Orange Moon Tuesday, October 24, 2023 "The Life of Our Lives"

The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…

"The Life of Our Lives"

    

       "God gave Himself to us when we believed, in the Person of the indwelling Holy Spirit who reveals the character, nature, and way of the Lord Jesus in our hearts."           

   "This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life" (I John 5:11-12).

    

    "Christ is our life" (Colossians 3:4).

    "This life" must become "our life."  God made human hearts for the presence of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.  He does not account us as truly, completely, and genuinely alive until it becomes personally true that "God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba Father" (Galatians 4:6).

    Life, as defined by God, begins when we receive by faith the saving grace of the Lord Jesus, which results in His living presence becoming the very Life of our lives.  God gave Himself to us when we believed, in the Person of the indwelling Holy Spirit who reveals the character, nature, and way of the Lord Jesus in our hearts.  "To live is Christ" declared the Apostle Paul of the life that can be found nowhere else, in nothing else, and in no one else (Philippians 1:21).  "Ye are the temple of God… the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (I Corinthians 3:16).  

   The inestimable glory of such reality can only be presently known in limited terms as we "walk by faith, not by sight" (II Corinthians 5:7).  Indeed, the God beyond all measure who "even the Heaven of heavens cannot contain" dwells within every born again believer in the Lord Jesus (II Chronicles 2:6).  We will never fully know the wonder of such grace, and certainly in our present lives, even the most godly among us barely touch the hem of the Lord's garment regarding His living, indwelling presence.  Every Christian can, however, know more than we presently realize that "God is in you, of a truth" (I Corinthians 14:25).

    Paul referred to "Christ in you" as "the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27).  He did not confine such hope to the next life, when we shall know God's glories far better than we do in the present.  No, the hope of glory, the hope of knowing that the Lord Jesus dwells and walks in us, must fortify and fuel our hearts in the moments to come of this day (II Corinthians 6:16).  We are not merely ourselves as believers in the Lord Jesus.  We are ourselves, as inhabited and empowered by the Spirit of Christ.  The realization of such truth is life changing.  The ongoing remembrance and affirmation of such truth is also life imparting as by faith, the Lord who indwells our spirits becomes manifested in our souls and bodies.  "If Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness.  But if the Spirit of Him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from the dead shall quicken (enliven) your mortal bodies by His Spirit that dwelleth in you" (Romans 8:1-11).  

    We can live this day as if the Lord Jesus does not dwell and walk in us.  We can "neglect so great salvation" (Hebrews 2:3).  What a waste, most certainly the saddest of all disregards.  As Jacob said at Peniel, after awakening to realize what  - Who - he had missed, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not!" (Genesis 28:16).  May we not have to confess such a sad ignorance at the end of this day.  The Christ who died for us no less lives in us as the very Life of our lives.  God gave Himself to us when we believed, in the Person of the indwelling Holy Spirit.  He furthermore grants the promise that such a hope, "the hope of glory," can be fulfilled in this day as we believe and submit our hearts to the greatest of all gifts that came to us in the moment of our new birth.  The gift of Himself, the living presence of the Lord Jesus - this is the Life of our lives.  There is no other, and our Father would have us to know how very near He has drawn to us in His Son, and by His Spirit.

"He is thy life."

(Deuteronomy 30:20)

"And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one."

(John 17:22-23)

Weekly Memory Verse

   Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

 

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Orange Moon Monday, October 23, 2023 “Confident”

The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…

"Confident"

    

       "We will be faithful to God in direct proportion to how faithful we know and believe Him to be."        

     

   Left to ourselves, we are all helpless and hopeless.  We did not make ourselves, we cannot sustain ourselves, and the Lord Jesus Christ stated the truth in the most stark terms: "Without Me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5).  This particularly applies to relationship with God, both in its origination and its maintenance.  Our Savior came looking for us rather than we for Him in leading us to the new birth.  He continues after we trust Him in terms of our flesh, which as the hymnwriter suggested, is "prone to wander" despite our Christ-inhabited spirit's desire to love, trust, and obey God.  "I delight in the law of God after the inward man, but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind" (Luke 19:10; Romans 7:22-23).  Thankfully, prone to wander does not characterize our faithful Shepherd, who ever fulfills His promise in working to motivate and empower our trust and obedience to God.

    "Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6).

     Persistent, insistent, and consistent characterizes our Lord.  It is good that this is true because every one of us would wander completely out of His pasture if He did not fulfill His promise to "work in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure" (Philippians 2:13).  Certainly, we play a vital role of response to such grace, whereby we "serve God acceptably, with reverence and godly fear" (Hebrews 12:28).  However, our Father's role of leading and enabling must ever be known as the dynamic power of faith and faithfulness.  God merits all glory for every step of obedience His sheep will ever take as He faithfully fulfills His relentless determination "to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work" (II Corinthians 9:8). 

   Are we "confident of this very thing?"  To the degree we are will be the degree to which we respond to our Lord's presence and promise.  We work out that which God works in as both recipients and responders to His grace (Philippians 2:12).  Our confidence in His working empowers the consistency of our works as "the just shall live by faith" (Romans 1:17).  We will be faithful to God in direct proportion to how faithful we know and believe Him to be.  "Beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord" (II Corinthians 3:18).

   Our Shepherd abides ever faithful in the execution of His loving purposes for us.  He completes what He starts.  He knows He can do this, and He has made a promise based on confidence in His own ability to finish the work He begins in all who believe in Him.  We must join Him in the assurance of His capability.  We did not begin our Christian life, but rather received by faith the gift offered by "the Author and Finisher of our faith" (Hebrews 12:2).  We no less require God's relentless execution for the living of our Christian life, and we no less require confidence in His faithful trustworthiness to keep His promises.  He will not disappoint us, and our Shepherd's persistent, insistent, and consistent execution of His purpose will lead to our own faithfulness as we are "confident of this very thing."

"The Lord shall be thy confidence."

(Proverbs 3:26)

"We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works."

(Ephesians 2:10)

Weekly Memory Verse

   Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. (Philippians 1:6)

 

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Orange Moon Saturday, October 21, 2023 "The Remembrance of His Remembrance"

The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…

"The Remembrance of His Remembrance"

    

       "He personally remembers each of us, to the degree of our hairs being numbered.  His mind makes this possible.  His heart makes it living, loving, and actual."        

     

   We all need reminders.  This especially applies to God and His truth.

     "Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth" (II Peter 1:12).

   We may think we know certain truths quite well, and in relative terms, this may be the case.  However, the Apostle Paul declared that we know nothing yet as we ought to know (I Corinthians 8:2).    God and His truth exist as infinite realities, never to be fully discovered.  We can know some, we can know more, but we can never know all.  Our human weakness also plays a factor, as does the fact of living in a world wherein spiritual enemies ever seek to distract us from our Lord's presence, involvement, and working in our lives.  We therefore do well to give thanks for the means of remembrance our Heavenly Father makes available to us, including His Spirit, His Word, His people, and His providential working along the pathways of our lives.

    One of the greatest of all truths to be remembered is that we ourselves ever abide in God's recollection:

    "Remember these, O Jacob and Israel; for thou art My servant: I have formed thee; thou art My servant: O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of Me" (Isaiah 44:21).

    God does not forget His people, be it His earthly nation Israel, or His Heavenly family, the church.  Of course, as One possessed of infinite understanding, He cannot forget us in terms of awareness and knowledge.  However, the matter involves far more than merely the technical, wondrous as this is.  He also personally remembers each of us, to the degree of our hairs being numbered (Matthew 10:30).  His mind makes this possible.  His heart makes it living, loving, and actual.  We do well to remember this, as much as any other truth we seek to plant and nurture within our hearts.  Indeed, the remembrance of His remembrance will encourage and challenge us to continue our journey with Him in times of blessing, difficulty, and the everyday moments of life.  

    "Thou shalt not be forgotten of Me."  The assurance reads as pure poetry of prose.  Remembering it graces our hearts even more as the most enlivening and invigorating of promises.  Yes, remembering that our Lord remembers, and that He does so in the fulfillment of His faithfulness, goes far in empowering our own recall of "things which are most surely believed among us," and of things we must not forget (Luke 1:1).

"Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of My hands; thy walls are continually before Me."

(Psalm 49:16)

"I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember Thy wonders of old."

(Psalm 77:11)

Weekly Memory Verse

    Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

 (I John 4:10)

 

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