May
26
They shall be Mine, says
the Lord of hosts, in that day when I publicly recognize and openly declare
them to be My jewels (Malachi 3:17 AMP).
If we have committed
ourselves to God thoroughly and really meant with the Lord that we want His
full will and we do not want our own, and by His grace we will go the way that
He leads and shows, whatever it costs, if we have done that and then situations
have arisen which look terribly complicated and seem to contradict the
faithfulness of God, what am I to conclude? What are we going to conclude? We
have to conclude one of two things – that God cares nothing for all our
devotion and consecration, and just lets us get into any mess, or else this is
all under His eye. That is ultimate. We have either to believe God or not to
believe Him. You have all this here in the Word, and it all bears down upon
this, that people who are related in Divine foreknowledge and Divine sovereign
action come into situations like that, but in the end that sovereignty has been
shown to relate to something unusually precious to the Lord, "and they
shall be Mine, saith the Lord of hosts, even Mine own possession, in the day
that I do make" (Malachi 3:17).
The Lord is after
something more than ordinary and He needs a people for it, but such a people
will have unusual experiences, inside and out. It will not be the ordinary,
normal course where everything goes well and straightforwardly. It will not be
like that for these people. They go through ways that are tortuous and
exceedingly difficult, but there is a sovereignty at work. That is my way of
analyzing and summing up the situation as I see it in the Word, and I can only
say to you that it is not foreign and strange to God's special purposes to have
experiences like that. Whether it be the remnant of Israel, whether it be the
reactions of God in this Christian dispensation, in the book of the Revelation,
the messages to the churches which are just on this ground, it is all like
this. Nothing seems normal with a people like that, because God is not going to
have anything that is just normal, as we call the normal. It is something more,
something extraordinary, and our experience therefore is extraordinary.
By T. Austin-Sparks from: Attaining to God's Full
Thought
This painting by Claudia Wood Rahm is called Living Stones.
No comments:
Post a Comment