Give Your Life Away

I want to talk to you, [young person]. You’ve learned doctrines of sovereign grace. You read the puritans, congratulations.
I will not lose sleep tonight because people in the world lack self esteem. I will not lose sleep tonight because they’re not having their best life now, or they’re not being all they can be, or their check book is not balanced.
I will lose sleep tonight if I lose sleep tonight because men will stand naked before God and be cast into Hell!
When I preach and when you preach, whether here or the mission field you cannot simply think that you’re just a communicator of truth and you leave it there.
You must preach as a dying man to dying men!

And I see that in Paul. There was a passion. There was an urging. He wasn’t simply satisfied if he preached well, or communicated truth. He longed for God to be honored among men. And he longed for men to be holy, to be Christ like. And to be able to rejoice in the benefit of their great Salvation.
We ought to be a people given to urging our brethren to greater and greater godliness, to greater and greater piety, to abound further and further in love.
He says, “I urge you brethren.” What is he going to urge them to do?
To do the most diffucult, scandalous, and some cases some would say, preposterous thing a person can ever urge a person to do, to give their life away.
Do you know even the devil had it right, in this sense you can take a man’s goods, his houses, his lands, you can do absolutely anything to him, but the moment you touch his flesh is when you’re truly going to test this man. To give away a car, a home, a tithe is a small thing.
But to ask a man to give away his life…
I know there is so much romantic notions about missions but Amy Carmichael, Elizabeth Elliot’s book, is right. Missions is only this an opportunity to die. An opportunity to give your life away for something much larger than yourself, much greater than yourself.
So he is going to ask these people to do what some would consider almost cultic, absurd, ridiculous, immoral, to give their life away, to offer their life!
Now, you’re going to need strong medicine to motivate a person to do something such as this. What on earth or on Heaven could ever motivate a man to give his life away. I’m going to urge you to give your life away to God, to offer it up as a living and holy sacrifice to God. Now I’m going to do so on the basis of the following, the first eleven chapters of this book that outline for you the mercies of God.
And have you decided that you would submit your life to those directives?
You see we talk about being Biblical…
In our worship, have you gone through Scripture to discover what God desires out of worship?
“Well you know we love worship this way”.
I don’t care how you like worship, ‘coz that’s not the point.
What has God said?
You see in this idea we can romance this thing to death. We can spiritualize it to death. Someone says, “Well I’ve given my life to the mission field.” That does not mean at the same time that you have given your heart to God. ‘Coz you can go to the mission field and be godless, and carnal and trite. You’d be better off joining National Geographic than you would a mission agency.
Are you seeking in simplicity to examine your life…
I’m not talking about finding legalistic inferences and forcing them upon yourself. I’m talking about the great principles of Scripture dealing in every aspect of your personal life, applying them to you and seeking to obey them.
Let me ask you a question, If you go to the mission field without taking what I’ve said as a serious endeavor, isn’t there the possibility that the only thing you’re going to do there after you have crossed land and sea is make a convert like yourself that’s nothing more than a two fold son of Hell?
There isn’t a whole lot of American Christianity, folks, that needs to be exported! Unless like (Leonard) Ravenhill says we put it on some kind of a raft and send it off to a lone island and as it’s going off from the dock we all sing the doxology.
If we’re going to endeavor to work in missions then we must be motivated by a God that we know, a Gospel that we know! And we must be a people who have endeavored with great force to examine their lives in the light of Scripture, and conform their lives to what Scripture says!
How much of what you have, even the way you sit in a chair, is formed by those around you and not by Scripture? It’s something to think about.
Well I think if you’re going to be a missionary of any account this is what you must do, stay in your room. Not only pray, but study. So that when you walk out of that room you have something to say about God. And so that you will be able to walk out of that room.
Listen to me! I’ve been there, done that, got the T-shirt! You walk out there in all your zeal in the middle of the plaza and you begin to preach, and you think as a young missionary that angels are going to drop out of Heaven and the Hallelujah chorus is going to be sung, millions of people are going to be converted, they’re going to toss you on their shoulders and build a statue of you!
That’s not going to happen!
What’s going to happen is this, you’re going to go there and you’re going to preach, and you’re going to preach. And when a crowd starts listening to you somebody, somewhere is going to rise up and call you a demon! The entire crowd is going to turn on you. They’re going to grab your little pulpit and your make-shift microphone and all your little tracts and they’re going to throw you out on the street!
It’s going to take a lot more than a romantic zeal for missions to make you get up, pick up your pulpit, your tracts and walk back right in there and preach again!
It’s going to take a passion for God that is created out of knowing Him!
And that’s the same for everything in the Christian life!
—Give Your Life Away, a sermon delivered by Paul Washer at Heritage Baptist Church in Owensboro, KY

The Importance of Prayer

I do want to pray.

I want to be able to pray for hours and hours at the feet of my Lord.  I'm realizing, that it is a difficult thing to do even with all this time in my hands.. since I'm not working right now. My spirit and flesh are constantly conflicting and so far, I've fed my flesh.  I picked up this one book by Leonard Ravenhill and started to read it.  Many parts of it brought me to my knees before my savior, realizing how much I've chosen to not give Him all me.  The more I read, the more I saw the passion in that 87 year old man: a passion to die to self, to live like Apostle Paul, to be broken so that God may use him to reach the lost.  I asked the Lord to make me a woman that will cling to the cross.

Leonard Ravenhill articulates on how essential one's prayer life is.

"No greater man is greater than his prayer life. The pastor who is not praying is playing; the people who are not praying are straying.  The pulpit can be a shop window to display one's talents; the prayer closet allows no showing off."
I thank God there's an alternative in meeting and being used by Him.


"We have many organizers, but few agonize -rs; many players and payers, few pray-ers; many singers, few clingers; lots of pastors, few wrestlers; many fears, few tears; much fashion, little passion; many interferers, few intercessors; many writers, but few fighters. Failing here, we fail everywhere."

"Today God is bypassing men - not because they are too ignorant, but because they are too self-sufficient."

This is so true in the church today. Where are the people who will cling to cross cuz they can't even depend on themselves to get anything done?

"All decays begin in the closet; no heart thrives without much secret converse with God, and nothing will make amends for the want of it." - Berridge.


"The secret of praying is praying in secret.  A sinning man will stop praying, and a praying man will stop sinning."
This stuck out like a sore thumb. It is so true. I will stop disobeying if only I simply obeyed. I will begin to live, the moment I die.


"Someone now warns us lest we become so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly use."

I want to get to that point, to be a woman that this world is not worthy of.


"When we go to God by prayer, the devil knows we go to fetch strength against him, and therefore he opposeth us all he can." - R. Sibbes

"These priests who dope men's souls, these idolatrous "masses," these Calvary eclipsing prayers to Mary, these miserable millions cheated in life and in death by the greatest forgery Lucifer ever made - all these do not seem to stir us to tearful intercessions and godly jealousy, as identical circumstances stirred Elijah.  The enemy has come in like a flood. Is there no spirit-filled messenger of God today?"
This is not only about the Catholic Church and it's heretical teachings that have no biblical standing but every other false teaching out there that take the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and desecrate it by putting man's 2 cents.  Man's two cents implying, that Jesus' blood wasn't enough for the atonement.  When people are being cheated their lives... to false religions, shouldn't we be burning with holy indignation?



"God does not want partnership with us but ownership of us."
This is a good reminder whenever I tell myself, "I'm doing this for God" that I'm actually doing it with God since He has all of me.


"A sober church never does any good."

"Tell me in the light of the Cross, isn't it a scandal that you and I live today as we do?" - Alan Redpath

"Such a sinning, repenting "easy believeism" dishonors the blood and prostitutes the altar.  We must alter that altar, for the altar is a place to die on.  Let those who will not pay this price leave it alone!"


"How shall I feel at the judgment, if multitudes of missed opportunities pass before me in full review, and all my excuses prove to be disguises of my cowardice and pride?" - Dr. W.E. Sangster

"Then Christ was enthroned.  And before we can be clean and ready for Him to control, self-seeking, self-glory, self-interest, self-pity, self-righteousness, self-importance, self-promotion, self-satisfaction - and whatsoever else there be of self - must die."


"No man is ever fully accepted until he has, first of all, been utterly rejected."  - Author Unknown

"Men of prayer must be men of steel, for they will be assaulted by Satan even before they attempt to assault his kingdom."


What use is deeper knowledge if we have shallower hearts?  What use is greater standing with men if we have a less standing with God? What use is personal physical hygiene if we have filthiness of the mind and of the spirit?  What use is religious piety if we have soul carnality?  Why strut with physical strength if we have spiritual weakness? Of what use is worldly wealth if we have spiritual poverty?  Who can take comfort in social popularity if he is unknown in hell?  Prayer takes care of all these spiritual maladjustments."
Luke 9: 25 "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his soul?"  It'll be worth nothing.



"One crowded hour of glorious "life" - so they argue- is worth a gamble on the speculation of the theologians' so called "eternity."


"Better to die bound in body and free in spirit than free in body and bound in soul!"


"God's purpose for us is not happiness, but holiness!"

"Yet while over our heads hangs the Damoclean sword of rejection, we believers are lean, lazy, luxury loving, loveless, and lacking.  Though our merciful God will pardon our sins, purge our iniquity, and pity our ignorance, our lukewarm hearts are an abomination in His sight.  We must be hot or cold, flaming or freezing, burning out or cast out.  Lack of heat and lack of love God hates."


"This generation of preachers is responsible for this generation of sinners."


I'm not done reading the book so I will be back. It's praying time.