I found today's "My Utmost For His Highest" by Oswald Chambers to be a very good take on taking care of our soul (mind, emotions and will) so that we can make wise choices, every day!
Do You Walk
In White?
Buried with
Him…that…even so we also should walk in newness of life. — Romans 6:4
No one
enters into the experience of entire sanctification without going through a
“white funeral”* — the burial of the old life. If there has never been this
crisis of death, sanctification is nothing more than a vision. There must be a
“white funeral,” a death that has only one resurrection — a resurrection into
the life of Jesus Christ. Nothing can upset such a life; it is one with God for
one purpose, to be a witness to Him.
Have you
come to your last days really? You have come to them often in sentiment, but
have you come to them really?You cannot go to your funeral in excitement,
or die in excitement. Death means you stop being. Do you agree with God that
you stop being the striving, earnest kind of Christian you have been? We skirt
the cemetery and all the time refuse to go to death. It is not striving to go
to death, it is dying — “baptized into His death.”
Have you had
your “white funeral,” or are you sacredly playing the fool with your soul? Is
there a place in your life marked as the last day, a place to which the memory
goes back with a chastened and extraordinarily grateful remembrance — “Yes, it
was then, at that ‘white funeral,’ that I made an agreement with God”?
“This is the
will of God, even your sanctification.” When you realize what the will of God
is, you will enter into sanctification as naturally as can be. Are you willing
to go through that “white funeral” now? Do you agree with Him that this is your
last day on earth? The moment of agreement depends upon you.
* “white
funeral”: phrase from Tennyson’s poem “To H.R.H. Princess Beatrice”; to
Chambers, it meant a passage from one stage of life to another; leaving the past
behind and moving into the future; he often used it to mean death to self and a
complete surrender to God.
We ARE spirit beings, who have souls (mind, emotions and will) and live in physical bodies while here on earth. When we received JESUS as LORD and personal SAVIOR, our spirits, which were dead because of sin, were instantly made new, in the image of Almighty God! When we rise to meet JESUS in the air, at the Catching Away of the Church, our bodies will be changed instantly into a body such as JESUS now has in Heaven! In the meantime, in the NOW, we are to renew our minds DAILY so that we can think God's thoughts after Him! The above devotion addresses that! We MUST protect the words of our mouths, because we WILL have what WE speak! It doesn't do anyone any good to ask someone else to speak into your life, because only YOU have authority over your life. We WILL speak what we have been thinking about! SO, we must control what goes into our eyes and ears in order to control what we think about, because what we think about the most IS what we will eventually speak! I hope that you see by now that EVERYTHING that JESUS instructs us to do is extremely vital in order to walk in the abundance of LIFE that HE intends! John 10:10:
10 The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows).
That is HIS desire! Make it yours, too, and then DO the things He says to do so HE can confirm His Word in our lives! AMEN! Here is Hillsong with "Your Word":
Shalom in Him!
