Verse of the Day - weekend 11/27

Through the Bible - Ezekiel 39-42, 2 Peter 2-3

 

Good morning,

Over the past few years we've heard a lot about change.  We've seen change and what many people realize is that they had a different "change" in mind.

What we need most is heart change, as individuals and as a nation.  For Christians this means revival.   I read the following in Ray Ortlund's blog the other day.

 

Horatius Bonar, writing the preface to John Gillies' Accounts of Revival regarding the leaders of the Great Awakening, proposed that men useful to the Holy Spirit for revival are marked in these nine ways:

1.  They are in earnest: "They lived and labored and preached like men on whose lips the immortality of thousands hung."

2.  They are bent on success: "As warriors, they set their hearts on victory and fought with the believing anticipation of triumph, under the guidance of such a Captain as their head."

3.  They are men of faith: "They knew that in due season they should reap, if they fainted not."

4.  They are men of labor: "Their lives are the annals of incessant, unwearied toil of body and soul; time, strength, substance, health, all they were and possessed they freely offered to the Lord, keeping back nothing, grudging nothing."

5.  They are men of patience: "Day after day they pursued what, to the eye of the world, appeared a thankless and fruitless round of toil."

6.  They are men of boldness: "Timidity shuts many a door of usefulness and loses many a precious opportunity; it wins no friends, while it strengthens every enemy.  Nothing is lost by boldness, nor gained by fear."

7.  They are men of prayer: "They were much alone with God, replenishing their own souls out of the living fountain, that out of them might flow to their people rivers of living water."

8.  They are men of strong doctrine: "Their preaching seems to have been of the most masculine and fearless kind, falling on the audience with tremendous power.  It was not vehement, it was not fierce, it was not noisy; it was far too solemn to be such; it was massive, weighty, cutting, piercing, sharper than a two-edged sword."

9.  They are men of deep spirituality: "No frivolity, no flippancy . . . . The world could not point to them as being but slightly dissimilar from itself."

You might say that these are 9 traits or tools to be equipped with if we want to bring about this kind of change. They aren't human tools, they are God tools.

For this weekend's verse we'll go to 2 Corinthians 10 from The Message.

 

2 Corinthians 10:5–6:  "We use our powerful God-tools for smashing warped philosophies, tearing down barriers erected against the truth of God, fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ. Our tools are ready at hand for clearing the ground of every obstruction and building lives of obedience into maturity" (MSG).

Which of these traits,  these tools do you find in yourself?  May we strive to be better equipped to smash the "warped philosophies" of the day.

 

Blessings,
Mike

mikevw@bellsouth.net
mikesvotd.blogspot.com

 

2 Corinthians 10 (New King James Version)

2 Corinthians 10

The Spiritual War

 ¹ Now I, Paul, myself am pleading with you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ—who in presence am lowly among you, but being absent am bold toward you. ² But I beg you that when I am present I may not be bold with that confidence by which I intend to be bold against some, who think of us as if we walked according to the flesh. ³ For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. ⁴ For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, ⁵ casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, ⁶ and being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.