Faith

Neither faith nor love are ours

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That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love. (Eph. 3:17)

“To experience Christ we need faith and love (1 Tim. 1:14). Faith enables us to apprehend Christ, and love enables us to enjoy Him. Neither faith nor love are ours; they are His. His faith becomes our faith, by which we believe in Him, and His love becomes our love, by which we love Him. When we are rooted and grounded in His love, we grow and are built up in His life.”

(Ep 3:17, footnote 4)

Excerpts from “Twelve Baskets Full” by Watchman Nee

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“Sin yields sorrow; salvation yields peace and joy.

If you love the Lord Jesus, you should tell Him.

God says He will bless us when we obey Him.

To have fellowship with the Lord Jesus is far more important than to work for Him.

May every morning become your life’s new beginning.

The Bible was given to us as a teacher for this present age. Have you read it?

For the continuous growth of life in Christ, you need ceaseless prayer.

God says, “I will keep thee.” Faith answers, “Lord! I thank You because You surely will keep me.”

If God puts the tears of His people in a bottle, how could He not listen to their prayers?

The mercy of God, the love of Christ, and the coming glory are all calling God’s children to offer their lives.

To have a true walk with God just one time can cause your heart to marvel and worship more than a hundred years of walking on this earth by natural sight. Your duty is to be at rest in God’s hand under whatever circumstances there may be.

God reveals Himself when we are in need (Exo. 15:22-26). When we consider ourselves to be strong, we rely on our own strength, resulting in spiritual weakness. When we know how useless we are and thus rely on His strength, we are strong.

Difficulties provide the atmosphere for miracles and are the initial step to miracles. If there is to be a great miracle, what is encountered must not only be something hard, but something absolutely impossible to overcome. Whether the Lord has spoken or not, we can fully trust in a Savior who is without worry or fear.

If God leads you to walk a way that you know, it will not benefit you as much as if He would lead you to take the way that you do not know. This forces you to have hundreds and thousands of conversations with Him, resulting in a journey that is an everlasting memorial between you and Him.

Your Leader will lead you to walk an untrodden way, to go down a path you never dreamed of. He is afraid of nothing, and He wishes you to be afraid of nothing also. He is with you. In desperate situations it is His joy to see His children grasping His hands.

…

It is abnormal for a saint to seek worldly glories. Those who love the Lord do not wish to be great in this world. Among the saints in the church of God, however, many still crave for a high position and to be called Rabbi. The crisis with the saints is not in the world but in the church!

How wise is the Lord! He told us to call each other only brother and to use no other title. It is regrettable that many, even among the brothers, want to be a great brother! If we have not allowed the Holy Spirit to work the Spirit of the cross in us, we cannot avoid a wicked heart to pursue a name.

Many consider that the world is in the world, without realizing that the world is also in the church and in the hearts of the saints! Unless one is truly dead to the world, it is hard to rid oneself of this kind of heart. Only those saints who have truly died with the Lord on the cross can be dead to the world in the church and in their hearts.”

Every difficulty is food for us

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Only do not rebel against Jehovah, nor should you fear the people of the land, for they are our bread. Their protection has been removed from them, and Jehovah is with us; do not fear them. (Num. 14:9)

“Every time you meet a difficulty, every time you find yourself in an impossible situation, ask yourself this question: Am I going to starve here, or am I going to eat? If you are relying on the Lord for victory and allow His overcoming life to be manifested in you, you will find fresh nourishment and increased vitality, and you will be fed once again. Bear in mind that people who do not eat well cannot grow into maturity. Our bread is not only the word of God, our meat is not only to do His will, our bread is also the Anakim — the difficulties that are in our way. Many people take the word of God as their bread and the doing of His will as their meat, but they have not eaten the Anakim. Many eat too little of the Anakim. The more we eat the Anakim, the stronger we will become. Caleb is a grand illustration of this. Because he accepted the Anakim as “bread,” he was still full of vitality at the age of eighty-five. His strength was the same at eighty-five as it was at forty. So many Anakim had been assimilated by him over the years that he had developed a constitution which showed no trace of age. This is also true in the spiritual realm. Some brothers and sisters have met few difficulties, but it is obvious that there are many weaknesses in their lives. They are weak before the Lord because they have not consumed enough Anakim. However, there are those who have met and overcome difficulty after difficulty, temptation after temptation; they are full of vigor because they have fed well on Anakim. We have to eat our difficulties and our temptation. Every difficulty and every temptation Satan puts in our way is food for us. This is a God-appointed means of spiritual progress. The sight of any trouble strikes terror into the heart of those who do not have faith, but those who trust Him say, “Here comes my food!” Praise and thank the Lord, all our trials, without exception, are bread for us. Every trial brings in growth after we have eaten of it. As we accept one trial after another, we are more and more richly nourished.”

(God’s Keeping Power [booklet], pp. 6-8)

The choice is yours

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Trust in God, not in your own understanding. (Prov. 3:5)

Serve God, not mammon. (Matt. 6:24)

Do not regard the temporary things which are seen, but the things which are not seen which are eternal. (2 Cor. 4:18)

Walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Cor. 5:7)

Live to God, not yourself. (2 Cor. 5:15)

We belong to the new creation, not the old creation. (2 Cor. 5:17)

Please God, not man. (Gal. 1:10)

Live by His life, not yours. (Gal. 2:20)

Only Christ is gain, all else is refuse. (Phil. 3:8)

What is it to live by faith?

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“What is it to live by faith? It is what the three Hebrew men Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego said to Nebuchadnezzar:  ‘Our God… will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if He does not… we will not serve your gods nor worship the golden image that you have set up’ (Dan. 3:17-18). They were saying even if God did not save them, they still would not change. This is to live by faith.”

(CWWN, vol. 11, Living by Faith)

Don’t look for things other than they are

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“Surely You are a God who hides Himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.”  (Isaiah 45:15)

“The very fact that the church has continued on this earth for nearly two thousand years is the result of the working of Him who is a God who hides himself. It is often true that the greater the display accompanying any work, the less the divine content; and the more silent the work and the less our awareness of it, the greater the divine content. Since all the work we do is done unto Him who hides Himself, it must be based on faith, not on sight. [2 Cor. 5:7]

I trust these words will help some of us to realize that when we are most conscious of impotence, God is often most powerfully present. Don’t look for greater things. Don’t look for things other than they are. Don’t set your expectation on some great vision or on some great experience. And don’t expect anything outward, for the God who hides himself is at work within your life, and He is working mightily. Your responsibility is to cooperate with Him by responding to His voice within — that ‘still small voice,’ that voice that seems so much a part of your own feelings that you scarcely recognize it as a voice at all. To that voice, registered in the deepest depths of your being, you must say, ‘Amen,’ for there, secretly and ceaselessly, the God who hides himself is working.”

(A God Who Hides Himself, Chapter 1, Section 6)