How are you doing? Good to hear from you. Ma binu jare; but even you, you have not been doing a good job of keeping in touch. In times like this I guess what matters is the realisation that you have a friend and a brother here in me, and I a sister and a friend over there in you. Our paths may lead us farther from each other as the days mature but I trust God that our closeness will converge more and more in Christ. That brings me to this: how are you doing with God? How's your walk? I hope you are allowing yourself space to consider what matters more to you: the 'bread alone' or 'every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord'? Also understand that we only really fellowship with the word of God when we are continually soaked in prayers that attend to the voice of the Lord, most especially praying in the Spirit. When we separate waiting-prayer from the study of the word of God, we by the same doing rob ourselves of the aspect that makes the word of God 'quick' and 'sharper than any two-edged sword'. We submit ourselves to the part called letters and to the danger of fleshly thoughts taking hold of and interpreting the word for us. "The letter kills..." then comes to bear on our situation. We can notice such times when we have taken support in the very word of God to proceed on actions that are against His will. At such times we have, by not submitting our vessels as instruments of righteousness unto continuing steadfastly in all prayers and supplications, submitted ourselves as idle and ready vessels for execution of every ungodly counsel. By continuing steadfastly in prayer we identify with the necessary pattern established by our Lord. Study of the word, prayer and the fellowship of the Spirit thus constitute the three pillars on which the maturity of our faith in God rests.
Any seemingly divine direction received at times when our knees have long refrained from the altar of waiting-prayers is a direction that must be critically and seriously validated by hours spent seeking the Lord's face. This is especially crucial because we often think it an act of disobedience to ignore what we perceived came from the Lord be it vision, perception in the spirit man or any other channel of divine communication. We immediately think, "The Lord has told me...!". That's where the danger is, attributing the communication to divine Source. And later when our spirit is through prayers and the word of God come into a better state to receive from the Lord, and we received something different from the first communication we immediately get confused not knowing which to trust.
God is not the author of confusion, confusion comes when vessels as we, created to dwell continually in His Presence, have stayed away too long from Him. Like Eve we have moved out of safe company into a place where we get confusing information from the devil and from the flesh (ours and others).
It's a divine fact that every believer hears the voice of Jesus Christ, that the unction we received teaches us all things, that we know the voice of the Saviour apart from that of the enemy (John 10:1-5; 1John 2:20; Psalm 18:28); that our spirit is the candle of the Lord...It will be a good start of effectual confidence to mutter it within us and to ourselves acknowledging that by spiritual genetics and hereditary the Lord has configured us to hear His voice. He has modeled us to be sensitive and respond to divine leading. The second step is to begin a habit of praying long everyday; praying in tongues 30 minutes or 1 hour consistently each day is a great way to begin. First for a week, then you'll cover a month and before you realise it you are at a point where you're addicted to the word of God and to effectual fervent prayers. At that point we have become vessels the Lord can trust to reveal divine purpose to and beckon on to take hold together with His Spirit to execute specific assignment in our lives and in this generation.
Trust me, I have tried it, there are just no other way to walk in the Spirit. Whenever we draw back from fellowshipping with the word and from long waiting-prayers we become no more than un-anointed scribes, debaters of scriptures. I trust the Holy Spirit to mantle upon your heart as you read this and persuade you to draw back the curtain of your own understanding and blindness into deep and consistent waters of fellowship where you can really get to know the Lord to whom you gave your life. May the good Lord sustain you together with me in walking with Him in Jesus name. Amen.
P.S.: I intended to send no more than few lines of reply but I felt the hand of the Lord urging me to write this
Friday, 9 April 2010
Saturday, 13 March 2010
GOD IS BEST WORSHIPPED IN SILENCE
I stand I stand in awe of You
I stand I stand in awe of You
Holy God unto You all praise is due
I stand in awe of You.
What does one say about a God one has never seen? How does one describe in worship a glory beyond the context of man’s highest experience? Worship is a description of the qualities of the Godhead…, but then, how does one express the qualities of a God beyond and without any terms of reference of man?
At best worship is silence, stunned silence, awe-inspiring silence. Marvel. Speechlessness before the Presence, rendered bereft of all eloquence or even the smallest trace of expressiveness.
God the maker of all things dwells outside all spheres of time and laws of nature without and outside which all creation cease to exist… What does it mean to exist without having yesterday, today and tomorrow as terms of reference? How does it feel? How do we describe it? It isn’t amorphousness but a state best described as… indescribable! And this only using time to try to understand who God is, every other points and aspects of contemplation we may choose to turn to we always find Him much infinitely loftier than our best and most reverential thoughts. Is it His mercy you’ll think about? It should be enough revealing to understand that His mercies cause the living to live and give the dead-in-Christ a certain hope. Without it none, I mean not one person out of the many trillions that have passed and will yet pass the face of the earth, would ever qualify to either be or remain a Christian. Not one! Or yet will you consider the marvel call creation?
Set thyself on a mount most tall
Or yet on the Ocean and call
To know the beasts and waters
And rocks and sky and Sun
The roll call shall turn thy heart
To know a glory beyond thee.
How then do we worship Him Whom our words do not know? For every little splinter of divine knowledge we glean with imperfect fingers from an imperfect vine that nature is cannot even in any ambitious extrapolation be considered sufficient in describing Him. This little splinter overwhelms, how much more the whole tree. His holiness is so loftily high it’s more than an absence of sin: for ever before transgression came God was holy. His holiness is living, and breathing. It predates the world and it becomes rather presumptuous to start to see the Lord only in the context of sinlessness whenever His holiness is mentioned. So also His faithfulness, glory, majesty, power,… and love. They all cannot be conceived of with regards to what men understand them to be, and neither should they be understood against their contrasts that we very well know (e.g., unfaithfulness, and hatred). God, and so all His attributes-anything we could worship Him by, predates men and their languages and their understanding and their recognition of attributes by which they describe God. The holy angels worship God night and day without ceasing not because they are paid to do it, not because they are creations by nature lacking in the will not to. No. But they are fully rational and conscious and will-having beings that at every gaze they have of the Ancient of Days they are struck with wonder and awe and marvel. These themselves are holy by what men commonly know holiness to be. Otherwise they wouldn’t stand a second in His presence of fiery holiness. The glory they see each time they behold Him surpasses everything that ever was seen in all the ageless time they had lived in His presence. Glory so high they are struck with such lack of words they could only utter the near speechless word: Holy! Holy! Holy! At each instant they behold His glory all the archive and memory of who He used to be vanished.
“Holy!” will suffice for all days for the worship of our Eternal God. Anything more wordy and creative and eloquent will easily mean we have not come face to face with His glory and majesty. While I do not disdain or disapprove of worshipping God with worthy words crafted by reverent hearts-for then I would have to also concede that the Psalms are worthless- I only try to observe that at the highest of worship when suddenly confronted by the Lord’s glory all eloquence shrinks into awe-inspired speechlessness.
When we come to worship with abundance of words not of sweet reflex, then most likely than not we haven’t encountered the Shekinah, the glory of fear and awe and dread and worship, the glory that left Ezekiel and John the Beloved as dead before Him. The glory that Peter saw at Transfiguration and could do no more than say words he never intended to utter. The glory Isaiah saw and couldn’t but consider himself in trouble: he beheld God’s holiness and with his experience as a prophet he couldn’t see any man in the history of the world as possessing a tittle holiness,
“Woe is me! For I am lost: for I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for
my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”- Isaiah 6:5
Job beheld His glory and could only say:
“I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees You; therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”- Job 42:5-6
Here was a man that our God Himself considered most blameless on the earth! (Job 1:8) If Earth’s most holy repented in dust and ashes and became speechless before God I wonder what we demonstrate when we come with volumes and volumes of words which often mean nothing to us. Words we picked up from men that also picked them up in certain cold religious ritual. We have so much grown cold and estranged from the life of God that the basic duty, yet blessing, of our faith-worship- has been lost. I would rather become silent and muse upon the lofty holiness of God than utter words that are meaningless to Him. For worship is highest when the tongue goes dumb. I do not encourage that men hold all form of public worship in contempt, but this I do, I urge that the eye strives to see what the mouth utters in worship. That we begin to attend our confessions, during worship, with the holiest intentions, with a sacrifice of willingness and love and reverence.
The sum of all is this: when we are faced in worship with the glory of our God, the response left to us as unto all mortal is that blessed dumbness, or then its inherent reflex incoherence of Peter. Either way the Lord delights in and accepts it. No human experience has ever, neither will ever be, sufficiently equipped and programmed to express the Lord’s worship, and not with our limiting languages that have in fact failed to accurately express human feelings. How much less divine worship. (With the language of the Holy Spirit, I believe never in the history of the world has men been so favored to express the beauty of God's worship- but in an heavenly language. What a grief it must be to God’s heart that the sons of the dispensation of grace when He has so generously equipped them have fallen so dismally low in His worship- John 4:24)
May we learn to worship in silence and with worthy Holy! Amen in Jesus' name.
Written 2009.
I stand I stand in awe of You
Holy God unto You all praise is due
I stand in awe of You.
What does one say about a God one has never seen? How does one describe in worship a glory beyond the context of man’s highest experience? Worship is a description of the qualities of the Godhead…, but then, how does one express the qualities of a God beyond and without any terms of reference of man?
At best worship is silence, stunned silence, awe-inspiring silence. Marvel. Speechlessness before the Presence, rendered bereft of all eloquence or even the smallest trace of expressiveness.
God the maker of all things dwells outside all spheres of time and laws of nature without and outside which all creation cease to exist… What does it mean to exist without having yesterday, today and tomorrow as terms of reference? How does it feel? How do we describe it? It isn’t amorphousness but a state best described as… indescribable! And this only using time to try to understand who God is, every other points and aspects of contemplation we may choose to turn to we always find Him much infinitely loftier than our best and most reverential thoughts. Is it His mercy you’ll think about? It should be enough revealing to understand that His mercies cause the living to live and give the dead-in-Christ a certain hope. Without it none, I mean not one person out of the many trillions that have passed and will yet pass the face of the earth, would ever qualify to either be or remain a Christian. Not one! Or yet will you consider the marvel call creation?
Set thyself on a mount most tall
Or yet on the Ocean and call
To know the beasts and waters
And rocks and sky and Sun
The roll call shall turn thy heart
To know a glory beyond thee.
How then do we worship Him Whom our words do not know? For every little splinter of divine knowledge we glean with imperfect fingers from an imperfect vine that nature is cannot even in any ambitious extrapolation be considered sufficient in describing Him. This little splinter overwhelms, how much more the whole tree. His holiness is so loftily high it’s more than an absence of sin: for ever before transgression came God was holy. His holiness is living, and breathing. It predates the world and it becomes rather presumptuous to start to see the Lord only in the context of sinlessness whenever His holiness is mentioned. So also His faithfulness, glory, majesty, power,… and love. They all cannot be conceived of with regards to what men understand them to be, and neither should they be understood against their contrasts that we very well know (e.g., unfaithfulness, and hatred). God, and so all His attributes-anything we could worship Him by, predates men and their languages and their understanding and their recognition of attributes by which they describe God. The holy angels worship God night and day without ceasing not because they are paid to do it, not because they are creations by nature lacking in the will not to. No. But they are fully rational and conscious and will-having beings that at every gaze they have of the Ancient of Days they are struck with wonder and awe and marvel. These themselves are holy by what men commonly know holiness to be. Otherwise they wouldn’t stand a second in His presence of fiery holiness. The glory they see each time they behold Him surpasses everything that ever was seen in all the ageless time they had lived in His presence. Glory so high they are struck with such lack of words they could only utter the near speechless word: Holy! Holy! Holy! At each instant they behold His glory all the archive and memory of who He used to be vanished.
“Holy!” will suffice for all days for the worship of our Eternal God. Anything more wordy and creative and eloquent will easily mean we have not come face to face with His glory and majesty. While I do not disdain or disapprove of worshipping God with worthy words crafted by reverent hearts-for then I would have to also concede that the Psalms are worthless- I only try to observe that at the highest of worship when suddenly confronted by the Lord’s glory all eloquence shrinks into awe-inspired speechlessness.
When we come to worship with abundance of words not of sweet reflex, then most likely than not we haven’t encountered the Shekinah, the glory of fear and awe and dread and worship, the glory that left Ezekiel and John the Beloved as dead before Him. The glory that Peter saw at Transfiguration and could do no more than say words he never intended to utter. The glory Isaiah saw and couldn’t but consider himself in trouble: he beheld God’s holiness and with his experience as a prophet he couldn’t see any man in the history of the world as possessing a tittle holiness,
“Woe is me! For I am lost: for I am a man of unclean lips,
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for
my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”- Isaiah 6:5
Job beheld His glory and could only say:
“I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees You; therefore I despise myself,
and repent in dust and ashes.”- Job 42:5-6
Here was a man that our God Himself considered most blameless on the earth! (Job 1:8) If Earth’s most holy repented in dust and ashes and became speechless before God I wonder what we demonstrate when we come with volumes and volumes of words which often mean nothing to us. Words we picked up from men that also picked them up in certain cold religious ritual. We have so much grown cold and estranged from the life of God that the basic duty, yet blessing, of our faith-worship- has been lost. I would rather become silent and muse upon the lofty holiness of God than utter words that are meaningless to Him. For worship is highest when the tongue goes dumb. I do not encourage that men hold all form of public worship in contempt, but this I do, I urge that the eye strives to see what the mouth utters in worship. That we begin to attend our confessions, during worship, with the holiest intentions, with a sacrifice of willingness and love and reverence.
The sum of all is this: when we are faced in worship with the glory of our God, the response left to us as unto all mortal is that blessed dumbness, or then its inherent reflex incoherence of Peter. Either way the Lord delights in and accepts it. No human experience has ever, neither will ever be, sufficiently equipped and programmed to express the Lord’s worship, and not with our limiting languages that have in fact failed to accurately express human feelings. How much less divine worship. (With the language of the Holy Spirit, I believe never in the history of the world has men been so favored to express the beauty of God's worship- but in an heavenly language. What a grief it must be to God’s heart that the sons of the dispensation of grace when He has so generously equipped them have fallen so dismally low in His worship- John 4:24)
May we learn to worship in silence and with worthy Holy! Amen in Jesus' name.
Written 2009.
And you shall be witnesses unto Me
“And while staying with them He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, He said, “you heard from Me; for John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now... But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be witnesses unto Me in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth”
Acts1:4-5,8
Just like many of us believers I had stumbled over this and similar verses of the Bible without realising the full import of its message. However while praying this evening I felt the Lord open my heart to understand it more and realise the error in which many of us have walked into. I will attempt to set this forth in the form of a question. Why did the Lord put so much emphasis in the ministry of the Holy Ghost that was to be given after His glorification, so much so that He ordered the apostles not togo away from Jerusalem until they were baptised in the Holy Spirit? From the emphasis He put into the giving of the Holy Ghost one might have wanted to ask if He, the Lord, had come to fore-run Him, the Holy Spirit. However, it is enough for us to know that the ministry of the Holy Spirit was meant to be the bricks and mortal, that finishes the building whose chief cornerstone and foundation are the Lord Jesus Christ. Our error, and that to our detriment, commences the moment we accord less importance to ministry of the Holy Spirit than the Lord did.
It is clear from the above passage that believers are not meant to witness Christ to unbelievers outside of the ministry of the Holy Ghost. It was a direct order (vs 4)! The work of salvation is wholly to be embarked upon in the strength and wisdom of the Holy Ghost; that is when you can be confident that the seed is divine and it comes from God. It was a divine principle upon which the whole christian structure rests. In I Corinthians 2:4 Paul related how he brought the gospel to the Corinthians “...in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power”. That's when the issue of such divine service can be Gods. And that's when the new convert can be energised with Holy Spirit right from birth.
We only have to look around, and that not for too long, when we start to see how we have allowed overzealousness to twist the work of God in our hands. That's why in a country like mine (Nigeria) the 'quantity' of christianity bears no correlation whatsoever with the moral structure of the society. Why? Because we are in such unscriptural haste that we draft the new converts into the field and tell them to start witnessing Christ to the unsaved. That is wrong! (And here I do not in any way suggest that new converts are inexperienced when it comes to witnessing Christ. Instead I use the word new converts as a blanket description for every believer engages in soul winning but is either not baptised in the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in other tongues or that does not daily continue in walking in the Spirit especially by praying in other tongues.) Every such work leads to a situation where the converts' faith stands in the wisdom of men and rather than in the power of God. Simply put, those converts are products of our ability to join verses from the Bible together while throwing in some philosophical statements and communication skills. We often end up giving birth to our own children, not God's. Apart from the religious air and the name of the Lord that we often call at such time, such exercises are little different from the process of decamping from one political party to another.
We will notice that at new birth the believer already has a 'portion' of the Holy Ghost in him, which the apostles to whom the Lord was speaking too had. In spite of this they were mandated to wait until they're endued with power from on high by the baptism in the Holy Ghost. That's the only time they could be called and become witnesses of Christ. That's the only time they could convert sinners to Christ. And when it comes to us of this age this commandment is essentially the same and it's in two folds. First, before we can be witnesses of Christ we must be filled with the Holy Ghost. And two for those that are already filled with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues we need to live continually in the habit and strength of God's Spirit, praying daily with all prayers and supplications in the Holy Ghost (which partly entails praying in other tongues, for what will it benefit you if you're baptised in the Holy Spirit but you do not daily pray in the Spirit?). This alone has great impact in birthing Christ in our spirit and ensuring that the converts proceeding from our witnessing are indeed products of the Spirit of God. I pray that the Lord will re-visit all such children born in haste outside of the power of God's Spirit; that He will re-order their christian life after His will. And that the Lord will remind us of this order of the Lord so that we can ensure that conversions coming through us bear fruits from God.
Amen in Jesus' name.
14.03.2010
Acts1:4-5,8
Just like many of us believers I had stumbled over this and similar verses of the Bible without realising the full import of its message. However while praying this evening I felt the Lord open my heart to understand it more and realise the error in which many of us have walked into. I will attempt to set this forth in the form of a question. Why did the Lord put so much emphasis in the ministry of the Holy Ghost that was to be given after His glorification, so much so that He ordered the apostles not togo away from Jerusalem until they were baptised in the Holy Spirit? From the emphasis He put into the giving of the Holy Ghost one might have wanted to ask if He, the Lord, had come to fore-run Him, the Holy Spirit. However, it is enough for us to know that the ministry of the Holy Spirit was meant to be the bricks and mortal, that finishes the building whose chief cornerstone and foundation are the Lord Jesus Christ. Our error, and that to our detriment, commences the moment we accord less importance to ministry of the Holy Spirit than the Lord did.
It is clear from the above passage that believers are not meant to witness Christ to unbelievers outside of the ministry of the Holy Ghost. It was a direct order (vs 4)! The work of salvation is wholly to be embarked upon in the strength and wisdom of the Holy Ghost; that is when you can be confident that the seed is divine and it comes from God. It was a divine principle upon which the whole christian structure rests. In I Corinthians 2:4 Paul related how he brought the gospel to the Corinthians “...in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power”. That's when the issue of such divine service can be Gods. And that's when the new convert can be energised with Holy Spirit right from birth.
We only have to look around, and that not for too long, when we start to see how we have allowed overzealousness to twist the work of God in our hands. That's why in a country like mine (Nigeria) the 'quantity' of christianity bears no correlation whatsoever with the moral structure of the society. Why? Because we are in such unscriptural haste that we draft the new converts into the field and tell them to start witnessing Christ to the unsaved. That is wrong! (And here I do not in any way suggest that new converts are inexperienced when it comes to witnessing Christ. Instead I use the word new converts as a blanket description for every believer engages in soul winning but is either not baptised in the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in other tongues or that does not daily continue in walking in the Spirit especially by praying in other tongues.) Every such work leads to a situation where the converts' faith stands in the wisdom of men and rather than in the power of God. Simply put, those converts are products of our ability to join verses from the Bible together while throwing in some philosophical statements and communication skills. We often end up giving birth to our own children, not God's. Apart from the religious air and the name of the Lord that we often call at such time, such exercises are little different from the process of decamping from one political party to another.
We will notice that at new birth the believer already has a 'portion' of the Holy Ghost in him, which the apostles to whom the Lord was speaking too had. In spite of this they were mandated to wait until they're endued with power from on high by the baptism in the Holy Ghost. That's the only time they could be called and become witnesses of Christ. That's the only time they could convert sinners to Christ. And when it comes to us of this age this commandment is essentially the same and it's in two folds. First, before we can be witnesses of Christ we must be filled with the Holy Ghost. And two for those that are already filled with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues we need to live continually in the habit and strength of God's Spirit, praying daily with all prayers and supplications in the Holy Ghost (which partly entails praying in other tongues, for what will it benefit you if you're baptised in the Holy Spirit but you do not daily pray in the Spirit?). This alone has great impact in birthing Christ in our spirit and ensuring that the converts proceeding from our witnessing are indeed products of the Spirit of God. I pray that the Lord will re-visit all such children born in haste outside of the power of God's Spirit; that He will re-order their christian life after His will. And that the Lord will remind us of this order of the Lord so that we can ensure that conversions coming through us bear fruits from God.
Amen in Jesus' name.
14.03.2010
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