Stop spiritualising,
take it as it is.
"By His stripes you are healed"
For several months the arthritic pain in my spine and hip had become unbearable. So much so, that I dreaded having to go to bed at night and was forced to try sleeping on a chair where I was lucky to snatch three or four hours sleep.
Pain killers did not seem to work any more and I was wondering if this might be my future lifestyle.
Ten days later, I was laid low with a nasty bout of flu and tossing about trying in vain to find a comfortable spot, I had plenty of time for reflection.
Suddenly it struck me that God did not want me to suffer like this. Had he not assured me in no uncertain terms that "by His stripes (blows that cut in) we are healed".
I pondered this statement for ages and try as I might, could find nothing ambiguous about it. It was plain to see as the nose on my face and it was referring to the present moment. I next remembered having read somewhere, that "we should stop spiritualising Scripture and take it as it is. God says it. I believe it. That settles it". Then the words of Jim Glennon, the Australian evangelist, crossed my mind: "You must stop affirming your problems and come to faith".
The final decision was definitely up to me and nobody else. I could accept those words as fact or I could spend the day "spiritualising " them.
After great deliberation, I decided to take the plunge and jump in at the deep end. I made my mind up, with the help of God giving me the stamina to do so, that I would "stand" on this tenet from Isaiah 53; "by his stripes you are healed" and I would not deviate from this stance, until God had honoured His promise. As Fr Jack McArdle had repeatedly told us: " Don't leave until the miracle happens". Then I fell asleep and slept soundly for eight hours.
Since that evening I have had no pain. Not even a twinge . May his precious name be praised and glorified!
"What things so ever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them." (Mark II:2)
We need to get back to the simplicity of the Word of God. We must not let our minds get in the way. We must stand on the Word of God. Always remember it is not our ability but our availability that matters. When we make ourselves available to Him for service, we become channels which He can anoint and bring His healing power and presence to the lives of others. When we let Him chart our course we will be on the right path. Remember He never makes a mistake. Trust Him to lead your life and He will do so to perfection. Lord give us simple hearts to believe your Word. You said it ; I believe it ; that settles it. I'm going to live it !
Where God guides, He provides.
Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.
HUMILITY, HUMILITY, HUMILITY
The main difference between Science and Christianity is this : Science we must experience to believe ; Christianity we must believe to experience.
The Our Father.
The Our Father is the first and greatest of all Christian prayers. It contains a whole programme for Christian living. This is how Jesus thought, prayed and lived. Unfortunately, it tends to be said so hurriedly and unthinkingly that much of its meaning is lost. The following method of reciting it, slows it down and tries to bring out some of its meaning.
C. When our faith is weak, Lord, teach us to pray.
All. Our Father who art in heaven.
C. When we are inclined to forget about you, Lord teach us to pray.
A. Hallowed be thy name.
C. When we feel pessimistic about our lives and about the state of the world Lord, teach us to pray:
Thy Kingdom Come..
When we have difficult decisions to make, and are tempted to take the easy way out, Lord, teach us to pray.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
When we complain about little upsets and forget that millions of people are poor and hungry, Lord, teach us to pray.
Give us this day our daily bread.
When we are worried about our sins, and find it hard to forgive those who sin against us, Lord, teach us to pray.
Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
When we are troubled by temptation, Lord teach us to pray:
Lead us not into temptation.
When we are finding it hard to cope,Lord, teach us to pray.
Deliver us from evil
When we are preoccupied with ourselves and our own glory, Lord, Teach us to pray:
For the Kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever.
Fr. Flor McCarthy SDB.
The Calvery Road by Roy Hession.
The Highway of Holiness.
One of the things that we must learn if we are to live the victorious Christian life is its utter simplicity. How complicated we have made it! Great volumes are written; all sorts of technical phrases are used ; we are told that the secret lies in this, or that, and so on. But to most of us , it is all so complicated that, although we know it in theory, we are unable to relate what we know to our practical daily living. In order to make the simple truths we have been considering even clearer we want to put them into picture form in this chapter.
The Highway.
An 'overall' picture of the life of victory, which is familiar to many of us, is that of the highway in Isaiah 35 : 'And a highway will be there; it will be called the Way of Holiness'.The picture is that of a highway built up from the surrounding morass, the world. Though the highway is narrow and uphill, it is not , beyond any of us to walk it, for 'whoever walks the road, although a fool, shall not go astray'. Though there are many dangers if we get off the road, while we keep to the highway there is safety, for 'No lion will be there, nor will any ferocious beast get up on it'. Only one kind of person is barred from walking there, and that is the unclean one. 'The unclean will not journey on it'. This includes not only the sinner who does not know Christ as his His Saviour, but also the Christian who does, and yet is walking in unconfessed and uncleansed sin.
The only way on to the highway is up a small, dark, forbidding hill - the hill of Calvery. It is the sort of hill we have to climb on our hands and knees - especially our knees. If we are content with our present Christian life, if we do not desire with a desperate hunger to get on to the highway, we shall never get to our knees, and thus never climb the hill. But if we are dissatisfied, if we are hungry, then we will find ourselves climbing. Do not hurry. Let God make you really hungry for the highway. Let Him really drive you to your knees in longing prayer. Mere sightseers won't get very far. 'You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart'.
A Low Door.
At the top of the hill, guarding the way to the highway, stands the Cross, gaunt and grim. There it stands, the divider of time and the divider of men. At the foot of the cross is a low door, so low that one has to stoop and crawl to get through it. It is the only entrance to the highway. We must go through it if we want to continue on our way. This door is called the 'door of the broken ones'. Only the broken can enter the highway. To be broken means 'not I, but Christ'. There is in every one of us a proud stiff-necked 'I'. The stiff neck began in the garden of Eden when Adam and Eve , who had always bowed their heads in surrender to God's will, stiffened their necks, struck out for independence and tried to be 'as gods'. All the way through the Bible God accuses His people of having the same stiff neck; and it reveals itself in us, too. We are hard and unyielding. We are sensitive and easily hurt. We get envious, irritable and critical. We are resentful and unforgiving. We strive in our own strength and attempt to do by our own efforts what should be left to God. We are self-indulgent- and how often that can lead to impurity. Everyone of these things, and many more spring from this proud self within. If it were not there and Christ were in its place, we would not have these reactions. Before we can enter the highway, God must bend and break that stiff-necked self, so that Christ reigns instead. To be broken means to have no rights before God and man. It does not mean merely surrendering my rights to Him, but rather recognising that I haven't any, except to deserve hell. It means being nothing and having nothing that I call my own; neither time, money, possessions nor position.
In order to break our wills to His, God brings us to the foot of the Cross and there shows us what real brokenness is. We see those wounded hands and feet and that face of love crowned with thorns. We see the complete brokenness of the one who said ' Not my will but yours be done', as He drank the bitter cup of our sin to its dregs. So the way to be broken is to look on Him and to realize it was our sin which nailed Him there. Then as we see the love and the brokenness of the God who died in our place, our hearts will be melted and we will want to be broken for Him, and we shall pray,
Oh, to be saved from myself dear Lord / Oh, to be lost in Thee / Oh, that it might be no more I / But Christ that lives in me.
Some of us have found that the prayer that He might break us, is the prayer which God is most swift to answer.
A constant choice.
Do not let us imagine, that we have to be broken only once as we go through the door. It will be a choice which constantly before us. God brings His pressure to bear on us, but we have to make the choice. If someone hurts or slights us, we immediately have the choice of accepting the slight as a means of grace to humble us lower, or we can resist it and stiffen our necks again, with all the disturbance of spirit that that is bound to bring. Right the way through the day our brokenness will be tested , and it is no use pretending we are broken before God if we are not broken in our attitude to those around us. God nearly always tests us through other people. There are no second causes for the Christian. In the providence of God, His Will is often made known to us through others with their many demands upon us. If you find yourself in a patch of unbrokenness, the only answer is to return to Calvary and see Christ broken for you. You will come away willing to be broken for Him.
Over the door of the broken ones is sprinkled
the precious blood of the
Lord Jesus. As we bend to crawl through , the blood cleanses us from all sin, for not only have we to bend to get through, but only the clean can walk on the highway. Maybe you have never known Jesus as your Saviour ; maybe you have known Him for years ; but in either case you are defiled by sin, the sins of pride, envy, resentment, impurity, etc. If you will give them all to Him who bore them on the Cross, He will whisper to you again what He said on the Cross, 'It is finished', and your heart will be cleansed whiter than snow.
The gift of His fullness.
So we reach the highway. There it stretches before us, a narrow, uphill road, bathed in light , leading towards Jerusalem. The embankment on either side slopes away into thick darkness. In fact, the darkness creeps right to the very edges of the highway, but on the highway itself all is light. Behind us is the Cross, no longer dark and forbidding, but radiant and glowing. We no longer see Jesus stretched across its arms, but walking the highway overflowing with resurrection life. In His hands He carries a pitcher full of the water of life. He comes right up to us and asks us to hold out our hearts, and just as if we were handing Him a cup , we present to Him our empty hearts. He looks inside - which can be a painful scrutiny - and where He sees we have allowed His blood to cleanse our hearts, He fills them with the water of life. So we go on our way rejoicing and praising God and overflowing with His new life. This is revival, you and I full of the Holy Spirit all the time, loving others and concerned for their salvation. No struggling, no waiting; simply giving Him each sin to cleanse in His precious blood and accepting from His hands the free gift of His fullness, then allowing Him to do the work through us. As we walk along with Him, He is always there continually filling our cups so that they continually overflow. So the rest of our Christian life now consists simply of walking along the highway, with hearts over flowing, bowing our necks to His will all the time, constantly trusting the blood to cleanse us, and living in complete oneness with Jesus. There is nothing spectacular about this life, no emotional experiences to crave and wait for. It is just plain day-to-day living the life the Lord intended us to live. THIS IS REAL HOLINESS.
Off the Highway.
But we may, and sometimes do,slip off the highway, for it is narrow. One little step aside and we are off the path and in darkness. It is always a failure in obedience somewhere or a failure to be weak enough to let God do something. Satan is always beside the road, shouting at us, but he cannot touch us. But we can yield to his voice by an act of will. This is the beginning of sin and slipping away from Jesus. Sometimes we find ourselves stiffening our necks towards another, sometimes to God Himself. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by jealousy or resentment. Sometimes we find ourselves tense and striving, without resting in Him. Immediately we are over the side, for nothing unclean can walk the highway.Our cup becomes dirty, ceases to overflow and we lose our peace with God. If we do not come back to the highway at once, we shall go further down the side. We must get back. How?
THE FIRST THING TO DO IS to ask God to show us what caused us to slip off; AND HE WILL, though it often takes Him time to make us see. Perhaps someone annoyed us and we were irritable. God wants us to see that it was not the thing that the person did that matters, but our reaction to it. If we had been broken, we would not have been irritated. So, as we look longingly back to the highway, we see the Lord Jesus again, and we see what an ugly thing it is to get irritable and that Jesus died to save us from being irritable. As we crawl up again to the highway on hands and knees, we come again to him and his blood for cleansing. Jesus is waiting there to fill our cup to overflowing again. Hallelujah!
Finding the Highway again.
No matter where we leave the Highway, we will always find him calling us to come back and be broken again, and the blood will always be there to make us clean. THIS IS THE GREAT SECRET OF THE HIGHWAY - knowing what to do with sin, when sin has come in. The secret is always to take sin to the Cross, recognise its sinfulness, confess it to God, and count it gone, through the value of the blood of Jesus. So the real test all along the highway will be - are our cups running over? Is the peace of God ruling in our hearts?
Have we love and concern for others? These things are the BAROMETER OF THE HIGHWAY. If they are disturbed, then sin has crept in somewhere - self-pity, self-seeking,self-indulgence in thought or deed, sensitiveness, touchiness, self-defence, striving in our own strength, self-consciousness, shyness, reserve, worry, fear and so on.
Our walk with others
An important thing about the highway which has not yet been mentioned is that we do not walk this highway alone. Others walk it with us. There is, of course, the Lord Jesus. But there are other people on this journey too,and the rule of the road is that fellowship with them is as important as fellowship with Jesus. Indeed, the two are intimately connected. Our relationship with our fellows and our relationship with God are so linked that we cannot disturb one without disturbing the other. Everything that comes between ourselves and others , such as impatience, resentment or envy, comes between us and God. These barriers are sometimes no more than veils -through we can still see to some extent. But if not removed immediately, they thicken into blankets and then into thick walls, and we are shut off from both God and our fellows, and shut in on ourselves. It is clear why these two relationships should be so linked, 'God is love', AND THE MOMENT WE FAIL TO LOVE OTHERS, WE PUT OURSELVES OUT OF FELLOWSHIP WITH GOD - FOR GOD LOVES THEM EVEN IF WE DO NOT. But more than that, the effect of such sins is always to make us walk in darkness - that is, to cover up and hide who we really are or what we are really feeling. That is the meaning of 'darkness' in Scripture, for, while the light reveals, the darkness hides. The first effect of sin in us is that we always hide, with the result that we pretend, wear masks and are not real with either God or man.| And, of course, neither God nor man can have fellowship with an unreal person.
The way back into fellowship with the Lord Jesus will bring us again into fellowship with one another, too. All unlove must be recognised as sin and confessed as such that it may be covered by the blood of Jesus - and then it can be put right with others, too. As we come back to the Lord Jesus like this, we shall find His love for others filling our hearts and wanting to express itself in our actions towards them, and we shall walk in fellowship together again.
So this is life on the highway. It is no new astounding doctrine. It is not something new to preach. It is quite unspectacular. It is just a life to live day by day in whatever circumstances the Lord has put us. It does not contradict what we may have read or heard about the Christian life. It just puts into simple pictorial language the great truths of sanctification. To start to live this life now will be revival continued. Revival is simply you and I walking along the highway in complete oneness with the Lord Jesus and with one another, with cups continually cleansed and overflowing with the life and love of God.
oooOooo
To think about.
As I read Isaiah 35, I see that the highway of holiness is a wonderful path for my life. God promises that "gladness and joy will overtake" those who walk that way and that "Sorrow and sighing will flee away". I want to walk the highway and I see that the entrance is just before me. ALL I HAVE TO DO IS BEND THAT STIFF NECK and humble myself before God and others and I will climb that path to the Highway.
A Prayer.
O God, do not let my pride and self-righteousness prevent me from walking the Highway to Holiness. I choose to humble myself, please help me to stay on the path.
ooooOoooo
CLC
51 The Dean,
Airesford, Hants. SO24 9BJ
England.
Following his serious perusal of the following tenets, Marcus Grodi (EWTN), a fomer Lutheran Pastor, was converted to the Roman Catholic faith.
1. Prov. 3: 5-6.
2. 1 Tim. 3: 14-15 and Tim 3-15.
3. 2. Tim 3: 14-17
4. 2 Thess. 2-15.
5. Matt. 16 : 13-19 .
6. Rev. 14-13 and Rev. 2
7, Rom. 1O: 14-15.
8. John 15-4 and 6:56.
9. Col. 1-24 .
1O. Luke 1 - 46-49.
oooOooo
Anita Kilbride -Jones,
St Paul's Bay,Malta.
