DON’T FOLLOW THE TREND
Month: December 2023
Conduct Rooted in Character
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1 Peter 2:11–12
Dear friends, since you are foreigners and temporary residents ⸤in the world⸥, I’m encouraging you to keep away from the desires of your corrupt nature. These desires constantly attack you. Live decent lives among unbelievers. Then, although they ridicule you as if you were doing wrong while they are watching you do good things, they will praise God on the day he comes to help you.
Colossians 3:12–17
As holy people whom God has chosen and loved, be sympathetic, kind, humble, gentle, and patient. Put up with each other, and forgive each other if anyone has a complaint. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. Above all, be loving.This ties everything together perfectly. Also, let Christ’s peace control you. God has called you into this peace by bringing you into one body. Be thankful. Let Christ’s word with all its wisdom and richness live in you. Use psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to teach and instruct yourselves about ⸤God’s⸥ kindness. Sing to God in your hearts. Everything you say or do should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Conduct is what we do; character is what we are. Conduct is the outward life. Character is the life unseen, hidden within, yet evidenced by that which is seen. Conduct is external, seen from without; character is internal—operating within. In the economy of grace, conduct is the offspring of character. Character is the state of the heart, conduct its outward expression. Character is the root of the tree, conduct, the fruit it bears.
I HOPE YOU FOUND THIS QUICK REFRESHER TO BE HELPFUL.
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
WE NEED JESUS
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1 Timothy 2:5
For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:38-39
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
1 John 4:9
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
1 Corinthians 15:57
But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Revelation 22:21
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.
THANK GOD FOR JESUS, WE NEED JESUS.
PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
Security in God’s Faithfulness
Deuteronomy 7:9
Keep in mind that the LORD your God is ⸤the only⸥ God. He is a faithful God, who keeps his promise and is merciful to thousands of generations of those who love him and obey his commands.
Psalm 4:8
I fall asleep in peace the moment I lie down because you alone, O LORD, enable me to live securely.
Psalm 46:1
God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble.
If the Lord be with us, we have no cause of fear. His eye is upon us, his arm over us, his ear open to our prayer; his grace sufficient, his promise unchangeable. Under his protection, though the path of duty should lie through fire and water, we may cheerfully and confidently pursue it.
WE ARE SECURE IN GOD.
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
The Church Threatened by Trusting Intellect
Proverbs 3:5–6
Trust the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths smooth.
Romans 12:2
Don’t become like the people of this world. Instead, change the way you think. Then you will always be able to determine what God really wants—what is good, pleasing, and perfect.
Ah, I believe that the Church of Christ suffers more today from trusting in intellect, in sagacity, in culture, and in mental refinement, than from almost anything else.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
GOD’S CHILDREN HAS A PROMISING FUTURE
Think about this.
We do not live by our place, we live by our promise.
If the place I’m in screams LACK, I live by the promise of “…God… will supply all [my] needs from his glorious riches, which have been given to us in Christ Jesus.” (Phil. 4:19, NLT)
If the place I am in screams TERRIFYING, I live by the promise of… “Surely He shall deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the perilous pestilence. He shall cover you with His feathers, and under His wings you shall take refuge; His truth shall be your shield and buckler. You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor of the arrow that flies by day, nor of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor of the destruction that lays waste at noonday. A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you.” (Psalm 91:3-7, NKJV)
If the place I am in screams ABANDONED, I live by the promise of… “Even if my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will hold me close.” (Psalm 27:10, NLT) and “Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you; he will neither fail you nor abandon you.” (Deut. 31:8, NLT)
If the place I am in screams FEAR, I live by the promise of… “Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand.” (Isaiah 41:10, NLT)
If the place I am in screams SICKNESS, I live by the promise of… “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, Bible Verses About Future but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” (Psalm 34:19, ESV) and “He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.” (Isaiah 53:5b, NLT)
If the place I am in screams GUILTY, I live by the promise of… “He has removed our sins as far from us as the east is from the west.” (Psalm 103:12, NLT) and “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1, NIV)
WE MUST KNOW WHAT WE ARE ENTITLED TO AS CHILDREN OF GOD.
WE CAN’T STAND ON A PROMISE THAT WE DON’T KNOW. WE MUST LEARN THE PROMISES OF GOD UNTO HIS CHILDREN.
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
GOD IS ENOUGH
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My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him. He only is my rock and my salvation; He is my defense; I shall not be moved. In God is my salvation and my glory; the rock of my strength, and my refuge, is in God.
PSALM 62:5–7
The last and greatest lesson that the soul has to learn is the fact that God, and God alone, is enough for all its needs. This is the lesson that all His dealings with us are meant to teach.
If God is indeed the “God of all comfort”; if He is our Shepherd; if He is really and truly our Father; if, in short, all the many aspects we have been studying of His character and His ways are actually true, then we must come to the positive conviction that He is, in Himself alone, enough for all our possible needs, and that we may safely rest in Him absolutely and forever.
Most Christians have, I suppose, sung more often than they could count these words in one of our most familiar hymns: “Thou, O Christ, art all I want, more than all in Thee I find.” But I doubt whether all of us could honestly say that the words have expressed any reality in our own experience. Christ has not been all we want. We have wanted a great many things besides Him. We have wanted fervent feelings about Him, or realizations of His presence with us, or an interior revelation of His love; or else we have demanded satisfactory schemes of doctrine, or successful Christian work, or something of one sort or another that will constitute a personal claim upon Him. Just Christ Himself, Christ alone, without the addition of any of our experiences concerning Him, has not been enough for us, and we do not even see how it is possible that He could be enough.
The psalmist said: “My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him” (Psalm 62:5). But now the Christian says, “My soul, wait on my sound doctrines, for my expectation is from them”; or, “My soul, wait on my good feelings, or on my righteous works, or on my fervent prayers, or on my earnest striving, for my expectation is from these.” To wait on God only seems one of the unsafest things they can do, and to have their expectation from Him alone is like building on the sand. They reach out on every side for something to depend on, and not until everything else fails will they put their trust in God alone.
No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us. Feelings may change; doctrines and dogmas may be upset; Christian work may come to nothing; prayers may seem to lose their fervency; promises may seem to fail; everything that we have believed in or depended upon may seem to be swept away, and only God is left.
We say sometimes, “If I could only find a promise to fit my case, I could then be at rest.” But promises may be misunderstood or misapplied, and, at the moment when we are leaning all our weight on them, they may seem utterly to fail us. But the Promiser, who is behind His promises, can never fail nor change. The little child does not need to have any promises from its mother to make it content; it has its mother herself, and she is enough. Its mother is better than a thousand promises. And should every promise be wiped out of the Bible, we would still have God left, and God would be enough.
I do not mean by this that we are not to have feelings or experiences or revelations or good works or sound doctrines. We may have all of these, but they must be the result of salvation and can never be depended upon as any indication of our spiritual condition. We are to hold ourselves absolutely independent of them all, resting in only the grand, magnificent fact that God is and that He is our Savior. We are to find God sufficient for all our spiritual needs, whether we feel ourselves to be in a desert or in a fertile valley. We are to say with the prophet: “Though the fig tree may not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines; though the labor of the olive may fail, and the fields yield no food; though the flock may be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stalls—yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17–18).
The soul can never find rest short of this. All God’s dealings with us, therefore, are shaped to this end, and He is often obliged to deprive us of all joy in everything else in order that He may force us to find our joy only in Himself.
We have so accustomed ourselves to consider all the accompaniments of the spiritual life as being the spiritual life itself that it is hard to detach ourselves from them. We cannot think that the Lord can be anything to us unless we find in ourselves something to assure us of His love and His care. And when we talk about finding our all in Him, we generally mean that we find it in our feelings or our views about Him. If, for instance, we feel a glow of love toward Him, then we can say heartily that He is enough; but when this glow fails, then we no longer feel that we have found our all in Him. The truth is that what satisfies us is not the Lord, but our own feelings about the Lord. But we are not conscious of this; and consequently when our feelings fail we think it is the Lord who has failed.
Of course, all this is very foolish, but it is such a common experience that very few can see how foolish it is. Perhaps an illustration may help us to clearer vision. Let us think of a man accused of a crime, standing before a judge. Which would be the thing of moment for that man: his own feelings toward the judge or the judge’s feelings toward him? Would he spend his time watching his own emotions and trying to see whether he felt that the judge was favorable to him or would he watch the judge and try to discover from his looks or his words whether or not to expect a favorable judgment? Of course we will say at once that the man’s own feelings are not of the slightest account in the matter, and that only the opinions and feelings of the judge are worth a moment’s thought. Upon the judge only would everything depend.
In the same way, if we will only bring our common sense to bear upon the subject, we cannot help seeing that the only vital thing in our relationship with the Lord is what His feelings are toward us.
This, then, is what I mean by God being enough. God is our answer to every question and every cry of need. If there is any lack in the One who has undertaken to save us, nothing supplementary we can do will avail to make it up; and if there is no lack in Him, then He Himself is enough.
The all-sufficiency of God ought to be as complete to the child of God as the all-sufficiency of a good mother is to the child of that mother. My own experience as a child taught me this. My mother was the remedy for all my ills and, I fully believed, for the ills of the whole world. And when anyone expressed doubts as to her capacity to remedy everything, I remembered with what fine scorn I used to annihilate them by saying, “Ah! But you don’t know my mother.”
And now, when any tempest-tossed soul fails to see that God is enough, I feel like saying, not with scorn, but with infinite pity, “Ah, dear friend, you do not know God! If you knew Him, you could not help seeing that He is the remedy for every need of your soul, and that He is an all-sufficient remedy. God is enough, even though no promise may seem to fit your case, nor any inward assurance give you confidence. The Promiser is more than His promises, and His existence is a surer ground of confidence than the most fervent inward feelings.”
But someone may say, “All this is no doubt true, and I could easily believe it if I could only be sure it applied to me. But I am so good-for-nothing and so full of sin that I do not feel as if I had any claim to such riches of grace.”
All the more, if you are good-for-nothing and full of sin, have you a claim on the all-sufficiency of God. Your very good-for-nothingness and sinfulness are your loudest claims. The Bible declares that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; not to save the righteous, not to save the fervent, not to save the earnest workers, but simply and only to save sinners.
If we want to see God, our interior questioning must be, not about ourselves, but about Him. How does God feel toward me? Is His love for me warm enough? Has He enough zeal? Does He feel my need deeply enough? Is He sufficiently in earnest? Although these questions may seem irreverent to some, they simply embody the doubts and fears of many doubting hearts, and they only need to be asked to prove the fact that these doubts and fears are in themselves the real irreverence. We all know what would be the triumphant answers to such questions. No doubts could withstand their testimony; and the soul that asks and answers them honestly will know the profound and absolute conviction that God is enough.
“All things are yours,” declares the apostle Paul, “whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or things present or things to come—all are yours. And you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:21–23). It would be impossible for any statement to be more all-embracing. All things are yours because you belong to Christ. All things we need are part of our inheritance in Him, and they only await our claiming. Let our needs and difficulties be as great as they may, there is in these “all things” a supply exceedingly abundantly above all we can ask or think.
Because He is, all must go right for us. While God lives, His children must be cared for. What else could He do, being what He is? He knows everything, He cares about everything, He can manage everything, and He loves us. What more could we ask?
Paul could say triumphantly in the midst of many trials: “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38–39).
Nothing can separate you from God’s love, absolutely nothing. Can we not understand that God, who is love, who is, if I may say so, made out of love, simply cannot help blessing us. We do not need to beg Him to bless us, He simply cannot help it.
Therefore God is enough! God is enough for time, God is enough for eternity. God is enough!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT.
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
THE BELIEVER’S EXPERIENCE OF LIFE
Everlastingsalvationchurchofgod.com
God is at work in all that happens to believers, whether to warn them, to draw them to himself or to do them good.
God has a purpose in all the experiences that believers have in life.
Romans 8:28
We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God—those whom he has called according to his plan.
Ephesians 1:11
God also decided ahead of time to choose us through Christ according to his plan, which makes everything work the way he intends.
Genesis 21:22
At that time Abimelech, accompanied by Phicol, the commander of his army, said to Abraham, “God is with you in everything you do.
Genesis 28:16
Then Jacob woke up from his sleep and exclaimed, “Certainly, the LORD is in this place, and I didn’t know it!”
Genesis 39:20–21
So Joseph’s master arrested him and put him in the same prison where the king’s prisoners were kept. While Joseph was in prison, the LORD was with him. The LORD reached out to him with his unchanging love and gave him protection. The LORD also put Joseph on good terms with the warden.
Acts 17:28
Certainly, we live, move, and exist because of him. As some of your poets have said, ‘We are God’s children.’
1 Chronicles 29:11–12
Greatness, power, splendor, glory, and majesty are yours, LORD, because everything in heaven and on earth is yours. The kingdom is yours, LORD, and you are honored as head of all things. Riches and honor are in front of you. You rule everything. You hold power and strength in your hands, and you can make anyone great and strong.
I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS QUICK STUDY AND RECEIVED GREATLY FROM IT. TAKE A MOMENT A THINK ABOUT HOW THIS QUICK STUDY APPLIES TO YOUR LIFE.
DON’T FORGET TO GIVE GOD HIS THANKS.
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PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
CHILD OF GOD
