October 7 2018
"The men took of their provision, and asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord." ....Joshua 9:14
Sin before God as a Christian is of two kinds. One is the sin of refusing to obey Him when He issues orders, the other is the sin of going ahead of Him when He has issued no such orders. The first is rebellion, not doing what the Lord has commanded. The other is the sin of presumption, doing that which He has not commanded. How much of our work for Him has been based on a clear command of the Lord? and how much simply on the ground that it felt like a good thing to do at the time? We think that if only our conscience does not forbid a thing, or if it commends itself to us as positively good, that is reason enough to go ahead and do it. But, brothers and sisters, do you not agree that any servant should await his Master's orders before setting out to serve him?
In times past, God led His people by His written word on tablets of stone, but God now issues His commands to us directly by His living word in our heart and not from our self-focussed feeling or the self-conceived thought of our head! We have the Life of the risen Jesus in our hearts and it is from Him there that we are to receive our orders. Our mind and our feelings are to express and to magnify the life of Christ in us, not our own independent life apart from Him.
Today, what we personally feel or personally think has nothing necessarily whatsoever to do with God's truth or God's way. Our personal self-life holds no guarantees of ever being right in just about everything! These I mean to be the personal self-thoughts, and the personal self-feelings that we generate without any consideration of Jesus. They are our thoughts and feelings, not His! We have within us the spontaneous leading of God's Holy Spirit, so let us walk after the spirit as we are led by Him there as to what to do or what not to do. Let us seek counsel from the Spirit of the Lord and pay attention to our blood cleansed conscience and intuition.
