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September 1, 2010
The Place of Exaltation
“ Jesus took them up on a high mountain apart by themselves
” (Mark 9:2).
We have all experienced times of exaltation on the mountain, when we have seen things from God’s
perspective and have wanted to stay there. But God will never allow us to stay there. The true test of our spiritual life
is in exhibiting the power to descend from the mountain. If we only have the power to go up, something is wrong. It is a wonderful
thing to be on the mountain with God, but a person only gets there so that he may later go down and lift up the demon-possessed
people in the valley (see 9:14–18). We are not made for the mountains, for sunrises, or for the other beautiful attractions
in life—those are simply intended to be moments of inspiration. We are made for the valley and the ordinary things of
life, and that is where we have to prove our stamina and strength. Yet our spiritual selfishness always wants repeated moments
on the mountain. We feel that we could talk and live like perfect angels, if we could only stay on the mountaintop. Those
times of exaltation are exceptional and they have their meaning in our life with God, but we must beware to prevent our spiritual
selfishness from wanting to make them the only time.
We are inclined to think that everything that happens is to be turned
into useful teaching. In actual fact, it is to be turned into something even better than teaching, namely, character. The
mountaintop is not meant to teach us anything, it is meant to make us something. There is a terrible trap in always asking,
“What’s the use of this experience?” We can never measure spiritual matters in that way. The moments on
the mountaintop are rare moments, and they are meant for something in God’s purpose. September 2, 2010
The Place of Humiliation
“If You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us” (Mark 9:22).
After every time
of exaltation, we are brought down with a sudden rush into things as they really are, where it is neither beautiful, poetic,
nor thrilling. The height of the mountaintop is measured by the dismal drudgery of the valley, but it is in the valley that
we have to live for the glory of God. We see His glory on the mountain, but we never live for His glory there. It is in the
place of humiliation that we find our true worth to God—that is where our faithfulness is revealed. Most of us can do
things if we are always at some heroic level of intensity, simply because of the natural selfishness of our own hearts. But
God wants us to be at the drab everyday level, where we live in the valley according to our personal relationship with Him.
Peter thought it would be a wonderful thing for them to remain on the mountain, but Jesus Christ took the disciples down from
the mountain and into the valley, where the true meaning of the vision was explained (see 9:5–6, 14–23).
“If
you can do anything .” It takes the valley of humiliation to remove the skepticism from us. Look back at your
own experience and you will find that until you learned who Jesus really was, you were a skillful skeptic about His power.
When you were on the mountaintop you could believe anything, but what about when you were faced with the facts of the valley?
You may be able to give a testimony regarding your sanctification, but what about the thing that is a humiliation to you right
now? The last time you were on the mountain with God, you saw that all the power in heaven and on earth belonged to Jesus—will
you be skeptical now, simply because you are in the valley of humiliation? September 3,
2010
The Place of Ministry
“He said to
them, ‘This kind [of unclean spirit] can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting’ ” (Mark 9:29).
“His
disciples asked Him privately, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ ” (9:28). The answer lies in a personal relationship
with Jesus Christ. “This kind can come out by nothing but” concentrating on Him, and then doubling and redoubling
that concentration on Him. We can remain powerless forever, as the disciples were in this situation, by trying to do God’s
work without concentrating on His power, and by following instead the ideas that we draw from our own nature. We actually
slander and dishonor God by our very eagerness to serve Him without knowing Him.
When you are brought face to face with
a difficult situation and nothing happens externally, you can still know that freedom and release will be given because of
your continued concentration on Jesus Christ. Your duty in service and ministry is to see that there is nothing between Jesus
and yourself. Is there anything between you and Jesus even now? If there is, you must get through it, not by ignoring it as
an irritation, or by going up and over it, but by facing it and getting through it into the presence of Jesus Christ. Then
that very problem itself, and all that you have been through in connection with it, will glorify Jesus Christ in a way that
you will never know until you see Him face to face.
We must be able to “mount up with wings like eagles”
(Isaiah 40:31), but we must also know how to come down. The power of the saint lies in the coming down and in the living that
is done in the valley. Paul said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13) and
what he was referring to were mostly humiliating things. And yet it is in our power to refuse to be humiliated and to say,
“No, thank you, I much prefer to be on the mountaintop with God.” Can I face things as they actually are in the
light of the reality of Jesus Christ, or do things as they really are destroy my faith in Him, and put me into a panic? September 4, 2010
The Vision
and the Reality
“ to those who are called to be saints ” (1 Corinthians 1:2).
Thank
God for being able to see all that you have not yet been. You have had the vision, but you are not yet to the reality of it
by any means. It is when we are in the valley, where we prove whether we will be the choice ones, that most of us turn back.
We are not quite prepared for the bumps and bruises that must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision.
We have seen what we are not, and what God wants us to be, but are we willing to be battered into the shape of the vision
to be used by God? The beatings will always come in the most common, everyday ways and through common, everyday people.
There are times when we do know what God’s purpose is; whether we will let the vision be turned into actual character
depends on us, not on God. If we prefer to relax on the mountaintop and live in the memory of the vision, then we will be
of no real use in the ordinary things of which human life is made. We have to learn to live in reliance upon what we saw in
the vision, not simply live in ecstatic delight and conscious reflection upon God. This means living the realities of our
lives in the light of the vision until the truth of the vision is actually realized in us. Every bit of our training is in
that direction. Learn to thank God for making His demands known.
Our little “I am” always sulks and pouts
when God says do. Let your little “I am” be shriveled up in God’s wrath and indignation—“I AM
WHO I AM has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14). He must dominate. Isn’t it piercing to realize that God not
only knows where we live, but also knows the gutters into which we crawl! He will hunt us down as fast as a flash of lightning.
No human being knows human beings as God does. September 5, 2010
The Nature of Degeneration
“Just as through
one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned ” (Romans
5:12).
The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man’s sin, but that the nature of sin, namely,
my claim to my right to myself, entered into the human race through one man. But it also says that another Man took upon Himself
the sin of the human race and put it away—an infinitely more profound revelation (see Hebrews 9:26). The nature of sin
is not immorality and wrongdoing, but the nature of self-realization which leads us to say, “I am my own god.”
This nature may exhibit itself in proper morality or in improper immorality, but it always has a common basis—my claim
to my right to myself. When our Lord faced either people with all the forces of evil in them, or people who were clean-living,
moral, and upright, He paid no attention to the moral degradation of one, nor any attention to the moral attainment of the
other. He looked at something we do not see, namely, the nature of man (see John 2:25).
Sin is something I am born with
and cannot touch—only God touches sin through redemption. It is through the Cross of Christ that God redeemed the entire
human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a person responsible for having
the heredity of sin, and does not condemn anyone because of it. Condemnation comes when I realize that Jesus Christ came to
deliver me from this heredity of sin, and yet I refuse to let Him do so. From that moment I begin to get the seal of damnation.
“This is the condemnation [and the critical moment], that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness
rather than light ” (John 3:19). September 6. 2010
The Nature of Regeneration
“When it pleased
God to reveal His Son in me ” (Galatians 1:15–16).
If Jesus Christ is going to regenerate me, what
is the problem He faces? It is simply this—I have a heredity in which I had no say or decision; I am not holy, nor am
I likely to be; and if all Jesus Christ can do is tell me that I must be holy, His teaching only causes me to despair. But
if Jesus Christ is truly a regenerator, someone who can put His own heredity of holiness into me, then I can begin to see
what He means when He says that I have to be holy. Redemption means that Jesus Christ can put into anyone the hereditary nature
that was in Himself, and all the standards He gives us are based on that nature—His teaching is meant to be applied
to the life which He puts within us. The proper action on my part is simply to agree with God’s verdict on sin as judged
on the Cross of Christ.
The New Testament teaching about regeneration is that when a person is hit by his own sense of
need, God will put the Holy Spirit into his spirit, and his personal spirit will be energized by the Spirit of the Son of
God—“ until Christ is formed in you” (Galatians 4:19). The moral miracle of redemption is that God can put
a new nature into me through which I can live a totally new life. When I finally reach the edge of my need and know my own
limitations, then Jesus says, “Blessed are you ” (Matthew 5:11). But I must get to that point. God cannot put
into me, the responsible moral person that I am, the nature that was in Jesus Christ unless I am aware of my need for it.
Just as the nature of sin entered into the human race through one man, the Holy Spirit entered into the human race through
another Man (see Romans 5:12–19). And redemption means that I can be delivered from the heredity of sin, and that through
Jesus Christ I can receive a pure and spotless heredity, namely, the Holy Spirit. September 7,
2010
The Nature of Reconciliation
“He made Him who knew no sin to be
sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Sin is a fundamental relationship—it
is not wrong doing, but wrong being—it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith bases
everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin. Other faiths deal with sins—the Bible alone deals with sin.
The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation
of the gospel that the message of the gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.
The revealed truth of the Bible
is not that Jesus Christ took on Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took on Himself the heredity of sin that no man can
even touch. God made His own Son “to be sin” that He might make the sinner into a saint. It is revealed throughout
the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through identification with us, not through sympathy for us.
He deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in His own body, the complete, cumulative sin of the human race. “He
made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us ” and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race solely on
the basis of redemption. Jesus Christ reconciled the human race, putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone
can experience that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what our Lord has done on the cross.
A man cannot redeem himself—redemption is the work of God, and is absolutely finished and complete. And its application
to individual people is a matter of their own individual action or response to it. A distinction must always be made between
the revealed truth of redemption and the actual conscious experience of salvation in a person’s life.
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