OSWALD CHAMBERS*
…come, follow Me.
LUKE 18: 22
When Jesus heard this he said to him, “There is still one thing left for you: sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have a treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.
Where our individual desire dies and sanctified surrender lives. One of the greatest hindrances in coming to Jesus is the excuse of our own individual temperament. We make our temperament and our natural desires barriers to coming to Jesus. Yet the first thing we realize when we do come to Jesus is that He pays no attention whatsoever to our natural desires. We have the idea that we can dedicate our gifts to God. However, you cannot dedicate what is not yours. There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1). If you will give God your right to yourself, He will make a holy experiment out of you— and His experiments always succeed. The one true mark of a saint of God is the inner creativity that flows from being totally surrendered to Jesus Christ. In the life of a saint there is this amazing Well, which is a continual Source of original life. The Spirit of God is a Well of water springing up perpetually fresh. A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus. Never try to make your experience a principle for others, but allow God to be as creative and original with others as He is with you.
If you abandon everything to Jesus, and come when He says, “Come,” then He will continue to say, “Come,” through you. You will go out into the world reproducing the echo of Christ’s “Come.” That is the result in every soul who has abandoned all and come to Jesus.
Have I come to Him? Will I come now?
LORD, HELP YOURSELF TO MY LIFE!
*MY UTMOST FOR HIS HIGHEST
PRAYER
Our Father, You have given us many invitations to come to You. You have invited us to come with our sins, to come with our troubles, to come with our mistakes, to come with our cares, to come with our sorrows.
You have told us to come at all times, that we shall never be unwelcome, never be turned away, and never find You too busy to hear us.
You have promised us mercy for our sins, comfort for our sorrows, strength for our duties, wisdom for our ignorance, when we come to You. We thank You for all these precious invitations and assurances.
What would we do, O God, if we might not thus come to You? To whom else could we go? There is no other in all the universe who could help us — as we must be helped. Our hearts are full of praise and rejoicing, that we may thus come to You. There is nothing we cannot bring to You — nothing too small to bring — and nothing too large. We thank You that we are so blessed, that we have all Your divine love and grace to help us in our times of need. We need no other help, but Yours. We come to you with all our burdens.
We have sins. These are our worst burdens. They will sink us to eternal despair unless we find help. We thank You that the Lord Jesus bore our sins, and bore them away. In His name, depending upon redeeming love and mercy, we come with our sins.
We have other needs. We are not strong enough for duty. We cannot stand against the world and the power of Satan. We have no wisdom for life’s problems, its duties, its responsibilities. We need strength, we need wisdom, we need grace — for every moment!
So we come to You, our Father as Your redeemed children. Receive us, bless us, keep us, help us. We ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.