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#480 IT IS NOT JUST MAYBE
Excerpt
from sermon
#302 WE SHALL CALL—GOD WILL ANSWER “He shall call upon me, and I will answer
him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him,” Psalm
91:15.
Receiving
an answer to our prayers has always been contingent upon an unconditional
surrender to God’s will throughout the Old and the New Testaments. You will
never come before the Lord successful in prayer while your heart is in
rebellion to His revealed truth. The Lord wants you and me in unconditional
surrender to His will. You
will see this in 2 Chronicles 7:14, and I want you to see how the verse begins
with the word if. It is contingent
upon. “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves,
and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear
from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
What does it mean to humble
yourself? In Philippians 2:8 Paul writes, speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ:
“He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of
the cross.” Our
text says he shall call upon Him. If you are one of God’s loved ones, you
will humble yourself. It is not a matter of maybe. I
have raised eight children, and just because a child does what I tell him does
not make him a child. He was a child already, but because he is a child, his
will and his rebellion is going to be broken because I love him. That is the
way the Lord deals with His family. Now
we can see the blessedness of Hebrew 12:11: “Now no chastening seems to be
joyful for the present, but grievous; nevertheless, afterward it yields the
peaceable fruit of righteousness to unto them which are exercised thereby.” Do
you know what that peaceable fruit of righteousness is? It is when that little
child has been disciplined and can put her arms around your neck and say,
“Daddy, I want love.” It is when they can come and confess that they were
wrong and ask Daddy to forgive. That is the peaceable fruit of righteousness.
It is the fruit of chastening love. If
you are one of God’s people, it is not a matter of whether or not you are
going to humble yourself. If you are one of the Lord’s, you will humble
yourself. The Lord will bring you that point, and if it takes much chastening,
that is what will happen. Now the Lord’s family is just
like ours. One child needs many stripes to bring them in subjection, and the
other one needs only a frown. Some children only need to know that they have
done something to displease you, and their heart is broken. All the Lord wants
is that you humble yourself. That is what He is saying, and if you humble
yourself, then when you pray, He will hear you. This
is synonymous with 1 John 3:22-24: “And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him,
because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his
sight. And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his
Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment. And he that
keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in him. And hereby we know
that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath given us.”
I
want you to see the blessedness of those who keep that commandment of love.
They are in the Spirit of Christ and keep His commandments. We dwell in Christ
and He dwells in us. Then if we call, He answers. He says, “Here I am.”
That is effectual prayer. Effectual prayer does not take place in a state of
rebellion. That Spirit is a mental
disposition. It is the mental attitude we have. We know that He dwells in us
because we have that Spirit of Christ. We have His mind. We have His thinking.
We have that mental disposition. He has given us that spirit of absolute
unconditional surrender to the will of God.
Amen. How blessed are
they who truly see Gadsby selection, 1838 To see our Devotion archives go to http://archive.mail-list.com/devotion/ or see our Weekly Sermon archives go to http://archive.mail-list.com/sermon/ Forward this Devotion to a friend. You can receive the complete sermons from which these devotions are taken by joining our weekly sermons by email. To subscribe to our Weekly Sermons or Daily Devotions go to http://www.gospelchapel.com |
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