-Pastor Byron

One of the reasons God commands us to be filled with the Spirit is that He not only empowers us for service, but also is essential to our hearing God. If the Spirit is quenched and grieved, He cannot deliver the message of God because we are not listening. If we refuse to hear what the Holy Spirit says to us, then our praying is useless babbling into heaven and God does not hear it. How we live makes a difference as to what we hear. A believer can live what most would characterize as a normal Christian life and still be in error, because he is not listening to the Spirit. We can never get enough education, enough experience, to live independently of the Holy Spirit.

And it happened, as He was alone praying. (Luke 9:18)

Man needs to be alone with God. Without this, God cannot have the opportunity to shine into his heart, to transform his nature by His divine working, to take possession of him, and to fill him with His fullness.

Man needs to be alone with God, to yield to the presence and power of His holiness, of His life, and of His love. Christ on earth needed it; He could not live the life of a Son here in the flesh without at times separating Himself entirely from His surroundings and being alone with God. How much more must this be indispensable to us!

When our Lord Jesus gave us the blessed command to enter our inner chamber and shut the door in order to pray to our Father in secret, He gave us the promise that the Father would hear such prayers and would mightily answer them in our lives before men. (See Matthew 6:4)

Alone with God-that is the secret of true prayer, of true power in prayer, of real living, of face-to-face fellowship with God, and of power for service. There is no true, deep conversion; no true, deep holiness; no clothing with the Holy Spirit and with power; no abiding peace or joy, without being daily alone with God. As someone has said, “There is no path to holiness, but in being much and long alone with God.”

-Pastor Byron

And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves. (John 17:33)

How in practice do we have this joy? The first thing is to avoid concentrating on our own feelings. Many Christian people spend the whole of their lives looking at their own feelings and always taking their own spiritual pulse, their own spiritual temperature. Of course, they never find it satisfactory, and because of that they are miserable and unhappy, moaning and groaning.

The secret joy is the practice of meditation-that is the way to have this joy of the Lord. We must meditate upon Him, upon what He is, what He has done, His love to us, and God’s care for us who are His people.

And obviously-this almost goes without saying —we must avoid everything that tends to break our fellowship with God. The moment that is broken, we become miserable. We cannot help it; whether we want it to or not, our conscience will see to that. It will accuse us and condemn anything that breaks our fellowship with God and His Son. The joy of the world always drives out the other joy, as does any dependence on the world; so, we must avoid sin in every shape and form. Let us stop looking to the world, even at its best, for true joy and for true happiness. But above all, we must look at “these things” (John 17:13) that He speaks of, these truths that He unfolded. Let us meditate upon them, contemplate them, dwell upon them, revel in them, and I will guarantee that as we do so, either in our own personal meditation or in reading books about them, we will find ourselves experiencing a joy we have never known before. It is inevitable; it follows as the night the day.

In considering this great subject (The work of Christ as the only resting place for the conscience), two things claim our attention; first, what Christ has done for us; secondly, what He is doing for us. In the former, we have atonement, in the latter, advocacy. He died for us on the cross; He lives for us on the throne. By His precious atoning death, He has met our entire condition as sinners. He has borne our sins and put them away forever. He stood charged with all our sins – the sins of all who believe in His Name. “Jehovah laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53). And again, “for Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18).

This is a grand and all-important truth for the anxious soul—a truth which lies at the very foundation of the whole Christian position. It is impossible that any truly awakened soul, any spiritually enlightened conscience, can enjoy divinely settled peace until this most precious truth is laid hold of in simple faith. must know, upon Divine authority, that all my sins are put away forever out of God’s sight; that He Himself has disposed of them in such a manner as to satisfy all the claims of His throne and all the attributes of His nature; that He has glorified Himself in the putting away of my sins, in a far higher and more wonderful manner than if He had sent me to an everlasting hell on account of them.

Oswald Chambers gives a good biblical strategy for how we can listen to and hear from God.

-Pastor Byron

“Samuel was afraid to tell Eli the vision” (1 Samuel 3:15)

God never speaks to us in dramatic ways, but in ways that are easy to misunderstand. Then we say, “I wonder if that is God’s voice?” Isaiah said that the Lord spoke to him “with a strong hand,” that is, by the pressure of his circumstances (Isaiah 8:11). Without the sovereign hand of God Himself, nothing touches our lives. Do we discern His hand at work, or do we see things as mere occurrences?

Get into the habit of saying, “Speak, Lord,” and life will become a romance (1 Samuel 3:9). Every time circumstances press in on you, say, “Speak, Lord,” and make time to listen. Chastening is more than a means of discipline – it is meant to bring me to the point of saying, “Speak, Lord.” Think back to a time when God spoke to you. Do you remember what He said? As we listen, our ears become more sensitive, and like Jesus, we will hear God all the time.

When once the soul has been brought to feel the reality of its condition before God – its utter and hopeless bankruptcy, there can be no rest until the Holy Spirit reveals a full and an all-sufficient Christ to the heart. The only possible answer to total ruin is God’s perfect remedy.

The true secret of peace is, to get to the very end of a helpless, worthless self, and there find an all-sufficient Christ as God’s provision for our very deepest need. This truly is rest – a rest which can never be disturbed. There may be sorrow, pressure, conflict, ups and downs, all sorts of trials and difficulties: but when a soul is really brought by God’s Spirit to see the end of self, and to rest in a full Christ, it finds a peace which can never be interrupted.

-Pastor Byron

“Watch and pray,” said Jesus in the center of His own agony. If we don’t, we shall slip into the lure of wrong roads without knowing it. The only way to keep right is to watch and pray. The basis of prayer is not human earnestness, not human need, not the human will; it is redemption, and its living center is a personal Holy Spirit. Prayer on any other basis is stupid. A child can pray. Through His own agony in redemption, God has made it as easy to pray as it sounds. A rationally minded being can ridicule nothing more easily than prayer. “Praying always”-the unutterable simplicity of it! No panic, no flurry, always at leisure from ourselves on the inside.

“Being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints.” It is all very well to have prayer meetings, but are we continually practicing in the armor of God, keeping our hearts stout in the courage of God’s Spirit and taking our orders from Him? Or are we making an ingenious compromise? There is only one service that has no snares and that is prayer. Preaching has snares to the natural heart; so has public service. Prayer has no snare because it is based on the redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ made efficacious all the time by the Holy Spirit.

Lord God Omnipotent, how my soul delight to know that you care for sparrows and number the hairs of our head! Lord breathe on me till I am in the frame of mind and body to worship you.

Some people are overcome by problems. Others overcome problems. Some people are left bitter. Others are left better. Some people face their challenges with fear. Others with faith….. You don’t have a choice about having problems. But you do have a choice about what you do with them. Choose faith.

-Max Lucado

Vanity of vanities…all is vanity” (Eccles. 1), except to love God and to serve Him only. This is the highest wisdom, by the contempt of the world to press forward toward heavenly kingdoms.

Therefore, it is vanity to seek after perishing riches and to trust in them. Also, it is vanity to hunt after honors and to climb to high degree. It is vanity to follow the desires of the flesh, and to long after that for which you must afterward suffer grievous punishment. It is vanity to wish to live long, and to be careless to live well. It is vanity to mind only this present life, and not to foresee those things which are to come. It is vanity to set your love on that which speedily passes away, and not to hasten to where everlasting joy abides.

Call often to mind that proverb: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (Eccles. 1:8). Endeavor therefore to withdraw your heart from the love of visible things, and to turn yourself to things invisible. For they that follow their own sensuality defile their own consciences and lose the grace of God.

As I was reading Thomas à Kempis this morning, I thought how appropriate for a devotional thought as we turn our thoughts to a new year. May God help us this year to “major on the major” and not get caught “majoring on the minor.”

The danger we have is that we want to water down what Jesus said to make it mean something that aligns with our common sense. But if it were only common sense, what He said would not even be worthwhile.

God’s call on each of us to share the gospel and speak graciously, but boldly takes courage and confidence in the Risen Savior.