For What it’s Worth…

Nobody likes having their will crossed. From an early age we learn to react with anger and outrage when someone dares to impose upon us, to prevent us achieving our aims, to deprive us of what we perceive to be our right to self-determination. But this makes for a clash of wills for the Christian because the Christian lives not according to their own word, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
This is why the foundation of the Christian life is repentance and faith and this is why each and every day of discipleship with Jesus involves dying to ourselves and living to him. As Christians, we should be able to see the fruit of God “crossing our will” in the changes that he has made in us to make us more Like Christ. Can you?

The Bible should be at the centre of our life. Most of us will say that this is the case. We read it, we sing it, we study it, we hear it taught. The Bible is the foundation of our life in God – but, is it? Do we have a thirst to know God’s will that we might do it? Are we eager to know God through his Word? A 19th century Pastor, Octavius Winslow, writes,
When a professing Christian can read his Bible with no spiritual taste, or when he searches it, not with a sincere desire to know the mind of the Spirit in order to [walk] a holy and obedient walk, but with a merely curious aim, it is a sure evidence that his soul is making but a retrograde movement in real spirituality. Nothing perhaps more strongly indicates the tone of a believer’s spirituality, than the light in which the Scriptures are regarded by him.

What is it that we value the most? We live in a world that puts a value on almost everything in our life, including our life! Donald Whitney challenges us…
“Perhaps you would think of something like the Hope Diamond, the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s sculpture of David…yet offer any of these to an emaciated man who is hours from dying of thirst and hunger, the relative value of the world’s greatest treasures drops to nothing. Though inexpensive and often taken for granted, ultimately it is the basics of life – things such as food and water – that are most precious. For without them, there is no life at all. Therefore, I submit that the single most valuable item on earth is the Bible.”
What is it that we value the most?

Calvin’s fourth rule on prayer – “We pray in confident hope”. Calvin rightly comments,
“Cast down and overcome by true humility, we should be nonetheless encouraged to pray by a sure hope that our prayer will answered”
Prayer is essentially linked to faith, and true faith is founded on the sure character of the one in whom we have that faith, and not some abstract quantity or quality of ours. As we come to God in prayer, it is helpful to recall the cross of His Son. We know we come as sinners, but as forgiven sinners – sinners who are now children. Meditate on Paul’s encouragement in Romans 8.32 – “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Let us pray!

Calvin’s third rule on prayer – “We yield all confidence in ourselves and humbly plead for pardon”.
Simply, we are to ‘depend on no assurance whatever but this alone: that, reckoning [our]selves to be of God, [we] do not despair that he will take care of [us].”
We must come, knowing that we deserve nothing but judgment and condemnation, but trusting that Jesus Christ took all we deserved on the Cross. He bought us by his blood and we are his – nothing can snatch us from his hands. We can have confidence in prayer, we can have assurance of God’s love for us, we can know that our Father hear our requests – but only on the basis of Christ’s death for us and never on the basis of our own righteousness – remember that “on Christ the solid rock we stand, all else is sinking sand”.