Oswald’s Insight
So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:36 NASB
Free – A favorite verse of those who desire unfettered living, pastors are quick to point out that “free” doesn’t mean “no obligations.” In the Roman world, free would indeed entail the right to do as I please, but that leads to chaos even in the “under grace” theology, so we take pains to show that what Yeshua meant is “free from the guilt of sin,” not “permitted to do whatever you want.” This is not a new insight. Oswald Chambers understood it very well when he penned the devotional for November 18th over one hundred years ago. It’s worth quoting some of his words.
“We are designed with a great capacity for God; and sin and our individuality are the things that keep us from getting at God. God delivers us from sin: we have to deliver ourselves from individuality, i.e., to present our natural life to God and sacrifice it until it is transformed into a life of spiritual obedience.” [1]
“God will not discipline us, we must discipline ourselves. God will not bring every thought and imagination into captivity; we have to do it. Do not say—O Lord, I suffer from wandering thoughts. Don’t suffer from wandering thoughts. Stop listening to the tyranny of your individuality . . .”[2]
What does it mean, “to be free?” If we listen to Chambers, freedom means death to the self. Freedom is anything but license. It is sacrifice. No Roman would accept such an idea, and perhaps we are still a bit Roman when we heard those wonderful words, “You are free indeed.” But Chambers shortens the leash we are so anxious to escape. We are not free in any Roman sense at all. We are free to purposefully destroy the yetzer ha-ra’s desire for its version of freedom. We are free to obey.
Chambers is absolutely right. God isn’t going to do this for us. He takes care of the guilt issue so that we can take care of the obedience issue. But He deliberately leaves it up to us. Biblical obedience is not compulsion. It was never so. Anyone in the Kingdom who believes that obedience comes through compulsion is living in the Roman world. Obedience comes through heartfelt devotion—the deep desire to love the Lover of my soul. God could force me to follow in His way, but He does not—and He will not, for that would amount to overriding His purpose for creating me in the first place. Even in my disobedience and rebellion, God allows me to be free to choose. That I choose another form of slavery is only the consequence of being capable of choice.
God lets me be. It’s up to me to be as He desires. Obedience is discipline and discipline is a self-taught art.
Topical Index: free, discipline, John 8:36, Oswald Chambers
[1] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 18th.
[2] Ibid.
His Part and Ours
“God isn’t going to do this for us.” -No, He has already done this for us. Our part is to believe: Calvary is a “done deal.” We must remember three of the absolute most excellent words ever spoken or penned: (Yes, it is written!) – “It is finished.” I love these words!
My life, my hope, my future, my desires- everything I need (which is quite a list btw..) is found in the final words, the Last Words of a dying Man: “it is finished!”
Oh, how we need to establish and fix our hearts and minds upon the finished (final, full) work of the Christ of Calvary. Everything (everything) we need (all of our needs) are found (delightfully discovered!) *in Him. The Messiah has not only come, but also “conquered.” Death, Sin and the Grave- “vanquished!” And friend, -to the Victor belong the spoils! Amen.
And as for us? Let us give unto the LORD (our LORD and Master) the glory that is due His Name. I (personally) believe, -this is the “purpose” of eternity!! Why? Because the half has not yet been told.. Oh, -the majesty and mercies of The Messiah!
Each of us (yes, -human creatures) has a “story” to share.. A story of redemption and of reconciliation. My name is Carl and I once was a sinner, but now I am a son. My Father has forgiven me. He has given unto me His own royal robe of righteousness to cover my sin and shame. He has placed upon my hand His own signet ring, a sign of the authority I have been given. I may now pray. I may now “draw near.” Unto me (and unto you) “permission” has been granted, -or given, to “enter in.” The veil of the Temple has been torn in two, from top to the bottom. Why? Because “access” has now been given unto “we the people!” God and sinners have now been (through the shed blood of the Perfect Pascal Lamb)- “reconciled!” – Hallelujah! What a Savior!
~ Rejoice in the LORD, (when?) – ALWAYS!! ~
Rejoice, the Lord is King!
Your Lord and King adore;
mortals, give thanks and sing,
and triumph evermore.
Lift up your heart,
lift up your voice; rejoice;
-again I say, rejoice.
Jesus the Savior reigns,
IncarnateTruth and Love;
when He had purged our stains,
He took His seat Above.
Lift up your heart,
lift up your voice; rejoice,
– again I say, rejoice.
His kingdom cannot fail;
He rules o’er Earth and Heaven;
The keys of earth and hell
are to our Jesus given.
Lift up your heart,
lift up your voice; rejoice,
-again I say, rejoice.
Rejoice in glorious hope!
Jesus the Judge shall come,
and take his servants up
to their eternal home.
We soon shall hear
th’archangel’s voice;
the trump of God shall sound, – Rejoice!
~ Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the Presence of His glory blameless with great joy, -to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our LORD, be glory-majesty-dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. ~
I have struggled through the years trying to rightly divide the difference between white-knuckle righteousness vs . the freedom to obey.
When I set out to do right ‘my way’ i.e. on my own steam, I got beat up and creamed. It never worked. My efforts never seemed to produce the peaceable fruits of actual righteousness. I was a joke. If it were not for the mercy of the Lord, I would have been consumed, I’m sure. His purposes shadowed my life and His long arm got Him the victory in spite of me! Praise His Holy Name!
It is the Truth that sets us free. Free from what? Free FROM sin. So what is sin? All sin results from believing some sort of lie. It is falsehood that enslaves me. False core beliefs buried deep in my heart, so deep my head cannot even detect their existence. What I believe saves me, in a very real sense. Right here, right now. But it is also what enslaves me; drives my thought patterns and my behavior. What are all beliefs based on? Well, looking at all mine that I have identified, it seems beliefs are about love. What I understand love to be. This has been a shocking revelation. I don’t have beliefs about abstracts! For the longest time I was not catching this because I had been taught that beliefs were the things that you set up in your HEAD, so when I went and looked in my head, yep, I was still agreeing with statements ABOUT truth. I did not know where to even go looking for my heart: did not know how to look in my heart, did not know my heart even existed to the extent I was burying all the evidence of my heart (my emotions). I had to go do a lot of work to even GET to my emotions! But that is another story.
My heart only and ever looks for one thing; only one thing is it designed to recognize: love. To the extent that I am believing (knowing in my heart) the truth about love is the extent that my mind and actions are going to be lining up with love. To the extent that I am believing garbage about love is the extent that I am going to continue with crazy, insane thought patterns and behavior. That simple.
I THOUGHT I ‘believed’ correctly; that I had carefully chosen to agree with all the things I was taught to believe to be ‘saved’. I still agree with all those important THINGS that I was taught. But my heart was understanding some horrible things about love! The proof was in the crazy thinking and actions that were not effective. They say where there is smoke there is fire. I could see the insanity in my life, even though I thought I was BELIEVING all the ‘right’ things. I finally ended up in a twelve-step program that showed me systematically HOW to go examine what was in my heart as the engine that was driving me off my cliff. When I set out to line up with all those Steps, Traditions and Concepts with where I was at IN MY HEART, not just agreeing with whatever in my HEAD, I was genuinely shocked. I was not doing well in actually RELATING with God, myself and others, according to the outline, even though I THOUGHT I was!
You know, we set out in life assuming that we ‘know’ what love is; why, that surely is so obvious, right? But the truth is that we are not necessarily born knowing what love is. To the extent that our parents are walking in righteousness, they can transmit that understanding through EXPERIENCE to us, but who got that perfectly? Love is not something that can be understood through the head. The head can agree with the sense of it, but we only know with our hearts what we have actually experienced. That is scary. My belief systems in my heart are set from my experience. Now, can I affect what I believe? Sure. I can override those beliefs with my choices at any time. But unless I am convinced in my heart that they are TRUE (i,e. line up with my EXPERIENCE with love), I will not in fact be convincing my heart to change what it believes. If what I have experienced about love is rotten, the resulting beliefs in my heart are going to prevent me from resonating with any outside revelation about love. Truth is going to feel foreign. It is going to hit me and bounce off. My head can agree with it all day long, but it won’t be getting down into my belly, where living waters are supposed to be. And I will continue to struggle with a dissonance between what I know in my head to be true, and what I actually end up doing about it. And I will still wonder why it seems so easy for others, but so hard for me. Obedience can only be a delight when there is no interference between what I know in my heart to be true, what my thoughts are about how to choose what to do about what I believe, and what I actually end up DOING about it. It can be impossible if I am believing something horrible in my heart. My hand will not move, because my head is going to freeze in that place. Faith cannot operate unless the heart is confident.
To change what is in my heart, I have to be willing to take a chance with love. I have to become willing to let God DO something with that rotten heart. All false beliefs mess with the trust factor. They damage my ability to give and receive love, which is a trust issue. And the #1 trust problem begins with me being able to trust Him. Why? It seems we must be hard-wired to transmute our experience with our earthly father, and other authority figures, directly onto what our heart ends up believing about our Heavenly One. That means some of us must have gotten a truly rotten deal. It is so scary to attempt to trust God when we have experienced such horror to set our hearts in the first place. But, I wonder if it may not even be harder for those of us who got it almost right? Who had such good experiences, that rub along so comfortably with the truth that we never actually get around to examining the paradigm we started out with, because if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
But all of us have to go get a love experience with YHVH. Directly. The trust factor has to get re-set by Him before it is going to spawn correct beliefs that are going to drive clear thinking and choices that will result in good actions that actually line up with reality. All of us have to start over. And who knows if the most desperate of us don’t have it easier? When I can clearly see that 100% of my heart has to have been built on junk, it can make it easier to throw it into the dump and strike a match. The heart of man is desperately wicked. We are afraid of ourselves, God and others to the extent that we are messed up, but we have been given an easy solution: death! Hurray! The turning point for me was when I got told not to think of it as giving up, but as giving IN. That can only happen if there is Someone at the other end. But there is! Now all that is left is a good burning! Sleuthing and throwing away junky belief systems in my HEART (not just in my head!) can be fun! Truth about love DOES set me free! Halleluah! Anybody up for a Bonfire of the Vanities? Don’t forget the marshmallows and hot chocolate!
Here is a list of some false beliefs that I have found useful, and still do (and I apologize if I may be repeating myself):
“I am imperfect; there is something wrong with me.” solution: i need to try to ‘prove’ there is not something wrong with me by trying to be perfect.
“I am worthless: I have no value.” solution: I must ‘prove’ I am not worthless (fill in the blank – performing for love, making lots of money, doing good deeds, etc.)
“I am not able to do: I am incompetent.” solution: I need to ‘prove’ I can do by achieving and over-doing.
“I am inadequate.” solution: I most ‘prove’ adequacy.
“I am non-existent: I do not exist.” solution: I must ‘prove’ my existence.
“I am incomplete.” solution: I must ‘complete’ myself through a multiplicity of experiences.
“I am powerless.” solution: I must ‘prove’ how powerful I am.
“I am loveless.” solution: I must ‘prove’ I am not loveless by how lovable and loving I am.
“I am alone.” solution: I must try and be ‘connected’ at all times.
The homework is to detect the lie. To the extent you are not believing the truth, you will not be able to detect the lie in the above. Try it! If you are believing enough junk, you will not be able to see the lie at all. The above will look perfectly all right to you: you will find yourself agreeing with all of it, both the beliefs and their solutions. The first time I found this list and attempted to honestly examine myself against it, I flunked the whole thing. I was a mess.
The key is to go be honest about the actions you see in your life, and about what is driving them. Be careful: the devil comes so often as an angel of light, and we get sold all the junk in the name of love, but it will be based on a lie. We can go into sin doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. I know I was!
P.S. Here is a cheat sheet: ask yourself if any of the above is anything that a SHEEP would even be conceiving of, much less thinking that it must do….
Extra Credit: substitute instead what a sheep SHOULD be thinking, and therefore doing; what it should be letting the Shepherd think in His Mind about us, and doing FOR us. Righteousness is not something I invent OR produce. Righteousness is something I agree with, and gets done THROUGH me. The starting points are what end up being the critical points. What is driving my deal? Am I working to live, or living so that I can work? The first (working to live) only produces chaos, as Skip points out. The other (living so that I can work) is the correct order. Life is the STARTING point (which is why believing that salvation is something that can wait until I die is not going to actually get me to the saving point!), not a RESULT (which is why I am never going to be able to work my way to heaven!). (Gotta hate those dialectics!) My tank has to be already full. Now. If it is not; if I am working from a deficit, then I am vulnerable to everything that comes along and promises me a little impetus, a little energy, a little ‘help’ (to do right with, of course!). I am only safe from sin (energy to do ‘right’ from the wrong sources) if I am working from a full tank. If it is not full, I need to stay put until the Shepherd comes! And “baaaaa” with all my might until He does! (Hey, here is where those emotions can be so useful: they let me know when I am not actually operating from a point of power, love, or a sound mind. Need those heart barometers!)
Order is critical for righteousness. Choosing to get myself out of that wrong order, by choosing to believe something different about myself, God and others when it comes to love, and choosing to put my Shepherd in that place instead, by choosing to believe what He has to say about Himself, me and others when it comes to love, is the difference between killing myself slowly, and living. What I am believing is what establishes that order. What I believe IS what saves me from that chaos. Salvation IS for today! Halleluah!
“The starting points are what end up being the critical points. What is driving my deal?”
Hey Laurita, that’s a pretty profound statement. Here’s the way I found out about it.
I was looking at Gen. 1 and the building of the tabernacle in Exodus in regards to orders and patterns, and quite inadvertently I noticed that one of the commonalities between the two (along with any number of others) was the “processes” involved resulted in God being able to reside here on the earth with us. In Genesis it was that God walked with Adam in the cool of the evening and the result of the tabernacle was also that God’s presence would reside in the middle of His people as well. That may seem like a “well duh!!” but when you see what is happening at the tower of babel it becomes pretty profound. (at least it did for me 🙂 ) While there are actually a lot of similarities, (labor, order, etc.) what struck me most was the difference in direction. While the babel (ites) 🙂 were busy trying to get to heaven, God seems to want us to build a place for Him to come down. No wonder He broke it up so fast. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with that saying, “ever body wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die”. The dyin’ part will be taken care of when we stop trying to get too heaven and get busy building a pure house for God to dwell amongst us.
Why do we do what we do, What drives us and which way are we building? I for one would hate to go to heaven only to find out that God had moved to earth to be with His people. Talk about wasted effort!
Thank you for your posts sister, they’re always uplifting and clear. His peace to you always.
YHWH bless you and keep you………
Hey, Robert, I like that, too. It has struck me that sin can sneak a march on us and snare us by tempting us to pursue right the wrong way. Or pursue a ‘different’, or a ‘better’ right. We are hardwired for love, no doubt. We are incessantly looking for it. I believe that yearning for love is the driving force behind the yetzer ha-ra. What matters is what we do about it. Are we going to build after the pattern in the heavens; are we going to follow and obey and copy, which I believe is what transforms that motivation into the yetzer tov, or are we going to “seek out many inventions”? It is going to depend if we build our faith, our beliefs about love, and in love, on the Rock of Truth, or if we are going to listen to a different ‘gospel’, and light strange fire with sparks of our own kindling. It is telling to me that the word “wicked” has to do with shooting toward the mark (love), but missing it. If we build in the wrong way, or not according to the Pattern Who came to show us how love actually works, we are going to miss the mark.
I am convinced that there are only two responses possible to the drive for love, and they will all be built upon only two foundations: either the sand of fear, created by listening to lies (accusations against God, ourselves or others), or on the Rock of faith, which rises in our hearts when we are standing on what is actually true about love.
The Law is indispensable because is helps us, or guides us, with a picture of how love looks in operation.
I think the Babelites (love it!) missed the mark because they had the wrong motivation. They were afraid. Fear, driven by false beliefs, caused them to apply faulty solutions. They were afraid because, when they looked around and found themselves alone – without God – they did the wrong thing about it. They didn’t act like sheep and holler for the Shepherd; instead they listened to a snaky voice from that Other Kingdom which told them that they could have a myth called Their Own Way. In reality, they just got used. They were being set up for total rebellion, which could have resulted in total annihilation. Instead, their party got broken up. It was mercy, for sure….
This is so simple. Makes me wonder why the contortion and twisting of this beautiful simplicity to promote the idea that God’s law is somehow diametrically opposed to God’s grace.
I have trouble understanding these petitions according to this TW: Do not let me wander from Thy commandments, Remove the false way from me, Make me walk in the path of Thy commandments, Incline my heart to Thy testimonies, Establish my footsteps in Thy word, and do not let any iniquity have dominion over me. I also wonder how this makes sense with the time when God will put His law within the house of Israel. Jer 31
God will put the Law into hearts when the renewed Kingdom comes, that is, in the millennia reign. Until then, we work. As for the other verses you cited, notice that these are pleas. They do not set aside the need for action. They only ask God to assist. Remember what the rabbis said about the man who decides to live with purity?
I’m not sure how I got to this date of December 18, 2014 but this is an incredible today’s word and I really needed it today.
Your feedback on Oswald Chambers writing from November 18 is incredibly helpful in where I’m at right now in my walk with the Lord. Earlier today I was telling a friend that fear is something we will always have to deal with. I was talking about how God reminds us to “fear not”; “ don’t let your hearts be troubled” and so on and so on. God wasn’t assuming responsibility for our responsibility to him. He frees us to choose. I think it speaks about growing up in God, not always finding excuses or reasons to do what we do, but taking part of the promises, the exceeding great and precious promises that by these we might live godly lives. Accessing the ability to live godly lives through the promises of God. I don’t feel content in how I’m saying it but it will have to do. Although it’s difficult, I appreciate so much hearing from God in a firm voice. It speaks to me about care and protection. All those things I didn’t have growing up and wasn’t able to do myself until the last few years. God is actually relentless toward us. So look, I had to go all the way back to 2014 to get what I needed for today. I needed to hear this, today. Thank you God.
“ stop listening to the tyranny of your individuality!”.