Oswald Chambers: Joy - Strength In The LordSample

It is always easy to neglect a man or woman who deliberately accepts the aim of his life from the Lord Jesus. Many of us are imitators of other people; we do Christian work because someone has asked us to do it. We must receive our ministry, which is to testify the gospel of the grace of God, from Jesus Christ Himself, not from other Christians. Joy is the result of the perfect fulfillment of what a man is created for. It is continually necessary to revert to what the New Testament asks us to accept about ourselves. Our first accepted vocation is not to help men, but to obey God, and when we accept that vocation we enter into relationship with the despised and the neglected.

God is so immediately near and so immensely strong that I get more and more joyous in my confidence in Him and less and less careful how I feel.

Reflection Questions: Do I imitate other people to avoid finding my own ministry? What testimony has God given to me and to no one else? What message of joy has God given me to proclaim?

Quotations taken from The Psychology of Redemption and Run Today’s Race, © Discovery House Publishers