Voice of a Prophet: Consider Your Personal Ambitions
Voice of a Prophet
Consider Your Personal Ambitions
What about our ambition and our fleshly enjoyment?
How do we rationalize our ambition and appease ourselves and give God second place?
When it comes to a choice between God and marriage, who wins?
God, or the young lady?
God, or the young man?
When it comes to a choice between God and our friends, and especially when it comes to a choice between God and self, who wins?
I believe this is why evangelical churches are staggering on, because we will not give God the place that is His by right of who He is and who we are.
Whenever human will enters in, this monstrous inversion is found.
Out in the world of nature, up among the stars, everything is all right because they have no will. As soon as we get where God wants us, we have trouble.
There’s no trouble among the angels, because they are not fallen; but among fallen men and devils and many other creatures who have moral perception, there is always this monstrous inversion.
God always gets second place or third place or tenth place, while other things are put above Him.
And yet, at the same time, these persons, who put God below them, may be extremely religious.
There will be no inward peace until God is exalted over us and we are abased.
We can read all the books in the world and we can read the Scriptures through once a year and sing our way through the hymnal, but when it is all over, we will never find peace or victory until God is given the place in our hearts that He has in the universe.
This truth runs through all the teachings of Jesus Christ our Lord.
“If any man would come after me, let him take up his cross and follow me”
(Matt. 16:24).
Unfortunately, we have made taking up the cross to be a very poetic thing.
Taking up the cross meant that we would stop making plans.
The man who took up the cross in the old Roman days did not have any plans. Someone else made his plans for him.
Someone came to an old man of God and asked, “You teach the deeper life, the life lost in God. Tell me, what does it mean to be crucified with Christ?”
The old man scratched his head a little, gathered his thoughts and then said,
“The crucified man only faces one direction. He is not facing all around, but only facing one direction.
The second thing about a crucified man, he has no plans of his own; somebody else is making all his plans for him.”
These are the days of projects and enterprises and ambitions from little fellows who have not stayed in Jerusalem long enough to be endued with power.
They go out in the power of educated flesh and put on a project, and then ask God to bless their project.
They even will pray all right.
They will send out a mailing list to enlist people to pray such and such an hour for their project.
It is their project nevertheless.
They have not died yet!
They are making their plans.
My brother, when you go to a cross, you do not make your own plans.
Somebody else is making those plans for you.
So when God makes your plans, and you forsake all, even house and land and family, you have to forgo all of this and put God first.
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