I am currently sitting in the Waynesboro McDonald's doing my quiet time and doing some camp prep. (I'm also getting some pretty funny looks because "doing work" in a restaurant or coffee shop is just not apart of the culture here).
I've been reading through Oswald Chamber's "My Utmost for His Highest" this year, and I absolutely love how he puts things and gives insight into the spiritual life. As I'm getting ready to leave for camp in two days, both physically and spiritually, Chamber's reading for today really puts some things into focus for me. I'm not normally a fan of some illustrations, but I feel like Chambers captures our need to be proactive in our faith extremely well with his illustration of being tied to the dock. Here is the excerpt from "My Utmost:"
Determine to know more than others. If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea. Put everything in your life afloat upon God, going out to sea on the great swelling tide of His purpose, and your eyes will be opened. If you believe in Jesus, you are not to spend all your time in the calm waters just inside the harbor, full of joy, but always tied to the dock. You have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, and being to know things for yourself-- being to have spiritual discernment.
When you know you should do a thing, and do it, immediately you know more. Revise where you have become stodgy spiritually, and you will find it goes back to a point where there was something you knew you should do, but you did not do it because there seemed no immediate call to, and now you have no perception, no discernment; at a time of crisis you are spiritually distracted instead of spiritually self-possessed. It is a dangerous thing to refuse to go on knowing.
The counterfeit of obedience is a state of mind in which you work up occasions to sacrifice yourself; ardour is mistaken for discernment. It is easier to sacrifice yourself than to fulfil your spiritual destiny, which is stated in Romans 12:1-2. It is a great deal better to fulfil the purpose of God in your life by discerning His will than to perform great acts of self-sacrifice. “To obey is better than sacrifice.” Beware of harking back to what you were once when God wants you to be something you have never been. “If any man will do . . . he shall know.”
Taken from myutmost.org
