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A Personal “Will” For The New Year
I WILL:
LIKE PAUL – FORGET those things which are behind and press forward.
LIKE DAVID – LIFT up mine eyes unto God for my help and strength.
LIKE ABRAHAM – WALK by faith in God.
LIKE ENOCH – WALK in daily fellowship with my Heavenly Father.
LIKE JOHOSAPATH – PREPARE my heart to seek the Lord.
LIKE MOSES – CHOOSE Godly things over temporal things.
LIKE DANIEL – COMMUNE with God every day.
LIKE JOB – BE faithful under all circumstances.
LIKE CALEB and JOSHUA – REFUSE to be discouraged because of challenging circumstances.
LIKE JOSEPH – RUN from the Devils’ temptations.
LIKE GIDEON – ADVANCE, knowing that God is a majority.
LIKE AARON and HUR – SUPPORT the leadership of the church with my prayers and cooperation.
LIKE ANDREW – STRIVE to lead others to Jesus.
LIKE STEPHEN – MANIFEST a forgiving spirit of ill treatment.
LIKE JESUS – DO good unto everybody.
Christian to Christian
Work with me on this one. Imagine briefly that in some sort of mind-boggling, utterly fantastic twist in the master plan, I get to say who goes to heaven and who goes to hell. Wouldn’t that be cute?
“Hey Oz, what’s your verdict on Brother Joe?” “Brother Joe – send him below, I don’t like his attitude. He never said ‘hi’ to me the last time I saw him.” “And what about this Sister Sally?”
“Send her there with Joe too. She thinks she’s hot stuff.”
“Oh, and how about Brother Ray?” “Ray, ol’ Ray? Send him on up to heaven; he’s a good ol’ boy – paid me back the money he owed me – on time too.”
You get the point. Having me or anyone else breath- ing in charge of other people’s salvation and condemnation wouldn’t be cute at all. It would be just another outlandish reminder of the fickle way that we are by nature.
Thankfully for all of us, in the real way of things, God, our Creator, knows all about us and keeps Himself in charge of deciding where each soul will go when it’s through here on the time side.
And He makes His decisions by looking into the hearts of folks, something that we weak-in-the-flesh mortals could never, ever do.
Yet even though we know all that, because of what we are, we still tend to judge and condemn folks. So we need a lot of prayer and a lot of Spiritual guidance in that regard.
The Spirit often helps me catch myself by bringing to mind absurd notions such as the aforementioned scenario. And every now and then when I slip, something will also happen – through the Spirit – as it did once during a visit at a church out of town.
At first sight of one of the brothers in that congrega- tion, I immediately thought to myself: “This guy looks like a real backslider. He’s probably so full of sin he’s headed to- ward losing his salvation.”
It turned out that the brother was one of the church’ highly respected deacons.
Leave the judging and the saving and the condemn-
ing to God. That’s what the Spirit also keeps telling me.
“Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God,” (1 Cor. 4:5).