PERSEVERANCE

But you must let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing”, Tiago 1:4.

For this reason, take up the whole armor of God so that you may be able to take a stand in that evil day. And when you have done everything you could, you will be able to stand firm”, Efésios 6:13.

Then, instead of being lazy, you will become imitators of those who are inheriting the promises through faith and patience Heb.6:12.

For you need endurance, so that after you have done God's will you can receive what he has promised”, Heb.10:36.

"So then, those who suffer according to God's will should entrust their souls to a faithful Creator and continue to do what is good", 1Ped.4.19

1.  Oswald Chambers said: “We tend to think that if Jesus Christ compels us to do something and we are obedient to Him, He will lead us to great success. We should never have the thought that our dreams of success are God’s purpose for us. In fact, His purpose may be exactly the opposite. We have the idea that God is leading us toward a particular end or a desired goal, but He is not. The question of whether or not we arrive at a particular goal is of little importance, and reaching it becomes merely an episode along the way. What we see as only the process of reaching a particular end, God sees as the goal itself”.

2.  What sort of dreams do you nurture concerning the purposes of God? The main purpose of God is that I solemnly and instinctively depend on Him and His power alone all the time.  If I can remain calm and unworried under great pressure or persecution, knowing God takes care of every hair of me, that is the only goal God intended in the first place. God’s purpose is not to take me out of persecution, but, rather out of fear and worrying. What I call the means God calls the ends. Success means very little to God. The inner work is what God is aiming at constantly. To be able to see Him all the time while the sea is raging is success to God. And when there is a nearby beach, I still behold Him to see what He says. It is the process that glorifies the Lord. The goal is the inner achievements of the Spirit and what we may see as the goals might be merely the means.

3.  When I lack comprehension and understanding of God and of my ways in Him, it can be only ascribed to some sort of disobedience somewhere, which amounts to lack of confidence. Spiritual darkness or blindness is always the fruit of some kind of disobedience somewhere, whether it is a direct fruit or fruit in a second or third degree. Do you want light? Just obey the Lord and light will surely be there assuring you. And if you think for a while you might, also, become aware that all religious fanaticism comes from disobedience since people are their own light because they lack the real one. Let's look into it the other way round. If you have much light and enlightenment and your life seems to go nowhere, be assured that you are obedient to God or you wouldn't share in that light at all. Do not be worried and rather wait patiently. You will see that, soon, your life will be a complete whole and it will then make sense to you and to many others. "If anyone desires to do His will, he shall know...", John 7:17.

4.  The average person has this intuition that we have problems to learn something out of them. Even if it may be occasionally true, the truth is that God wants you to unlearn something through your problems. Problems hinder us to be what we have become as well.

5.  If your heart resembles God’s, when you have the same goals, motivation and means of power as He, you may be assured that the world will see you as a proud, stubborn person. E you must, also, take into account that most things that seem humble to worldly eyes are indeed proud things fed by wrong motives and through the wrong kind of power. If you have a worldly kind of vision, you shall surely look at God ways and things as of the wrong kind, proper to people who wish to show off or impose things upon others. You will become a critical and a bitter person in most things you undertake because you deny God openly and assume God does not deny you. Whatever godly beings are able to undertake, you will oppose or criticize. You might also uphold whatever sinful people carry out in the name of God. No one can hinder such things to happen that way. The same principle can be easily applied to any other kind of virtue or against it. Let’s look at perseverance as an example. The world will look at perseverance towards the ways of the Lord and have it as stubbornness. And the same eyes will see stubbornness and will power as perseverance. However, if any person wishes to be perseverant in the Lord without giving up any of the good and appropriate vows he may have pledged to undertake before God and through God, he must give up worldly means, ways, thoughts and manners to undertake whatever he knows he must do. Not even the smell of flesh or of the power of the arm of flesh should be spotted in such lives! Unless you are able to deny it all with confidence, you won’t remain truthful and faithful to the end, no matter how hard you try, since the ways of the Lord are carried out to the end only through grace and its means. The secret lies in the power you use to undertake and in the way you do it. However, the world will surely mark Spirit filled, powerful people as lazy or unfaithful. Holy ones will be seen as crazy people by the world. The world will say holy ones give up easily (because they have given up worldly ways decisively). Holy ones give up quickly whatever the world sees as right and proper.

6.  The main reason why God seems to be very strict concerning each of our relationships, either family or friendly relationships, is because it is merely based on selfishness or unloyalty where God does not come first. Amen.

 

José Mateus
zemateus@msn.com