hearing it said years ago, it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to be “spiritually inhibited once you’re inhabited by the Holy Spirit!” Get the picture?