DIVINE REASONINGS OF MIND - Oswald Chambers
It is a fruitful study to find out what the New Testament says about the mind. The Spirit of God comes through the different writers with one steady insistence to stir up our minds (e.g., Phil. II. 5, 2 Peter I. 12-13.) The only way Satan can get in as an ” angel of light ” is to those Christians whose hearts are right but whose minds are not stirred up. Our Lord in these verses deals with the mind, how I am to think and to reason about things. Unless we learn to think in obedience to the Holy Spirit s teaching, we will drift in our spiritual experience without any thinking at all. All the confusion arises when we try to think and to reason things out without the Spirit of God.
The Holy Spirit teaches us to fasten our thinking on God, then when we come to deal with property and money and everything to do with matters of earth, He reminds us that our real treasure is in heaven. Every effort to persuade myself that my treasure is in heaven is a sure sign that it is not. When my motive has been put right, it begins to put my thinking right.
Lay up for yourselves treasure in heaven,” i.e., have your banking account in heaven not on earth, lay up your confidence in God not in your common sense. It is the trial of your faith that makes you wealthy; and it works like this: every time you venture out on the life of faith you will come across something in your actual life which seems to contradict absolutely what your faith in God says you should believe. If you go through that trial of faith, laying up your confidence in God not in your common sense, you will gain so much wealth in your heavenly banking account, and the more you go through the trial of faith the wealthier you become in the heavenly regions, until you go through difficulties smilingly and men wonder where you have got your wealth of trust from.
It is a trial of faith all through. The conflict of the Christian is not a conflict with sin but with the natural life being turned into the spiritual life. The natural life is not sinful; the disposition that rules the natural life is sinful, and when God alters the disposition, we have to turn the natural life into the spiritual by a steady process of obeying God, and it takes spiritual concentration on God to do it. If you are going to succeed in anything in this world, you must concentrate on it, practice at it, and the same is true spiritually. There are many things you will find you cannot do if you are going to be concentrated on God, things that may be perfectly legitimate and right for others but not right for you if you are going to con centrate on God. Never let your narrowness of conscience condemn the other man. Maintain the personal relationship, see that you are concentrated on God for yourself, not concentrated on your convictions or your point of view, but on God. Whenever you are in doubt about a thing, push it to its logical conclusion Is this the kind of thing that Jesus Christ is after or the kind of thing Satan is after? Immediately your decision is made, act on it.
een put right by the Holy Spirit. A single eye is essential to correct understanding. One idea runs all through Our Lord’s teaching right with God, first, second and third. If I am born again of the Holy Ghost, I do not persuade myself I am right with God, I am right with Him because I have been put right by the Holy Spirit. Then if I walk in the light as God is in the light, that keeps my eye single, and slowly and surely all my actions begin to be put into the right relationship, and everything becomes full of harmony and simplicity and peace.
No one has a single motive unless he has been born from above, we have single ambitions but not a single motive. Jesus is the only One who had a single motive, and when His Spirit comes into me the first thing, He does it to make me a man with a single motive, a single eye to the glory of God. The one motive of Jesus is to turn men into sons of God, and the one motive of a disciple is to glorify Jesus.
If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! Darkness is my point of view, my right to myself; light is God s point of view. Jesus taught clearly the line of demarcation between light and darkness; the danger is that these divisions get blurred. Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil, said Jesus.
Jesus says we cannot serve God and mammon. A man of the world disbelieves that, he says with a little subtlety and wisdom and compromise (it is called diplomacy or tact), we can serve both. The devil s temptation to Our Lord to compromise, to fall down and worship him, is repeated over and over again in Christian experience. I have to realize that a division as high as heaven and as deep as hell must be made between the Christian and the world. Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” What is mammon? The system of civilized life which organizes itself without any consideration of God.
This doctrine of detachment is a fundamental theme of Our Lord s, it runs all through His teaching. You cannot be good and bad at the same time; you cannot serve God and make your own out of the service; you cannot make “honesty is the best policy” a motive, because immediately you do you cease to be honest. The riddling the Spirit of God puts a man through is the sternest on earth Why are you a student for the ministry, a missionary, a preacher of the Gospel? There is one consideration only I have to stand right with God, to see that that relationship is the one thing that is never dimmed, and all other things will right themselves. Immediately that relationship is lost sight of, multitudes of motives begin to work, and you get worn out. Never compromise with the spirit of mammon. When you get right with God, you become what is contemptible in the eyes of the world. Put into practice any of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount and you will be treated with amusement at first, then if you persist, the world gets annoyed and detests you. What will happen, for instance, if you carry out Jesus Christ s teaching in business? Not quite so much success as you bargained for. This is not the age of the glorification of the saints, but the age of their humiliation. Are you prepared to follow Jesus outside the camp, the special camp you belong to?
Ye cannot serve God and mammon.” Stand absolutely true to God s line of things. Thank God for everyone who has learned that the dearest friend on earth is a mere shadow compared to Jesus, it is dominant personal passionate devotion to Him, and only in Him are all other relationships in life right, (cf. Luke XIV. 26.) This is not ordinary integrity, it is supernormal integrity, a likeness to your Father in heaven. In the beginning of your spiritual life, make allowances for the swing of the pendulum.
It is not by accident, but by the set purpose of God, that in the reaction we go to the opposite extreme of all we were before. God breaks us from the old life violently, not gradually, and only brings us back into the domain of men when we are right with Him so that we are ” in the world ” but not ” of it.” When we are matured in godliness then God trusts us, and trusts His own honor to us, by placing us where the world, the flesh and the devil may try us, knowing that ” greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.
