Tag: Total Surrender

The Strictest Discipline

·

Oswald Chambersby Oswald Chambers

If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. —Matthew 5:30

Jesus did not say that everyone must cut off his right hand, but that “if your right hand causes you to sin” in your walk with Him, then it is better to “cut it off.” There are many things that are perfectly legitimate, but if you are going to concentrate on God you cannot do them. Your right hand is one of the best things you have, but Jesus says that if it hinders you in following His precepts, then “cut it off.” The principle taught here is the strictest discipline or lesson that ever hit humankind.

When God changes you through regeneration, giving you new life through spiritual rebirth, your life initially has the characteristic of being maimed. There are a hundred and one things that you dare not do— things that would be sin for you, and would be recognized as sin by those who really know you. But the unspiritual people around you will say, “What’s so wrong with doing that? How absurd you are!” There has never yet been a saint who has not lived a maimed life initially. Yet it is better to enter into life maimed but lovely in God’s sight than to appear lovely to man’s eyes but lame to God’s. At first, Jesus Christ through His Spirit has to restrain you from doing a great many things that may be perfectly right for everyone else but not right for you. Yet, see that you don’t use your restrictions to criticize someone else.

The Christian life is a maimed life initially, but in Matthew 5:48 Jesus gave us the picture of a perfectly well-rounded life— “You shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

by Oswald Chambers

Two Roads

·

A.B. Simpsonby A.B. Simpson

Lead me in the way everlasting —Psalm 139:24

There is often apparently but little difference in two distinct lives between the person in constant victory and the one in frequent victory. But that little difference constitutes a world of success or failure. The one is the divine, the other is the human; the one is the everlasting way, the other the transient and the imperfect way. God wants to lead us to the way everlasting and to establish us and make us immovable as He.

We little know the seriousness of the slightest infraction of our surrender to God. It is but the first step in the downward progression, and only God knows where it shall end. Let us be not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul (Hebrews 10:39).

Our victory today is preparing the way for a greater victory tomorrow; but our small compromise today is opening the door for a more terrible defeat in the days to come. Let us, therefore, whatever we have claimed from our blessed Master commit it to His keeping and take Him to establish us and hold us fast in the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.

by A.B. Simpson