Mini Sermonette Lite

God will get serious with keeping His Promises and delivering us when we get serious in seeking Him, repenting, and obeying.  

“13And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.  14And I will be found of you, saith the LORD...” (Jeremiah 29)

As I have long written in many of my books, “Why should God deliver us from what we are willing to tolerate?”  The majority of “Christians” are in delusion and prefer not to know when the tsunami hits them.  This is not what God has commanded us to do.  Christ commanded, “Occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13).  Not “blend in” and “be friends with the world”.  Scripture commands us, “have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove [rebuke] them” (Ephesians 5:11).

Just this morning in my morning reading God declares in Isaiah 37:4: “...lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left”.  After that, in an impossible situation, God sent an angel of the Lord and destroyed 185,000 of the Assyrian army that was laying siege to Jerusalem, and then had the king of Assyria assassinated by his own two sons!  God controls the heart of the king and turneth it like a river whithersoever He will (Proverbs 21:1)—and He controls the hearts of the kings sons too!  

“And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and He doeth according to His Will in the army of Heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay His Hand, or say [authoritatively] unto Him, ‘What doest Thou?’” (Daniel 4:35)

“For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His Good Pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13)

God is Master of His Universe.  He has planned and controls all.  The world is not on autopilot!  God is not passive.  God’s people need to lay hold of the Covenant and not let go until delivered!

This deliverance came when Hezekiah and the elders prayed and sought the Lord... and not merely during the half-time of the Superbowl... they gave up all such heathenism and truly sought God realizing what civilization and life and death actually meant, not being drugged up with the narcotics of hedonism and denial (like the majority of “Christians” today who, if they are even Christ’s sheep, are AWOL and wallowing in chosen ignorance and befriending evil, holding hands with it, or at best, merely turning a blind eye to it—Christ would not do so, so how can such people be His followers if they are ashamed of what He would do and what He stood for?).

If you deny the problem you cannot discover any solution, only another dead-end avenue of deluded fantasy.
Read Nehemiah’s prayer in chapter 1 of his book:

“4And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of Heaven,

5And said, ‘I beseech thee, O LORD God of Heaven, the Great and Terrible God, Who keepeth Covenant and Mercy for them that love Him and observe His Commandments:

6Let Thine Ear now be attentive, and Thine Eyes open, that Thou mayest hear the prayer of Thy servant, which I pray before Thee now, day and night, for the children of Israel Thy servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against Thee: both I and my father’s house have sinned.

7We have dealt very corruptly against Thee, and have not kept the Commandments, nor the Statutes, nor the Judgments, which Thou commandedst Thy servant Moses.

8Remember, I beseech Thee, the Word that Thou commandedst Thy servant Moses, saying,

“If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among the nations:

9But if ye turn unto Me, and keep My Commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set My Name there.”

10Now these are Thy servants and Thy people, whom Thou hast redeemed by Thy Great Power, and by Thy Strong Hand.

11O Lord, I beseech thee, let now Thine Ear be attentive to the prayer of Thy servant, and to the prayer of Thy servants, who desire to fear Thy Name: and prosper, I pray Thee, Thy servant this day, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.  For I was the king’s cupbearer.”

William Law (1686-1761), English cleric, divine, theologian, and author, in his, The Power of the Spirit,* wrote some very terse, but true words, in regard to the righteousness and obedience of professing believers:

[* —originally titled: An Affectionate Address to the Clergy (1761); which Andrew Murray reprinted under the present title (1896), which was subsequently edited and reprinted by Dave Hunt (1971).]

“[The average Christian possesses] ... blind believism which imagines faith to consist of a mere idea rightly affirmed with the lips, but knows nothing of a real faith that possesses within the heart.  So men imagine that to believe in Jesus Christ is something that can be done apart from obeying Him, because they do not know Him as the Lord who reigns and lives within.  As well imagine that a command is only to be believed but not obeyed, or that a tree is not known by its fruit.  ‘I will show you my faith by my works,’ said the apostle; and if this is the only way faith can be shown, then any faith which is not thus one with its works is no faith at all.

“James said, ‘As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’  Most pointedly this Scripture makes clear that devoutness and piety do not consist in a mere right understanding of these things that a man may profess without the fruits thereof, for works cannot be separated from its faith, or James could show his faith alone without its works.  He only is the devout man who lives no longer to his own will or the way and spirit of the world, but to the will of God alone.  He who considers God in everything, serves God in everything, who makes every moment of his daily life a real part of God’s will on earth by doing everything in the name of Christ; he alone can be called the pious man.  For if a man say he has faith, but does not evidence a life that produces the works of God, James tells us most emphatically that ‘faith alone’ cannot save him.* (pp. 180-181.)

[* ie. such a fruitless faith is counterfeit; not real (false life). R.A.B.]

“....So it is that for lack of this basic intention to surrender all to Christ, the church today is an open fraud of mere lip profession to that faith and divine love that once burned as a fire from heaven in those who ‘turned the world upside down.’  

“If you will but stop to ask yourself why your brand of Christianity is hardly recognizable as related to that which primitive Christians knew, your own heart will tell you that it is primarily because you never thoroughly intended to live as they lived and to die as they died.  You sing of your devotion to the same Lord, and profess to believe the same New Testament doctrines as the early disciples.  You have the same promises from the Lord of the fulness of the Spirit, the divine nature, and all that pertains to life and godliness.  You would never hope to get to heaven through a faith any different than theirs, but you have believed Satan’s lie that it is possible to have the same faith as the first Christians without manifesting the same works as they.  And if you are honest you will admit that this lie has been gladly received because you have not really had the heart intention to walk as Jesus walked.*  Did you but have this intention to please God in all your actions, as being the happiest and best choice for life in this world, you would then find yourself as unwilling to deny Christ with your life as you are now unwilling to deny Him with your lips.  And would you but add to this intention a simple faith in the promises of God in Christ, you would find yourself living in the same denial of self and as contrary to the world as fishermen apostles did in their day.” (pp.,182-183.)

[* Wow.  Amen!  So many professed believers today are like the rich young ruler who went away sad, not wanting to sacrifice what he deemed more important in life, in order to truly follow Christ.  R.A.B.]

“....the question is not whether gospel perfection can be fully attained, but whether you come as near it as a sincere intention and careful diligence can carry you through faith in Christ. .... Can you really call yourself a follower of Christ without at least  intending to follow Him all the way? .... Can a man who has this saving faith then fail to manifest those works which the Scripture so plainly tells us are the direct consequence of the new creation? .... that man who does not so much as intend to manifest in all his ways these works which God has ordained for him has denied the very faith which he otherwise professes. .... Works without faith is the dead and unacceptable offering of the sinful flesh; and faith without works is a fraud, a false profession of that which is dead because it does not have the life of God in it; and this is proven by the lack of fruit of the Spirit.  God holds out to our faith the blessing and power of the Holy Spirit as our all in all, filling us with the life of Christ, causing us to overflow with rivers of living water.” (pp.186,188,189)