"R" You Ready for Jesus

August 17
I was reading in Oswald Chambers’s devotional book “Daily Thoughts for Disciples” and the entry I was reading was full of “R” words like…

Redemption, Relationship, Responsibility, Refuse, Read.   They triggered a prayer I wanted to pray for several men, who either don't know or are not walking with the Lord.

God, we praise you for your plan of redemption.  You realized from the beginning, we would need to be released from our sins.  We cry out to you on behalf of some friends who don’t know You.  May today be the day they would realize or remember they need to be released from sin and restored to a right relationship with You Father.  May the young men we are speaking of read something that triggers their brains to realize the responsibility they carry in their role as "spiritual leader" in their homes.  When the temptations of the world rear their ugly heads help these people to run to You and refuse the entrapment.  Help these who are rambling through this world, missing the purpose and plans you have for them, really, really learn what it means to be in a love relationship with You.  In Jesus’ Name, Amen

Being Joyful and watching expectantly for the great things God is up to today!

Boo

The Oswald Chambers Devo.

Bedhold God is exalted by His power; who teaches like Him?  Job 36:22

“There is alway a tendency to produce an absolute authority; we accept the authority of the church, or of the Bible, or of a creed, and often refuse to do any more thinking on the matter; and in so doing we ignore the essential nature of Christianity which is based on a personal relationship to Jesus Christ, and works on the basis of our responsibility.  On the grounds of the redemption I am saved and God puts His Holy Spirit into me, then He expects me to react on the basis of that relationship.  I can evade it by dumping my responsibility onto a church, or a book or a creed, forgetting what Jesus said-'You searched the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me.  But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life'.  The only way to understand the Scriptures is not to accept them blankly but to read them in the light of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ.  If we insist that one must believe the doctrine of the Trinity and the inspiration of the Scriptures before one can be save, we are putting the cart before the horse.  All that is the effect of being a Christian, not the cause of it; and if we put the effect first we produce difficulties because we are putting thinking before life.  Jesus says, 'Come to Me, and if you want to know whether My teaching is of God, do His will.’ A scientist can explain the universe in which commonsense people live, but the scientific explanation is not first; life is first.  The same with theology; theology is the systematizing of the intellectual expression of life from God; it is a might thing, but it is second, not first."