Bread Crumbs – Devotions for Life

It is God who works in you for his good pleasure.

Philippians 2:13

I do not believe we have even begun to understand the wonderful power there is in being still. We are in such a hurry, always doing, that we are in danger of not allowing God the opportunity to work.

This is our problem regarding the Christian life: we want to do something to be Christians, instead of allowing Him to work in us.

Think of how still you stand when your picture is being taken, as the photographer captures your likeness on film. God has one eternal purpose for us: that we should be “conformed to the likeness of his Son” (Rom. 8:29). But in order for that to happen, we must stand still.

Reimann, Jim; Cowman, Mrs. Charles E. (2008-09-02). Streams in the Desert: 366 Daily Devotional Readings (p. 62). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

Some saints cannot do menial work and remain saints 

because it is beneath their dignity.

Are you willing to be offered for the work of the faithful, to pour out your life blood as a libation on the sacrifice of the faith of others? Or do you say, ‘I am not going to be offered up just yet, I do not want God to choose my work. I want to choose the scenery of my own sacrifice.

Suppose God wants to teach you to say, “I know how to be abased” are you ready to be offered up like that? Are you ready to be not so much as a drop in a bucket, to be so hopelessly insignificant that you are never thought of again in connection with the life you served?

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest : Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishers, 1993).

Letting God Use You, Is a Will-Full Decision

“I am now ready to be offered.” It is a transaction of will, not of sentiment. Tell God you are ready to be offered; then let the consequences be what they may.

Go through the crisis in will, then when it comes externally there will be no thought of the cost. If you do not transact in will with God along this line, you will end in awakening sympathy for yourself.

Tell God you are ready to be offered, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever dreamed He would be.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest : Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishers, 1993).

God Can Only Use the Weak

Now the question has suggested itself to me as to whether those who are consciously led of the Spirit of God are emptied of self by Him, and left with no consciousness of strength of their own whatever, in order that He may fill them with His fullness.

When God works in a soul, the soul itself always works in “fear and trembling,” because He totally takes away from it that sense of its own strength.

When we do a thing from our own idea that it would be a good thing to do, we do it with great confidence and a feeling of strength. It’s is then our work and God’s work through us.

Hannah Whitall Smith and Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life : The Unpublished Personal Writings of Hannah Whitall Smith (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997).

God’s work is accomplished

when we use the resources He has given to us. 

Martin Luther