Daily Verse
“Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.” ( Titus 2:2)
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"My soul faints for
Your salvation, but I hope in Your word" (Psalm 119:81).
The human soul is for ever in search of salvation, whatever it may mean to it.
The word "salvation" is beyond adequate definition. Dictionaries
define it as "the act of saving, the state of being saved." The
writer to Hebrews calls it the "so great salvation". It is indeed
great and is the outstanding theme of all sixty-six books of the Bible.
Whatever its true meaning, salvation touches every phase of human life and is
the reason for the existence of all faiths and religions, good or bad, true or
false.
Let us attempt to define this word by referring to an Old Testament type: the Temple. Salvation is the
work of God to restore humanity to the condition and constitution originally
intended by God for them. Man was designed to be the temple of the Holy Spirit,
an expression and manifestation of God in the material world. Mankind, even in
its fallen state, carries traces of the grandeur of the original Jewish Temple
- a habitation of God through the Spirit. The people we meet on our city
streets, even in their prideful best, are but walking ruins of what they were
meant to be - human beings indwelt by the Holy Spirit, in possession of divine
life.
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"They have Moses and the prophets let them hear ... if they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead" (Luke 16:29,31).
The more I watch the events of the world and the inability of the Church to proclaim the whole counsel of God to a dying world, the more concerned I become and the heavier my burden. The quotation from our Lord is a very profound statement. It is the story of a rich man and a poor man, their place and condition after having passed from this life. How much speculative teaching has come out of this story! And yet, in truth, the Lord was not establishing a doctrine of life after death. Anything in that connection was incidental.
What He was really trying to get across, as the context shows, is a matter of responsibility. Whenever He came in touch with the existing traditional religious system He deliberately raised and pressed this issue. What this story really is trying to emphasize is the factor of responsibility, which dominates the situation.
The rich man represents those who:
1. Have had every facility and opportunity of obtaining a wealth of the things of God;
2. Have accumulated a great deal of information;
3. Have, by reason of the above, come to a place of spiritual complacency, contentment, or even pride and superiority;
4. Have not grown spiritually although well provided for;
5. Have failed to realize that every bit of spiritual provision is a trust; it must not stay with them, but must enrich the needy, always at the gate, as represented by the beggar - the sufferer, the hungry.
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"I remember the days of long ago; I meditate on all your works and consider what your hands have done." Psalm 143:5 NIV
Life is often - and very rightly - compared to a journey, a race, a voyage, a battle. To me, life is also like mountain climbing.
In our spiritual walk towards our spiritual destination, we are all called to climb. However, all of us are not called to climb the same mountain. Each one of us is given a steep and high mountain to climb in our lifetime. In order to succeed in climbing it, we need to produce the very best we have in every respect. It calls for even more than that: it calls for outside help; a guide, an experienced guide, with a loving heart and strong arms.
When climbing a steep mountain, we stop occasionally to review the past, to consider what lies ahead, and to renew our strength. In this process, we recall the danger spots, places where we narrowly escaped injury or death. We may also remember places where we actually did fall, injuring ourselves. We will carry with us scars of those injuries all our days. As we meditate, we will remember coming to places which we regarded as impossible to climb. Yet, with care, perseverance, and reliance on our guide and his trustworthy rope, we overcame those difficulties.
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Recently, the Lord has been impressing upon my heart the matter of hearing His voice. What made me conscious of this was a passage in the Book of Acts 13:26-30: "Men and brethren, sons of the family of Abraham, and those among you who fear God, to you the word of this salvation has been sent. For those who dwell in Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they did not know Him, nor even the voices of the Prophets which are read every Sabbath, have fulfilled them in condemning Him. And though they found no cause for death in Him, they asked Pilate that He should be put to death. Now when they had fulfilled all that was written concerning Him, they took Him down from the tree and laid Him in a tomb. But God raised Him from the dead."
God's indictment on the Jews was that they could not and did not hear the voice of the prophets read to them every Sabbath. They listened to the words of the prophets but could not hear their voice. This made me think: Do we hear His voice? Does the church hear His voice?
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