Hi everybody, this is Pam. In storage the other day, I found a journal I kept several years ago. It was like finding a treasure. It consists of excerpts from the books I was reading at that time. I enjoyed reading through it so much that I asked Monty if I could put some on his blogosphere during this hiatus.
This is from Martin Lloyd-Jones, Revival, Ch. 23 -
“…It is a terrible and a dangerous thing for God’s people to be disobedient. For sometimes God punishes our disobedience not only by turning his face from us, by leaving us to ourselves, but he even seems to drive us into sin, and its error, and to harden our hearts. He sends afflictions, and afflictions harden us….
Be careful how you treat God, my friends. You may say to yourself, ‘I can sin against God, and then, of course, I can repent and go back and find God whenever I want him.’ You try it. And you will sometimes find that not only can you not find God but that you do not even want to. You will be aware of a terrible hardness, a callosity in your heart. And you can do nothing about it. And then you suddenly realize that it is God punishing you in order to reveal your sinfulness, and your vileness to you.”
Any comments?
That is terrifying because it is so true, but at the same time God wants us to see our sin so we will turn to Him.
True, God can certainly use our sin that way, but it is not our sin that draws us back to God. It is the realization of the uglyness of sin and the uglyness of our hearts contrasted with the amazing glory of God. Even that is all the work of graces. We should be mindful of that still, small voice that calls us. It only calls a few times before it becomes tired of being ignored and stops.
It’s really a matter of taking God the Father and the Lord Jesus for granted, and treating salvation and holiness as having very little value. And wow, isn’t that prevalent in today’s Chr. thinking! I know that’s how I used to think, but I had no clue that I did. And God was very merciful to me and began to teach me my sin and reveal Himself to me. Then He became very precious to me and I no longer blythely ignored Him. In fact, I was terrified of doing so and often prayed that He would keep me from slipping away from Him into my old way of thinking. And He did. Pam