Our God given Purpose - Oswald Chambers
” …that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.” Eph 1:12
“The joy of anything… is to fulfill its created purpose: ‘that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.’ (Eph 1:12)
We are not here to win souls, to do good to others. That is the natural outcome, but it is not our aim, and this is where so many of us cease to be followers. We will follow God as long as He makes us a blessing to others, but when He does not, we will not follow.
Suppose our Lord had measured His life by whether or not He was a blessing to others. Why, He was a ‘stone of stumbling’ to thousands, actually to His own neighbors, to His own nation… and in His own country ‘He did not many mighty works there because of their unbelief’ (Matt. 13:58).
If our Lord had measured His life by its actual results, He would have been full of misery. We get switched off when instead of following God we follow Christian work and workers. We are much more concerned over the passion for souls than the passion for Christ….
The passion for souls in not a New Testament idea at all, but religious commercialization. When we are taken up with this passion, the joy of the Lord is never ours but only an excitable joy which always leaves a snare behind.
The habit of enjoying the disagreeable
That the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.” 2 Cor. 4:10
“…It is not a question of being saved from hell, but of being saved in order to manifest the life of the Son of God in our mortal flesh, and it is the disagreeable things which make us exhibit whether or not we are manifesting His life. Do I manifest the essential sweetness of the Son of God, or the essential irritation of ‘myself’ apart from Him?
The only thing that will enable me to enjoy the disagreeable is the keen enthusiasm of letting the life of the Son of God manifest itself in me. No matter how disagreeable a thing may be, say ‘Lord, I am delighted to obey Thee in this matter,’ and instantly the Son of God will press to the front, and there will be manifested in my human life that which glorifies Jesus.
“There must be no debate. The moment you obey the light, the Son of God presses through you in that particular; but if you debate you grieve the Spirit of God. You must keep yourself [spiritually] fit to let the life of the Son of God be manifested, and you cannot keep yourself fit if you give way to self-pity. Our circumstances are the means of manifesting how wonderfully perfect and extraordinarily pure the Son of God is. The thing that ought to make the heart beat is a new way of manifesting the Son of God. It is one thing to choose the disagreeable, and another thing to go into the disagreeable by God’s engineering. If God puts you there, He is amply sufficient.
