“For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation.” (2 Cor. 7:10)
Taken from Devotions for MORNING and EVENING with OSWALD CHAMBERS
For December 7th page 706
“Conviction of sin is best portrayed in the words:
My sins, my sins, my Saviour, How sad on Thee they fall.
Conviction or sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy spirit rouses a man’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers him, but his relationship with God—‘against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Thy sight.’ The marvels of conviction of sin, forgiveness, and holiness are so interwoven that it is only the forgiven man who is the holy man, he proves he is forgiven by being the opposite to what he was, by God’s grace. Repentance always brings a man to this point: I have sinned. The surest sign that God is at work is when a man says that and means it. Anything less than this is a remorse for having made blunders, the reflex action of disgust at himself.
The entrance into the Kingdom is through the panging pains of repentance crashing into a man’s respectable goodness; then the Holy Ghost, Who produces these agonies, begins the formation of the Son of God in the life. The new life will manifest itself in conscious repentance and unconscious holiness, never the other way about. The bedrock of Christianity is repentance. Strictly speaking a man cannot repent when he chooses; repentance is a gift of God. The old Puritans used to pray for ‘the gift of tears.’ If ever you cease to know the virtue of repentance, you are in darkness. Examine yourself and see if you have forgotten how to be sorry.”
The following is taken from Our Daily Bread for Nov. 19/11 www.rbc.org
When God Cleans House
“Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you, with all malice.” Eph. 4:31
“God did some fall housecleaning this week. He sent a mighty wind through our neighborhood that made the trees tremble and shake loose their dead branches. When it finished, I had a mess to clean up.
In my own life, god sometimes works in a similar way. He will send or allow stormy circumstances that shake loose the ‘lifeless branches’ I’ve been refusing to release. Sometimes it’s something that once was good, like an area of ministry, but is no longer bearing fruit. More often it’s something that’s not good, like a bad habit I’ve slid into or a stubborn attitude that prevents new growth…
The lifeless limbs in my yard caused me to think of attitudes that God expects me to dispose of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians lists some of them: bitterness, anger, and evil speech (4:31). When God shakes things up, we need to get rid of what He shakes loose. –Julie Ackerman Link
Lord, give me a listening heart and help me
to cooperate with You when You
point out changes that need to be made in my life
I want to honor You and please You. Amen.
Christ’s cleansing power can remove the most stubborn stain of sin.”
Jean’s email jowildflowers@gmail.com
Blog: jean-oathout.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment