New Wineskins 5 of 21 – Taking You One Step Further Toward Him

Pray for the Holy Spirit to take you one step further toward Him today: 

Moses endured the reproach of Christ, considering reproach greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt.

He believed what God had said and was not influenced to swerve from his integrity by any of the world’s reproaches. He walked the earth as God’s free man. He had the love of Christ in his soul, which not only made him a man of dignity, but added the luster of the true Christian graces to the dignity of the man. Moses walked a rough and perilous path, but he looked to the things unseen and faltered not. The recompense of reward was attractive to him, and it may be also to us. He was familiar with God. (4T 345)

Dear Heavenly Father,

It was not easy for Moses to go back to Egypt, as an old, white-bearded man bearing robes and the staff of a nomad, wondering if anyone, Israelite or Egyptian, would listen to him or think he was crazy. Moses asked that You send someone else, but he was the one You had chosen.

I hear You calling me a step higher:  “Are you willing to count all things but loss for Me?  Willing to lose not only your material blessings, but even your desire for the approbation of others?”  God, I have always admired those heroes with great strength of character who, though alone, are true to what is right in the face of danger, but when it comes right down to it in my day-to-day life, I’m scared about the “reproach” You may call me to bear. It’s hard to be viewed as “different.”

I know it was not easy for Jesus to face the darkness alone, without an intercessor, knowing that all would forsake Him, some would deny Him, and many would do worse. He asked for that cup to be taken from Him, but there was no other way for Your will to be done. To think that He took upon Himself that crushing load of sin, that the sense of its terrible enormity and the awful separation it caused between You and Him actually broke the heart of the spotless Son of God!

“I hid my face from Him; He was despised, and I did not esteem Him. The chastisement of my peace was upon Him; and with His stripes I am healed.”  I am sorry for the times I “hid my face” from You, when it was more important to have the praise of men than Yours.  Heal me, O God, from my people-pleasing ways (really, I’m a “me-pleaser” for my concern is more about how I’ll look in their eyes than making them happy).  I don’t want to be “conformed” to this world’s ways but be “transformed by the renewing of my mind.”

So today, Father, may your Holy Spirit renew me, make me willing to be willing, for I am totally hopeless and helpless to do anything without Your strength in me!  Thank you for the promise that “nothing is apparently more helpless, yet really more invincible than the soul that feels its nothingness and relies wholly on You.”  So, as You take me on this step of the journey, help me rely wholly on You and accept what You call me to each moment of this day.

And I know the secret: You want me to become FAMILIAR WITH YOU. So today, I am going to take time alone with You.  I want to think about what it means in my life to be Your free (wo)man. I pray this in the name of the spotless Son of God who was wounded for me, Amen.

Become familiar with God as the suffering servant:  Read Isaiah 53 today.

SC 85; Phil 3:8; Is.53; SC 13; Rom. 12:2