Living for obedience to the faith
Title: Living for obedience to the faith
Text:
Series: The Cause that is Worthy My Life
A. T. Pierson: “There is enough jewelry, gold, and silver plate buried in Christian homes to build a fleet of 50,000 vessels, ballast them with Bibles, crowd them with missionaries, and supply every living soul with the gospel in a score of years. Only let God take possession and the gospel will wing its way like the beams of the morning.”
What does living for obedience to the faith of the gospel mean?
How is living for obedience to the faith possible?
Oswald Chambers: “The thing that makes a missionary is the sight of what Jesus did on the cross and to have heard Him say, ‘Go.’”
(1) You must be transformed by the gospel (v. 1 - 4)
Transformation
When Cambridge University student Thomas Bilney bought a Greek New Testament, his interest was purely academic. But when Bilney opened God’s Word, he encountered the gospel and was transformed.
The Protestant Reformation was underway, so Bilney joined the Cambridge Protestants. He began preaching, but was arrested in 1527 and threatened into silence. But Bilney could not keep quiet. He was arrested, released, and in 1531 arrested one last time. Condemned as a heretic, Bilney died at the stake for the gospel of Christ.
Today in the Word, August, 1996, p. 18
(2) You must be clear about your mission for the gospel (v. 5)
A Founder of SIM
“It is the impassioned pleading of a quiet little Scottish lady that linked my life with the Soudan,” wrote Rowland Bingham (a founder of S.I.M.). “In the quietness of her parlor she told how God had called a daughter to China, and her eldest boy (Walter Gowans) to the Soudan. “She spread out before me the vast extent of those thousands of miles and filled in the teeming masses of people. Ere I closed the interview she had place upon me the burden of the Soudan.”
A year and a half later Bingham returned to Canada, alone. Walter and Thomas Kent lay buried in Nigeria’s interior. “I visited Mrs. Gowans to take her the few personal belongings of her son,” he recalled. “She met me with extended hand. We stood there in silence.
“Then she said these words: ‘Well, Mr. Bingham, I would rather have had Walter go out to the Soudan and die there, all alone, that have him home today, disobeying his Lord.’” Our success in this venture means nothing less than the opening of the country for the gospel; our failure, at most, nothing more than the death of two or three deluded fanatics. Still, even death is not failure. His purposes are accomplished. He uses deaths as well as lives in the furtherance of His cause.
(3) You must be grateful for fulfilled gospel work (v. 6 - 8)
(4) You must know the mutual benefit of gospel work (v. 9-13)
Henry Martyn, at 23 years of age: “I feel that my heart is wholly for heaven, and the world mainly behind my back.” On his way to India: “I do not know that anything would be a heaven to me, but the service of Christ and the enjoyment of His presence. Oh how sweet is life when spent in His service.”
(5) You must sense the weight of the grace you've received in the gospel (v. 14-15)
C. T. Studd wrote from Cambridge in 1883: “I had known about Jesus dying for me, but I had never understood that, if He had died for me, then I didn’t belong to myself. Redemption means buying back, so that if I belong to Him, either I had to be a thief, and keep what wasn’t mine, or else I had to give up everything to God. When I came to see that Jesus had died for me, it didn’t seem hard to give up all for Him.” Studd also said, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”
Conclusion:
24. Nate Saint—in a Christmas meditation letter written just a short while before he and four other young men gave their lives in seeking to reach the Auca Indians in Ecuador, South America, December, 1955: “If God would grant us the vision, the word ‘sacrifice’ would disappear from our lips and thoughts; we would hate the things that seem now so dear to us; our lives would suddenly be too short; we would despise time-robbing distractions and charge the enemy with all our energies in the name of Christ. May God help us to judge ourselves by the eternities that separate the Aucas from a comprehension of Christmas, and Him, who, though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor so that we might, through His poverty, be made rich. Lord God, speak to my own heart and give me to know Thy holy will and the joy of walking in it. Amen.”