Today's "My Utmost For His Highest" by Oswald Chambers has another very important message for those who wish to be truly successful! Success being defined as this: being WHERE God wants you to be, doing WHAT God wants you to do! THAT is the definition of TRUE success in the eyes of God! Let's see if we can put THIS into practice:
I will very gladly spend and be spent for you. — 2 Corinthians 12:15
When
the Spirit of God has shed abroad the love of God in our hearts, we begin
deliberately to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ’s interests in other
people, and Jesus Christ is interested in every kind of man there is. We have
no right in Christian work to be guided by our affinities; this is one of the
biggest tests of our relationship to Jesus Christ. The delight of sacrifice is
that I lay down my life for my Friend, not fling it away, but deliberately lay
my life out for Him and His interests in other people, not for a cause. Paul
spent himself for one purpose only – that he might win men to Jesus Christ.
Paul attracted to Jesus all the time, never to himself. “I am made all things
to all men, that I might by all means save some.” When a man says he must
develop a holy life alone with God, he is of no more use to his fellow men: he
puts himself on a pedestal, away from the common run of men. Paul became a
sacramental personality; wherever he went, Jesus Christ helped Himself to his
life. Many of us are after our own ends, and Jesus Christ cannot help Himself
to our lives. If we are abandoned to Jesus, we have no ends of our own to
serve. Paul said he knew how to be a “door-mat” without resenting it, because
the mainspring of his life was devotion to Jesus. We are apt to be devoted, not
to Jesus Christ, but to the things which emancipate us spiritually. That was
not Paul’s motive: “I could wish my self were accursed from Christ for my
brethren” – wild, extravagant – is it? When a man is in love it is not an
exaggeration to talk in that way, and Paul is in love with Jesus Christ.
AMEN! So many born again believers have taken up 'Christian' causes and have NOT made it their #1 priority to share the Gospel with the lost, which IS God's #1 priority! Luke 19:10:
10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost.
We SHOULD take up 'causes', at the direct leading of Holy Spirit, that will serve as another platform for getting the 'Good News' to those that we are assigned to reach. Jesus instructed us to do THIS in Luke 10:2:
And He said to them, The harvest indeed is abundant [there is much ripe grain], but the farmhands are few. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.
When WE obey this instruction and pray to the LORD to send laborers into the harvest, there will be times when He chooses to send us! To send YOU! THIS is the most important 'cause' that we can be involved with. God will use all good causes for the benefit of reaching the lost, and He will use any one of us who make ourselves available TO Him! Are YOU ready to make whatever adjustments are needed in YOUR life so that YOU can be ready when HE sends? Nothing pleases the LORD more than when WE care as much for reaching the lost as HE does! After all, this IS the way HE increases His FAMILY! Amen! Here is Hillsong United with "Tell The World":
Shalom in Him!
