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

Revival

Revival..... another definition would be to recover, repair or restore. Hosea 10:12 says: "Sow to yourself in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord till He come and reign righteousness upon you." What is fallow ground? Fallow ground is ground that has been  fruitful, and then it has been plowed over, and no seed has been sown in it, and therefore it has become unproductive.

Notice, there is a human emphasis here -- it says that we are to break up -- you break up your fallow ground.

Now take another aspect of it here in Psalm 85:6 - "Would Thou not revive us again: that Thy people may rejoice in Thee." So, there is an absence of joy, of vitality -- there is an absence of ecstasy. The very word "revive" presupposes life. You can only revive what has already had vitality -- life that has become sick,
weak, or apathetic. I think the nearest analogy I can give you is a recent case of a man who apparently drowned. He had been under the water for an incredible amount of time. Then somebody
pulled him out and worked and worked on him, and eventually life came again. This is actually what it means to revive,

It means to revitalize.

                   It means to restore lost ; It means to recover lost energy.

In the Acts of the Apostles 3:19 we read, "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord." Whatever else we say about revival we have to recognize this, that revival is an act of mercy in the sovereignty of God. There
is a vast difference between revival and evangelism. When we speak of revival in America we think of church advertising, "Our revival will begin next Sunday night at a certain time and it is going to finish the next Sunday night at a certain time." Obviously this is something purely mechanical, it is something which men have engineered. I think that one of the offenses of revival, in the historic sense, is that it cannot be organized.

As Doctor Tozer said, "When revival comes it changes the moral climate of a community." You can have revival that covers a church - Spurgeon had that. You can have a revival that covers a city. You
can have a revival that covers the whole nation -- and I am thinking in this context more than in the other contexts (though sometimes revival spreads from here to there -- like fire spreads.) Revival
cannot be organized -- evangelism can be organized. Revival cannot be subsidized --evangelism can and usually it must be. Revival cannot be advertised --evangelism can.

It may cost millions of dollars, as it often does, to have one of our huge, modern, so called revivals. You have to pay vast sums of money for time on TV, for example -- perhaps a million dollars a night. That's incredible, that's unthinkable to me in the context of Biblical revival, or even historical revival. Why doesn't revival need
to be advertised? For the simple reason, that fire is the most self advertising thing that there is, whether it is a physical fire or a revival fire. It draws people like a magnet. To bring this down to modern technology -- revival cannot be computerized. There is information that you can put in computer and presto, you get the
answer predicting an outcome according to the facts that were put in. But you cannot computerize or predict revival.

There are periods in which one thing predominates.

         Sometimes revival is totally taken over by sorrow.

         Sometimes revival is totally taken over by joy, ecstasy 'till

         you don't know whether you are in the flesh or whether you've

         gone out of the earth. Sometimes revival is taken over by

         stillness.

There are times when you go to a prayer meeting and the power of God is there. There is stillness and you feel it is creative. You feel, "Now something is building up around here, somebody is going to come out shortly with a heart bursting... with some agonizing prayer..." Revival cannot be rationalized. Again, one of the offensive things about revival is you can't put your finger on the spot, usually, as to how or why or where it began. It is supremely an act of God.

You find a man would go with a series of messages to a community and before long that community is alive, it's throbbing. He goes to another town with exactly the same group of men, the same type of prayer is poured out, the same sweat and soul travail and there is no response. You can't predict and you can't organize revival.
Why? Because you can't organize where the wind is coming from. The Spirit, the wind, bloweth where it listeth. If you say it's going to come this way, it comes that way. If you say God's going to use that man, very often He doesn't even bother with that man. Revival so often comes through unknown characters.

I don't think the world has ever been in a greater sense of turmoil than it is in this moment. I don't think our nation has. Whatever we shall say about revival we have to recognize this: There are three things about natural life: conception, gestation, and birth. You can't alter the program. There has never been revival, that I can trace, that has not been preceded by agonizing prayer. You might say, "I haven't got to that stage yet of agonizing prayer. How does is come?" Well, it comes through VISION. If we are really going to get a concept of revival we have to get a vision of God's sorrow over sin. We have to get a concept of how, day by day, we offend God. As a nation we offend God in millions of ways.

When I was praying in the Bahamas one day, I saw a great column of smoke, which happened to be coming from tires that were being burned. It was as black as could be, and over there I saw a wisp of smoke going up from the  ground. I didn't think much of it until about a year after, I was praying and the Lord said, "That volume of black, thick smoke is like the volume of sin that goes up every day." All the blasphemy, all the unbelief, all the dirty stories, all the lying, all the deception, all sex- perversion, all drunkenness-- this tremendous column of iniquity goes up in the sight of God. And here you have a little wisp -- of what? That is the praise that God gets out of His people. If we are going to realize how much we need revival we need to recognize the dimension of sin. We have to recognize that sin offends God. Psalm 85:4 says, "Turn us, O God of our salvation and cause Thine anger towards us to cease. Wilt Thou be angry with us forever?" Psalm 80 verse 3, "Turn us again, O God, and cause Thy face to shine." Notice, it's repeated again in verse 7 and in
verse 19, "...cause Thy face to shine"..."cause Thy face to shine."
-Oswald Chambers

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.