VERSE: “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” Isaiah 6:8
MY THOUGHT: This week’s entries were so powerful, I’ve decided to let them speak for themselves. They cry out to each of us to respond to the call God has on our lives with complete abandon and absolute joy. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” the Lord asks today.
I hope like Isaiah, you and I will answer with a resounding, “Here am I, Lord. Send me.”
January 14th – God did not address the call to Isaiah; Isaiah overheard God saying, “Who will go for us?” The call of God is not for the special few, it is for everyone. Whether or not I hear God’s call depends upon the state of my ears; and what I hear depends upon my disposition. “Many are called but few are chosen,” that is, few prove themselves the chosen one. The chosen ones are those who have come into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ whereby their disposition has been altered and their ears unstopped, and they hear the still small voice questioning all the time, “Who will go for us?” It is not a question of God singling out a man and saying, “Now, you go.” God did not lay a strong compulsion on Isaiah; Isaiah was in the presence of God and he overheard the call, and realized that there was nothing else for him but to say, in conscious freedom, “Here am I, send me.”
January 15th – No one enters into the experience of entire sanctification without going through a “white funeral” – the burial of the old life. If there has never been this crisis of death, sanctification is nothing more than a vision….
Have you come to your last days really? You have come to them often in sentiment, but have you come to them really? You cannot go to your funeral in excitement, or die in excitement. Death means you stop being. Do you agree with God that you stop being the striving, earnest kind of Christian you have been? We skirt the cemetery and all the time refuse to go to death. It is not striving to go to death, it is dying – “baptized into His death.”
January 16th – The call of God is not the echo of my nature…As long I consider my personal temperament and think about what I am fitted for, I shall never hear the call of God.
January 18th – Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him…Are we being more devoted to service than to Jesus Christ?
January 19th – Whenever God gives a vision to a saint, He puts him, as it were, in the shadow of His hand, and the saint’s duty is to be still and listen…Never try and help God fulfill His word. Abraham went through thirteen years of silence, but in those years all self-sufficiency was destroyed; there was no possibility left of relying on common-sense ways. Those years of silence were a time of discipline, not of displeasure.
Complete dependence on Him. That is the life of a sold-out Lover of God. Not rushing here and there in an attempt to do something for God, but so intimately acquainted with the Father that we learn to wait on Him. So that when He says go, we go. Not in our own strength – but in the strength of the Lord.