Friday, February 1, 2008

Loving Surrender

The goal of His love and out work of His love constantly and gently moves us in the direction of yielding to the Father (the Father's will expressed). It's a spiritual reality. The desire deepening for His will to be expressed in our lives, for those around us, is the result of His love restoring our hearts and gaining a deepened expression. It's not something we are working to make happen. Instead the exchange is taking place within us because His love has captured us, trust is growing, and we are beholding our Father in a way where His love has settled within us and dispelled our fears. Loving surrender!

The law of liberty in Christ Jesus has set us free! Freeing us in surrender, moving us forward into restoration and what the Father has for us. Our confidence grows in the victory that He has already won! It's no longer what God can do, but what God has already done! It's all about Christ and Oswald said something very interesting this morning:

We are nowhere commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification; we are commissioned to lift up Jesus Christ (John 12:32). It is a travesty to say that Jesus Christ travailed in Redemption to make me a saint. Jesus Christ travailed in Redemption to redeem the whole world, and place it unimpaired and rehabilitated before the throne of God. The fact that Redemption can be experienced by us is an illustration of the power of the reality of Redemption, but that is not the end of Redemption. If God were human, how sick to the heart and weary He would be of the constant requests we make for our salvation, for our sanctification. We tax His energies from morning till night for things for ourselves - some thing for me to be delivered from! When we touch the bedrock of the reality of the Gospel of God, we shall never bother God any further with little personal plaints.

The one passion of Paul's life was to proclaim the Gospel of God. He welcomed heart-breaks, disillusionments, tribulation, for one reason only, because these things kept him in unmoved devotion to the Gospel of God.



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