Dear Friends.

Greetings,

As we come to an end of this year, and looking forward to the New year, I know that this year has been a very difficult year for many and also a difficult year for the church.

I know many are praying that the next year will be better.

Let me tell you if you have not learned anything from your trials this year, next year will even be much more difficult. But before you get discouraged, let me share something to encourage and strengthen you.

The Lord is desiring for His Bride to come up higher in Him, He is asking or may I say He is wooing His Bride to come and hide away in Him.

My dear friends, this coming year must be a year of carrying your cross and letting the self die, so that the resurrected Christ can be manifested in your life.

I woke up this morning with this word in my heart that I want to share with you, hoping it will bless you and encourage you, to apply this word to change you.

Let’s take a look at this scripture and I’ll talk to you about Abraham. You may say how does this apply to him?, well let's go through the teaching and you will see:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.” (Matthew 5:3)

“Abraham was old when Isaac was born, he was old enough indeed to be his grandfather, when Isaac was born, he became the delight and idol of Abraham’s heart. When he first held him, and admired him, he became a love slave of his son.

God  shows us Abraham’s strength of this affection. And it is not hard to understand. Isaac represented everything that was sacred to his father’s heart: the promises of God, the covenants, the hopes of the years, and the long messianic dream. As he watched him grow from babyhood to young manhood, the heart of Abraham was knit closer and closer with the life of his son, until at last the relationship bordered upon the perilous. It was then that God stepped in to save both father and son from the consequences of an uncleansed love.

Let's look at Gen22;2

“Take now thy son, said God to Abraham, thine only son Isaac, whom thou dost love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.”

I can imagine the agony Abraham went through that night on the slopes near Beersheba, where he must have had it out with God, asking and questioning why this.

This never happened with anyone else except and until a “Greater than Abraham” wrestled in the garden of Gethsemane, with great pain that one can handle in a human soul.

If only the Abraham himself might have been allowed to die. That would have been easier a thousand times because he was old now, and to die would have been no great ordeal for one who had walked so long with God.

Besides, it would have been a last sweet pleasure to let his dimming vision rest upon his son, who would live to carry on the Abrahamic line and fulfill in himself the promises of God made long before in Ur of the Chaldees.

Abraham was wondering about the promise the Lord made him and asking “How could he slay the lad?” The act with the promise: “In Isaac shall thy seed be called? This was Abraham’s trial by fire, and he did not fail in his testings.

While the stars were still shining above the tent where Isaac was sleeping, and long before the gray dawn had begun to lighten the east, Abraham had made up his mind. He would offer his son as God had directed him to do, and then trust God to raise him from the dead.

After a whole night of heart ache, he was able to find peace, and he rose early in the morning to carry out the plan.

It is beautiful to see that, while he was willing to obey God’s word, He understood it was not about him. And the solution is revealed  in the New Testament Scripture, in Matt;16:25

“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.”

God let the suffering of Abraham continue upto the point where He knew there would be no retreat, and then forbade Abraham to lay a hand upon Isaac, and He said to Abraham

“It’s all right, Abraham. I never intended that you should actually slay the Boy.. I only wanted to remove him from the temple of your heart that I might reign unchallenged there. God wants to reign in our hearts fully so that there is no perversion that exists in our love with Him.I wanted to correct the perversion that existed in your love. Now you may have the boy, sound and well. Take him and go back to your tent. Now I know that You fearest God, seeing that thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me.”

Gen22 :17

Then heaven opened and a voice was heard saying to him, By myself I have sworn, said the LORD, for because thou hast done this thing and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son; that in blessing I will bless thee and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gates of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the Gentiles of the earth be blessed because thou hast hearkened unto my voice.”

Abraham, as he heard that voice stood up to respond, now he was strong, pure and was a man marked by God. He was  a friend and favorite of the Most High. Now he was a man wholly surrendered, a man utterly obedient, a man who possessed nothing.

See God could have begun out on the margin of Abraham’s life and worked inward to the center, but He chose instead to cut quickly to the heart and have it over in one sharp act of separation. It hurt cruelly, but it was effective.

I have said that Abraham possessed nothing. Yet was not this poor man rich? Everything he had owned before was his still to enjoy: sheep, camels, herds, and goods of every sort. He had also his wife and his friends, and best of all he had his son Isaac safe by his side. He had everything, but he possessed nothing.

There is the spiritual secret.

There is the sweet theology of the heart, which can be learned only in the school of  self-denial.

After that bitter and blessed experience, I think the words “my” and “mine” never again had the same meaning for Abraham. The sense of possession which they connote was gone from his heart. Things had been cast out forever. They had now become external to the man. His inner heart was free from them.

The world said, “Abraham is rich,” but he only smiled. He could not explain it to them, but he knew that he owned nothing, that his real treasures were inward and eternal.

There can be no doubt that this possessive clinging to things is one of the most harmful habits in the life. Because it is so natural, it is rarely recognized for the evil that it is; but its outworkings are tragic.

We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety; this is especially true when those treasures  could be your ministry, friends, even relatives. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed.

Our gifts and talents should also be turned over to Him.They should be recognized for what they are, God’s loan to us, and should never be considered in any sense our own. We have no more right to claim credit for special abilities.

The Christian who is alive enough to know himself even slightly will recognize the symptoms of this possession, and will grieve to find them in his own heart. If the longing after God is strong enough within him, he will want to do something about the matter. Now, what should he do?

First of all, he should put away all defense and make no attempt to excuse himself either in his own eyes or before the Lord. Whoever defends himself will have himself for his defense, and he will have no other; but let him come defenseless before the Lord and he will have for his defender no less than God Himself.

Let the inquiring Christian trample under foot every slippery trick of his deceitful heart and insist upon frank and open relations with the Lord.

Let him insist that God accept his all, that He take things out of his heart and Himself reign there in power.

It may be he will need to become specific, to name things and people by their names one by one. If he will become drastic enough, he can shorten the time of his trails from years to minutes, and enter the good land long before, those who coddle their feelings and insist upon caution in their dealings with God.

Let us never forget that such a truth as this cannot be learned by watching or hearing, as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them. We must in our hearts live through Abraham’s harsh and bitter experiences if we would know the blessedness which follows them.

Our work in the Kingdom is not possible without you standing with us prayerfully and financially. For those that are led to donate on an ongoing basis or a one-time gift, you may send to the address below or click on this link. “SUPPORT.” Or go to our website and click on Donation.

We are very grateful to you for your partnering with us as we endeavor to prepare His Bride for Him.

Much love and blessings

Lu & Cynthia-- --