Oswald Chambers – My Utmost for His Highest – Wednesday, 29
January 2014 “But It Is Hardly Credible That One Could Be So Positively
Ignorant!”
Who art Thou, Lord?--Acts 26:15
"The Lord spake thus to me with a strong hand." There
is no escape when Our Lord speaks, He always comes with an arrestment of the
understanding. Has the voice of God come to you directly? If it has, you cannot
mistake the intimate insistence with which it has spoken to you in the language
you know best, not through your ears, but through your circumstances.
God has to destroy our determined confidence in our own
convictions. "I know this is what I should do" – and suddenly the
voice of God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our
ignorance. We have shown our ignorance of Him in the very way we determined to
serve Him. We serve Jesus in a spirit that is not His, we hurt Him by our
advocacy for Him, we push His claims in the spirit of the devil. Our words
sound all right, but our spirit is that of an enemy. "He rebuked them, and
said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." The spirit of our Lord
in an advocate of His is described in 1 Corinthians 13.
Have I been persecuting Jesus by a zealous determination to
serve Him in my own way? If I feel I have done my duty and yet have hurt Him in
doing it, I may be sure it was not my duty, because it has not fostered the
meek and quiet spirit, but the spirit of self-satisfaction. We imagine that
whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our
Lord – "I delight to do Thy will, O My God."
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