“When you fight to get victory, then you have lost the battle at the very outset… What then should you do when he attacks? You should simply look up and praise the Lord. ‘Lord, I am faced with a situation that I cannot possibly meet. Thine enemy the Devil has brought it about to compass my downfall, but I praise Thee that Thy victory is an all-inclusive victory. It covers this situation, too. I praise Thee that I have already full victory in this matter.’”

This quotation intrigued me because it reveals where our trust for the victory really is. Are we looking up to Heaven for help OR are we looking down from Heaven for appropriation of His already gained victory? So much of the time we head down the road of life asking God to come along and help us when that isn’t what He is really after. He doesn’t want to “help” us. He wants to lead in this relationship. His desire is for us to count ourselves dead to self, living from Heaven the life that is only Christ’s. His desire is for His people to look and live from Him… To see from His perspective… Only then do we truly live out the resurrected life. This is deep stuff! God wants us looking down from our position in Christ, not looking up from our condition. - This is something that God must teach us as we go through trials.

People who say they have no regrets must struggle with their memory. Maybe “regrets” is too strong of a word, I don’t know. But as I look back on my saved life I have many things I would have done differently. There are a good strong handful of conversations I have had with folks over the past many years that I would like to have back. I wish I could reinstate the “automatic do-over rule” that worked so wonderfully in our back yard wiffle ball games in 4th grade. But such is not the nature of this life we live. And it amazes me as I continue to grow in the Lord just how much growing I have yet to do! At each stage of life God reveals new areas in my life that scream of sin, insecurity, and immaturity. Sometimes, when God reveals more of me to myself, I will say, “Have we not progressed past this point!?!?” The sad answer is “no.” God is still about His work in me. I have a lot of growing up to do!

“Norman Douty writes, ‘If I am to be like Him, then God in His grace must do it, and the sooner I come to recognize it the sooner I will be delivered from another form of bondage. Throw down every endeavor and say, I cannot do it, the more I try the farther I get from His likeness. What shall I do? Ah, the Holy Spirit says, You cannot do it; just withdraw; come out of it. You have been in the arena, you have been endeavoring, you are a failure, come out and sit down, and as you sit there behold Him, look at Him. Don’t try to be like Him, just look at Him. Just be occupied with Him. Forget about trying to be like Him. Instead of letting that fill your mind and heart, let Him fill it. Just behold Him, look upon Him through the Word. Come to the Word for one purpose and that is to meet the Lord. Not to get your mind crammed full of things about the sacred Word, but come to it to meet the Lord. Make it to be a medium, not of Biblical scholarship, but of fellowship with Christ. Behold the Lord.’

Thou sayest, Fit me, fashion me for Thee.

Stretch forth thine empty hands, and be thou stilll:

O restless soul, thou dost but hinder Me

By valiant purpose and by steadfast will.

Behold the summer flowers beneath the sun,

In stillness his great glory they behold;

And sweetly thus his mighty word is done.

And resting in his gladness they unfold.

So are the sweetness and joy Divine

Thine, O beloved, and the work is mine.” - Ter Steegen

The freeing part of all of this is that it isn’t on me to be transformed.  That is God’s job.  My job is to be in His Presence and behold the beauty of the Lord.

The following quotation from Miles Stanford so perfectly describes the life of a young believer that I wanted to post it this morning.  It continues to encourage my heart to know that God is having His way over time and that He isn’t in a hurry.  And He has you in His arms and develops you just as the Oak tree is developed…  through much sunshine and rain…  through times of observable growth and through times of seeming pointless existence…  over much time…  A strong, hard-wood tree takes longer to develop and grow but it also is more stable and strong being more apt to withstand difficulties.  Nothing is wasted with God.  And there is method to what some would describe as madness.  What a blessing!

“It seems that most believers have difficulty in realizing and facing up to the inexorable fact that God does not hurry in His development of our Christian life.  He is working from and for eternity!  So many feel they are not making progress unless they are swiftly and constantly forging ahead.  Now it is true that the new convert often begins and continues for some time at a fast rate.  But this will not continue if there is to be healthy growth and ultimate maturity.  God Himself will modify the pace.  This is important to see, since in most instances when seeming declension begins to set in, it is not, as so many think, a matter of backsliding.

John Darby makes it plain that ‘it is God’s way to set people aside after their first start, that self-confidence may die down.  Thus Moses was forty years.  On his first start he had to run away.  Paul was three years also, after his first testimony.  Not that God did not approve the first earnest testimony.  We must get to know ourselves and that we have no strength.  Thus we must learn, and then leaning on the Lord we can with more maturity, and more experientially, deal with souls.’

Since the Christian life matures and becomes fruitful by the principle of growth (2 Peter 3:18), rather than by struggle and ‘experiences,’ much time is involved.  Unless we see and acquiesce to this there is bound to be constant frustration to say nothing of resistance to our Father’s development processes for us.”

     There is a notion which blesses my heart and allows me to hit the “reset button” on my perceptions through failure.  It is summed up in the Green Letters written by Miles Stanton:

     “We ought, instead of wanting no trials before victory, no exercise for patience, to be willing to take them from God’s hand as a means.  I say - and say it deliberately - trials, obstacles, difficulties, and sometimes defeats, are the very food of faith.  On this same subject, James McConkey wrote:  ‘Faith is dependence upon God.  And this God-dependence only begins when self-dependence ends.  And self-dependence only comes to its end, with some of us, when sorrow, suffering, affliction, broken plans and hopes brings us to that place of self-helplessness and defeat.  And only then do we find that we have learned the lesson of faith; to find our tiny craft of life rushing onward to a blessed victory of life and power and service undreamt of in the days of our fleshly strength and self-reliance.’”

     So if you find yourself “let down” or disappointed with your results it is likely that it is exactly what The Doctor ordered so that you could be weaned off of yourself.  And this can’t be learned in a book and applied.  It must be lived in order to be learned.  And the cool thing is that you will get plenty of opportunities to learn it.  But, to me, the blessing of blessings is that EVEN MY FAILURES are not wasted with God.  He is using all of it to form me into His image and engage me with His purposes and power.  Praise God!

By various maxims, forms, and rules,

That pass for wisdom in the schools,

I sought my passions to restrain;

But all my efforts proved in vain.

But since my Saviour I have known

My rules are all reduced to One,

To keep my Lord by faith in view,

This strength supplies and motive too.

     I like the line “My rules are all reduced to One.”  Notice that John Newton capitalizes “One” because he was saying Christ is the rule.  The rules are no longer the rules!  Living by “what’s right” or by duty or by any human invention is living by the law which was nothing more than our “schoolmaster” (Galatians 2).  All it did was prove our gilt.  It didn’t redeem us.  It didn’t perfect us.  It just proved that we were worthy of death.  So then, why do we try to live according to human effort?  One answer is that human effort is all we know early on in our Christian life.  So as we grow and fail in these feeble attempts to serve God in the power of the unredeemed flesh, we begin to realize the impossibility of it all.  At this point one of two things happens…  Either our frustration causes us to quit it all and serve ourselves - God forbid!  OR our frustration causes us to cry out to God for Him to do His work in spite of our failures.  We begin to understand that God fights for us and desires to do ALL OF THE WORK Himself.  We need only watch Him do His work while we pray and yield. 

    ”The condition-centered Christian has no other recourse but to fight against indwelling sin, and thus seek to control self as best he can.  Added to this intolerable burden is the frustrating fact that God does not seem to help him in this endeavor.  He is immersed in the defeat of Romans 7.  He battles here below, only to lose; he should rest above, where he is sure to win.”

     This passage from The Green Letters shows why we struggle like we do…  After salvation the Bible likens us to little babies who need to grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.  We don’t really understand HOW to relate to God.  We don’t understand the life of the SELF.  We don’t get how they relate the one to the other.  For the next 15 + years we find ourselves going through cycles of failure and success.  We don’t seem to grasp that victory has come after complete dependence upon Christ and failure has come from self.  As a result, God continues to allow us to experience it… cycle after cycle after cycle after cycle.  Finally, we realize what God has been doing all along.  Finally, we come to the place of utter frustration and realize that we can’t make SELF produce results.  We realize that SELF will NEVER be improved.  God so removes His hand from SELF that one of two things takes place…  We either give into the despair and give up on God OR we throw our entire beings into Christ, declare and reckon ourselves dead, and live in His resurrected freedom.

     Those of you caught in the cycle of sin…  Do you understand where you are???  You are living in the power of SELF that can never be controlled or purified.  God is teaching you the futility of hanging onto your life.  Declare the death that Paul spoke of in Galatians 2:20:  “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; YET NOT I, but CHRIST LIVETH IN ME…”  The old you is ALREADY dead.  True Life is Christ in us.  When Jesus died, I died there with Him.  When Jesus arose from the dead, I arose with Him!  His life is the only life.     

     Miles Stanford:  “This entire life-out-of-death process is directly related to our reckoning upon our position of life out of death.  As we yearn to be used, to mulitply, to be brought to harvest, the Holy Spirit takes us down into death in our experience.  He ‘plants’ or ‘buries’ us in this difficult situation or that dark area and, as the old life is thus held in the place of death (inoperative), the new life grows up and is manifested not only in us, but in others through us.  ‘So then death worketh in us, but life in you [others]‘ (2 Cor. 4:12).

     Conversely, when we are self-centered and refuse the path of the cross, we think little of others and everything of ourselves.  We scheme, fight, maneuver, and even pray to ‘abide alone.’  But the Lord Jesus has established the principle that ‘whosoever will save his life shall lose it [no fruit, no harvest]:  but whosoever will lose his life for my sake ['alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake'], the same shall save it [shall see it multiplied and harvestd in others]‘  (Luke 9:24).

     Actually, the Holy Spirit patiently uses everything (and everyone) in His process of bringing us to the grain-of-wheat stage.  When we are self-centered and carnal, He applies the appropriate pressures - perhaps in the physical body, the home, or the place of work - thereby, in time, causing us to hunger to be Christ-centered.

     When we begin to see and hate the self-life for what it is, when we begin to see and love the Lord Jesus for who He is, then we become willing for the Holy Spirit to take self into death in order that Christ may be formed in us…”

     I love the description given here in the Green Letters because I have seen it time and time again in my own life.  God is constantly working in us, in the midst of our rebellion or obedience, to bring us to the place of fruitfulness.  The only way we lose is if we quit.  He will get us where He wants us to be as long as we continue on.

     “Watchman Nee startles many by saying, ‘God’s way of deliverance is altogether different from man’s way.  Man’s way is to try to suppress sin by seeking to overcome it; God’s way is to remove the sinner.  Many Christians mourn over their weakness, thinking that if only they were stronger all would be well.  The idea that, because failure to lead a holy life is due to our impotence, something more is therefore demanded of us, leads naturally to this false conception of the way of deliverance.  If we are preoccupied with the power of sin and with our inability to meet it, then we naturally conclude that to gain the victory over sin we must have more power.  ‘If only I were stronger,’ we say, ‘I could overcome my violent outbursts of temper,’ and so we plead with the Lord to strengthen us that we may exercise more self-control.  But this is altogether wrong; this is not Christianity.  God’s means of delivering us from sin is not by making us stronger and stronger, but by making us weaker and weaker.  This is surely a peculiar way of victory, you say; but it is the divine way.  God sets us free from the dominion of sin, not by strengthening our old man but by crucifying him; not by helping him to do anything but by removing him from the scene of the action.’”

     This passage in the Green Letters is concluded with the following paragraph which brings the notion of “Stop asking God for help” full circle.  Why should we stop asking God for help? - Because it implies, by its very request, that WE are the ones at work and that we simply need God to aide US!  No.  We need to completely remove SELF, get out of God’s way, and allow Him to have His way.  Now watch how this section of the book is concluded…

     “The believer does not have to beg for help.  He does have to thankfully appropriate that which is already his in Christ; for, ‘…the just shall live by faith…’ (Heb. 10:38a).  And dear old Andrew Murray encourages us with, ‘Even though it is slow, and with many a stumble, the faith that always thanks Him - not for experiences, but for the promises on which it can rely - goes on from strength to strength, still increasing in the blessed assurance that God himself will perfect His work in us (Phil. 1:6).”

     I wanted to follow up with more Green Letters quotations on this idea of not asking God for help.  Initially, doesn’t it sound totally anti-biblical?  In actuality, it is EXACTLY the mindset of the Spirit-filled believer.  There is a subtle, and yet profound, distinction we need to make:  We don’t need the Holy Spirit to help us, as if we were doing something supernatural in the lives of others.  We can’t do anything that is eternal!  The self-life is what you and I were born with, the natural life, that will one day die.  It isn’t the supernatural life that God intends that we live from.  God intends that we reckon/ count as true that our old natural life/ self-life has already been crucified with Christ and that it is His life ALONE that is lived out through our lives.  OK…  So here’s another quotation to check out…

     “William R. Newell said, ‘Satan’s great device is to drive earnest souls back to beseeching God for what God says has already been done’!  Each of us had to go beyond the ‘help’ stage for our new birth, and thank Him for what He has already done on our behalf.  God could never answer a prayer for help in the matter of justification.  The same principle holds true for the Christian life.  Our Lord Jesus waits to be wanted, and to be all in us and do all through us.  ‘For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.  And ye are complete in him’ (Col. 2:9, 10).  God is not trusted, not honored, in our continually asking Him for help.  In the face of ‘my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus’ (Phil. 4:19), how can we beg for help?  Our responsibility is to see in the Word all that is ours in Christ, and then thank and trust Him for that which we need.”

     This quotation so resonates with me!  It is so profound and life transforming and freeing.  Spend some time meditating on it and see if God’s Spirit would reveal this truth to you.  If you sit there and this doesn’t excite you, it is probably because God has you in a different place and is teaching you different things right now in your life.  Relax and enjoy where God has you.   

     We need to stop asking God for help.  Doesn’t that sound crazy???  But it isn’t.  We really do need to get out of that mode.  The reason is found in the implication of who is doing the work. - You are.  YOU need help to get it done; but YOU aren’t the one who is supposed to be doing it anyway. 

     In a chapter called “Help” in the Green Letters, this idea is expanded.  I think it is THE KEY to an effortless, effective, Spirit-filled life.  “For most of us, it is time to stop asking God for help.  He didn’t help us to get saved, and He doesn’t intend to help us live the Christian life.  Immaturity considers the Lord Jesus a Helper.  Maturity knows Him to be Life itself.  J. E. Conant wrote, ‘Christian living is not our living with Christ’s help, it is Christ living His life in us.  Therefore that portion of our lives that is not His living is not Christian living; and that portion of our service that is not His doing is not Christian service; for all such life and service have but a human and natural source, and Christian life and service have a supernatural and spiritual source.’”

     I don’t know if you are able to get this yet or not.  It takes time to learn the futility of ”doing a work for God.”  You have to fail over and over again until you figure out that you are unable to produce supernatural results.  Only our supernatural God can produce supernatural results.  We don’t need Him to help us produce results.  He MUST.  We need to die to ourselves…  our agendas….  our programs…  everything that is done in the power of self…  and realize WE CAN’T!