The Journey Continues
Dear brothers and sisters,
It’s been a rough week.
I’ve made the decision to head into Cambodia, based on some thoughts I believe the Lord was giving, and the confirming impressions of two sisters in the Lord. None of us get a real sense of specific clarity and purpose, but we all sense the Lord in this decision.
I’ll be heading out of Viet Nam on Monday, December 8, and going to Cambodia, unless I get diverted back to the states in regards to a potential family emergency. I’d appreciate your prayers.
I was also sick for around four days, and am still feeling the effects of that.
In addition to those issues, and the coming transition, I believe the Lord is opening my eyes to some hard truths, and please don’t say, “SO? What else is new?” As a friend and I always say, “Never a dull moment!”
These hard truths are about me and my walk with the Lord, but I’d be dishonest if I said I don’t see them having application among believers at large.
I have decided to share anything and everything here, and I will allow the Lord to have His way with it; good or bad. I have put these thoughts in the form of verse, as I’ve done on other occasions.
This will be my last post for a while. I have no idea at this point for how long, although I sense it won’t be for very long.
Be blessed in Him with all fullness as you look up and gaze upon His wondrous face.
Your brother,
Gene
Who Is At The Core
Believer… look into your heart
look into your own eyes.
Take off the disguise, if only for a moment
and ask yourself, with all the noise and clutter silenced,
“Is it all about Him; or, is it all about me?”
You may not accept or believe
that the question can be… so black or white,
so utterly, mutually exclusive, but…
He didn’t leave room for any other possibility.
He says, “It’s all about you; or, it’s all about Me. Which shall it be?”
He is Redeemer, Savior, Sanctifier, Lord and Master, Alpha and Omega.
Do we dare pick and choose what to accept and what we’ll reject?
“Of course not!” we say, but isn’t that what we do?
Search your heart and see if that’s true,
if you can find a moment to quiet down from your busy agenda.
We’ve been deceived; deluded, believing a lie…
that there is place, there is room
for our own wants, agendas and desires, alongside His; or even His alongside ours.
There is no such place or room… never has been… never will be,
But we are great at deceiving ourselves; aren’t we?
This lie, among others, must be cast off and renounced
because there is only one place for you and me… the grave,
and only one basis of life… resurrection life in Him;
His purposes and agenda the beginning, middle and end, in everything.
Let His light and truth shine down into our soul
before it’s too late, and the fast-approaching darkness descends
like a long, fearsome, agonizing night of misery…
enclosing you, and me, and our brethren, in a death-shroud.
If we haven’t sought Him earnestly by then… it may be too late.
He is, and must be, the all-in-all, the center, the core.
Whosoever falls upon this Rock shall be broken,
but woe to those upon whom the Rock falls.
They shall be ground to powder.
Let us fall upon the Rock.
We have received and believed lies, brewed in the cauldron of Hell.
We are as blind ones, groping in darkness,
parroting silly, high-sounding phrases, religious smiles upon our faces,
continuing on in deception and delusion; deceiving and being deceived
as multitudes rush headlong toward destruction.
Multitudes in the valley of decision, for the day of the Lord is near in the valley.
Woe to you that desire the day of the Lord! It is darkness, and not light…
as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him.
Come, my people, enter your chambers, and shut your doors about you; hide yourself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast.
The Lord said to me, in the depths of my soul,
“Look into your heart; Look into your own eyes.
Take off the disguise, if only for a moment
And ask yourself, with all the noise and clutter silenced,
‘Is it all about you; or, is it all about Me?’”
I am stunned by what I see.
Godspeed Gene!
I get the impression that this is an indictment against those of us who still prioritize this life and it’s concerns above God’s.
May God help us all to desire Him more than anything else and be willing to forske everything for Him. I think I’m ready to do that, but at the same time I don’t believe it either.
While I believe God is number One in my life I worry that I esteem myself and my efforts too highly. It really is all of Him and none of us or we have not come far enough.
I was a bit confused about the “Woe to them that desire the day of the Lord” until I felt I understood it to be more a warning to those who think they will escape God’s judgment or don’t believe it will really come. It also seems directed to “Rapturists” who long to escape this world, but will not consider doing that while they’re still here.
Heavy stuff. God bless and keep you closer to Him every day my brother.
Bless you on your journey Gene. I pray God keeps you in His grip and holds you tight, leads you clearly and keeps you strong! In all of this, God reveals the heart, He shows us everything because He loves us so much and He refines us! Keep walking, running and standing for God! Bless you brother, God be with you!
Godspeed, bro. My prayers go with you.
Deuteronomy 31:8
We’ll be eagerly waiting your return.
Jesus Christ is Lord!
God bless you, Gene, and keep you safe on your journey. I appreciate your heart and your willingness to face truth head on. And I am so grateful to be a part of this fellowship that you led me to through Christ I know. Peace to you, brother, as you walk in His ways.
Gene,
You will be in my thoughts and prayers.
May God daily renew a steadfast spirit within you and give you the courage and wisdom to recognize His direction – His will. May He remove that doubt from your heart and replace it with His rest.
Stay focused.
I think he moves in ways that we can not understand.God be with you on your mission
I recently found a note of my father’s from the following book written in 1965! Anything new?
Fom – The Sky is Red
by Geoffrey Bull, 1965.
‘But some will piously protest, “We are not miserable nor flippantly casual.” Yet in the very protest, grows the seed of still another class of Christian – “We are aufait; [‘with it’ or cool]. We are not hidebound by ancient tradition or hoodwinked by modem trend. Ours is an expertise in things spiritual. We know the Word and we know the Lord. We preach the Gospel and observe the ordinances, and know what a church ought to be and how it should be governed. In fact we are the bulwark of the Truth in this day of declension. We have the greatest concern for the lost and set afoot all manner of activities to spread the message of Jesus Christ. We are the people who are zealous for divine interests. We constantly attend meetings. We have our quiet time, we give money to missions. We do not smoke or drink or go to houses of entertainment. We have been saved to serve and serve we will. Yet when all this has been said and done, the savour somehow is often foreign to Christ’s spirit, for if the truth were known, we who cherish this assessment of our Christian life, are not infrequently self-centred, bigoted and bad tempered. We are slaves to tradition, secretly lustful, carnally indulgent and prone to jealousy. We are more concerned with discussing the Bible than obeying it; more occupied in criticising others than converting others; more engaged in making arrangements than seeking the will of God, more enamoured of our service than our Saviour, and in business life too often ready to betray the very standards we profess to hold. No wonder that so many “scriptural companies” are dead and dark, for where the wick of sainthood is left untrimmed, true fellowship must be extinguished at the last.
Yet still the Living God renews, our God of no decay. With unflagging strength He executes His destined purpose. In all our sky He is the Sun which knows of no decline; in all our wilderness, the Eternal spring, no drought on earth can dry. He that is born from above is therefore a child of no despair. In all our Christian life, both together and individually, we are called to move with God, and in the measure that we really do, then is true fellowship with God begun. This is not just an idea nor even an ideal. It is a divinely originated activity, rooted in a special relationship between man and his Maker, secured through the blood of Christ and the generation of the Holy Spirit. It is a walking in the light as He is in the light and as we do this together in His company, mutually submitting ourselves to Him who is our light, then do we become together, light in the Lord. This is a light that shall never be put out for it is the life of God in expression. This experience of fellowship flows from a common participation in the life of God and only in the recognition of that Source, and the drinking from. it always, shall the saints personally and corporately be luminous for God. Those who believe unto the saving of the soul are come” says the writer to the Hebrews, “to mount Zion and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels; to the general assembly and church of the firstborn which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits just men made perfect and to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant and to the blood of sprinkling which speaks better things than that of Abel.” Here is the full fellowship into which His grace has brought us. God alone conceived it. God it was who forged it. None but God can sustain it; and in His sight nothing that man can do will either add to it or detract from it. Our responsibility is to enter into the good of it by faith.
Yet we allow our fellowmen to tamper with our highest privilege. Though we have access, we pander to a bogus priesthood. Though saints are one, we cling to “shibboleths” perpetuating schism, and fondly to virtual witchcraft, expecting infants sprinkled in the Godhead’s Name, to be inheritors of the Father’s Kingdom. We limit prayer to chanted liturgies, and doleful repetitions, as if God’s mind will change for cads and mumblers. We make the ministry professional and are glad to have it so that we might mind our own business. We let men institutionalise us, catechise us and proselytise us, control our conscience and consume our substance. We grant the interweave of alien causes with our church social, commercial, and even national, that have no links with Christ whatever, and all the time it is convocations, councils and committees, resolutions, recommendations and financial appeals, until little is heard of the Lord Jesus at all, and the fellowship of the Spirit is unknown. The denominational establishments permeated with liberalism, modernism and with-it-ism are now so broad-minded that evangelicals and modernists can exist and work side by side and we are left to ask in the Babel of it all, “Is there no word from the Lord?” Interdenominational local church life tends to be treated as a sideline. We are asked to hold the ropes but too often when the blimp of the big effort is on its way we are left to collect the debris that remains. Once raise one s voice in censure and the accusation levelled is “You show no fellowship”, when already the fellowship of the Church has been made a mockery and put to open shame. Are these hard words? Perhaps not too hard for it would seem that the King has very little function in His Kingdom as far as man is concerned. We make plans and ask in prayer for God to seal them. If they look remotely like success we glibly say His seal was given. In many places church life is reduced to a roundabout catering for all tastes.
Revealing?
Trust all goes well in Cambodia.
Blessings – Graham