What price are YOU willing to pay?

Our new life begins with a gift.

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 6:23

Salvation is not something we earn. It is not something we buy. It is not something we can create or attain by our own measures.

It is the greatest gift ever given throughout all of the ages to all of mankind. It is offered in a manner neither partial nor prejudiced towards any race, sex, class, orientation, or age.

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life." John 3:16

There are many who choose not to receive it. But for those of us who do, though we may begin our walk with the Lord so joyously, as we go on we begin to realize that things are not quite so easy as they were at first. Rather, many hardships confront and challenge our faith. As we go on in the Lord, we begin to taste the life of suffering that He once lived on this very earth. As we conform to His image and likeness, that means experiencing Him not only as Joy and Peace and Love and Blessing, but also experiencing His suffering, His hardships, His death and resurrection. It was by suffering that He was made perfect forever (Hebrews 7:28). If the Son of God must suffer to be made perfect, why would we ever think we could escape and be made perfect with a life full of blessing alone?

"The seeking one realizes that a price must be paid if she wants to follow the Lord. Her love for Him will not leave her untouched any longer, for from this point onward He will touch every aspect of her living....We can no longer expect that things will come cheaply. The Lord makes it clear that if you pay Him five cents, He will give you something worth five cents, and if you pay Him 100 dollars, He will give you something worth 100 dollars. If you give Him one year, He will give you something worth one year in return; if you give Him ten years, He will give you something worth ten years in return. How much blessing He gives you depends on the price you are willing to pay. Our relationship with the Lord is no longer one in which He draws us, and then we pursue Him, or in which He freely supplies us, and thus we enjoy Him. Now the Lord demands, 'Can you pay the price? Can I touch your living?'...

You may think that the Spirit works in you freely, at no cost to you. However, at a certain point in your Christian life, when you say, 'Lord, bless me,' He will answer, 'I will bless you, but at a price.' The blessing referred to here is not your initial salvation, for the Lord does save you freely. After receiving salvation, however, you must pay a price in order to grow in life and become mature before the Lord. In this stage, the way you live is by paying a price before God."

So I ask you again...What price are YOU willing to pay?

So that you remember to love only Him, and nothing else.

This past week I've had a lot of 'quiet time.'

It has mostly consisted of sleep and reading books and trying to wean myself off of narcotics (I had a procedure done late last week).

The past few days, despite incredible exhaustion, I've been a little more with it mentally. And I'm finally beginning to open myself up to processing this past year...I haven't gotten very far. A LOT has happened, internally and externally. Mostly really amazing things, but I feel like a very heavily kneaded lump of dough. I'll post more and share more as I work through and process things with the Lord these coming weeks, but I really wanted to share this excerpt with you all.

It comes from the most recent Fellowship Journal, a small publication put together by some members in our church network to encourage and build up the rest of the saints. These two paragraphs are pulled from a message given in the Fall of 2011.

"Once you love the Lord --- really love Him --- your new life begins, and this new life is filled with sufferings. This new life is divine and heavenly, but as you enjoy the heavenly things, remember, with this new life, a great deal of suffering will also come to you. Do you understand this? The Lord will come to you and do unreasonable things, things which may surprise you. You may ask the Lord, 'Must You do this? Why? Must this be so? Can't it be another way?' It seems the Lord becomes very firm and says, 'No, it must be this way; that's it.' If you say, 'It doesn't make sense,' He will reply, ' I don't care if it makes sense, or if it's fair or not; that's what I want to do.'

The Lord likes to come in and say, 'Can I interrupt a little bit of your life? Can I interrupt a little bit of your plan? Can I make you perhaps not so happy? Can I bother you a little bit?' Do you know why the Lord wants to do this? So that you remember to love only Him, and nothing else. He would say, 'Even in all your joyful times, remember to lay hold of Me. I need you, and I want to bless you with Myself.'"

Tozer: Following Hard After God

An excerpt from A.W. Tozer's, The Pursuit of God
Chapter 1, 
pp 13, 17-18

"God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires, and suffers as any other person may. In making Himself known to us He stays by the familiar pattern of personality. He communicates with us through the avenues of our minds, our wills and our emotions. The continuous and unembarrassed exchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of the New Testament religion....

...I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain.

Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.

If we would find God amid all the religious externals, we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now, as always, God discovers Himself to "babes" and hides Himself in thick darkness from the wise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to Him. We must strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few). We must put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor of childhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond.

When religion has said its last word, there is little that we need other than God Himself. The evil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in full revelation. In the and lies our great woe. If we omit the and we shall soon find God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives been secretly longing."

The strength of my heart

I'm loooong overdue for a new post. To all my readers out there, I apologize for being the worst blogger in the world. Good news- I can only get better! :p It's just been so hard with all the traveling on weekends and late night/all-nighters (yes, all-nighters) during the weekdays.

I want to share a little on my recent experiences with the Lord. It's definitely been a struggle here spiritually, away from the church, away from my companions and family. When I say "struggle" I don't mean a rebelliousness or anything against the Lord, it's just been really hard to carve out time to spend with Him. 

I have traveled so much in this short month that I've been here, and every single day there is something new that moves me and awes me. I get so excited about every new thing that we see or discover, and it's been so eye-opening and, to a large extent, quite fulfilling....

But...what I'm realizing is how misleading that fulfillment can be. Traveling has brought me so much joy and I already feel so changed. I feel so blessed to have been provided this experience, and I feel so covered by the Lord and by prayers from back home. I think what the Lord has been bringing me through is that, as wonderful an experience as He wants me to have here in Europe, all the joys and excitements and gratifications I experience here (as healthy as they all may be) can still distract me from the REAL enjoyment, the REAL satisfaction, the REAL life supply: my Lord Jesus Christ. 

I've had days where experience upon experience has been so satisfying, and I feel like it will never get old standing under the towering Duomo, or sitting atop Piazza Michelangelo looking out over the city of Florence with the mountains softly fading into the distance, or walking along the Ponte Vecchio, observing all the little jewelry boxes of little gold shops opening up their gates to reveal the hidden treasures beyond their thresholds... But at the end of the day, the satisfaction starts to wean a little, and the surge of fulfillment and vitality that I had felt throughout the day begins to fade. Upon recognizing that growing emptiness within,  I repent, realizing that not once had turned to the Lord for my supply that day.

Well, this past week and a half, I've been trying something "new": morning revival. (Or a morning devotional).  Growing up in the church life that I did, I always knew it was something I should do, that it'd make a difference in my day and my spiritual life. Alas...it was never quite implemented into daily life, as hard as I'd try---just not a morning person.

Anyways, I've been making a point to have morning revival (usually while I eat breakfast), and I've been spending a lot of time in the Psalms. This will probably sound horrible, but I've never been a huge fan of the Psalms. I always thought they were beautifully written and poetic, but in terms of a "supply", I always thought they were "too emotional" for me. And especially in times when I'm super emotional, I don't want to feed the flames even more. I tend to gravitate more towards Paul's epistles, especially those of high truths. Well anyway... for whatever reason, I've been in the Psalms, and let's just say they've been exactly what I've needed. The Lord has definitely been working on my heart in this aspect. So here are some verses that I read this morning that fit exactly what I've been feeling.

Psalm 73:21-26, 28
   21 When my soul was embittered,

when I was pricked in heart,

22 I was brutish and ignorant;

I was like a beast toward you.

23 Nevertheless, I am continually with you;

you hold my right hand.

24 You guide me with your counsel,

and afterward you will receive me to glory.

25 Whom have I in heaven but you?

And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.

26 My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

28 But for me it is good to be near God;

I have made the Lord God my refuge,

that I may tell of all your works.