Knowing Jesus

"I must know Jesus Christ as Saviour before His teaching has any meaning for me other than that of an ideal which leads to despair." --Oswald Chambers

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Chambers explains:  "The Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the natural man--the very thing Jesus means it to do.  As long as we have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out our Lord's teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are willing to come to him as paupers and receive from Him."

Chambers says Jesus, "came to make me what He teaches I should be."  He notes that the Sermon on the Mount begins with "Blessed are the paupers in spirit" because that is the entrance to His kingdom.  Only once in His kingdom can we "be born again of the Spirit of God."  

Why is this important to know?

I accepted Christ as my Savior when I was eight, but did not learn about the role of the Holy Spirit until I was 28.  I spent those 20 years trying to "be good."  Until I was 18 my family moved just about every year.  I saw it as a chance to start over and be better because no one knew the old me.  The next 10 years were spent in continual self-improvement schemes, but I was soon back to being my old self each time.  When I was 28 my dad gave me a Living New Testament (a paraphrased version) and I began reading it.  Until then I had not read the Bible because I found it too difficult to understand.  Then, because of my renewed interest in understanding what it meant to be a Christian and through a series of circumstances, I came upon a book about the beginnings of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and started attending their meetings for worship.  It was in that first silent meeting for worship that I was praying about something that weighed heavily on my heart when a fellow stood and spoke the words he felt led to share--the very words I needed to hear.  It was through that experience that I understood that I could not change myself--only God could through the surrender of my will to His.  And the amazing thing was, once I began to rely on God, I began to understand what I read in the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible.

That was almost 40 years ago and I can attest that our walk with the Lord is just that--a slow, step-by-step walk of becoming more and more like Him.  The Good News is that we are made righteous in His eyes immediately!  Then we must "work out" our salvation, as we submit ourselves to his loving work in our lives--to mold and make us into His image.

Father, whenever I feel "bent out of shape" it's because I'm resisting the work of the Holy Spirit in my life.  Help me to relax into your loving Hands so that I might continually be shaped into a vessel that is pleasing to You.


Link to Scripture:  Matthew 5:3

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