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Word of the Day

Counsel to Stand

We are living in a generation that doesn't know how to "make due;" everything is in place for instant gratification. What we need as a people is temperance, discipline, and redirecting our priorities and our values into the heavenlies. We are being seduced and being absolutely destroyed, as the prophet Daniel of old said, by our prosperity. If that's the prediction, then what shall we do to prepare ourselves?

"Let's just sell everything we have, move into a cave somewhere, hide out, and become a survivalist."

We've seen the secular church, the Catholic Church, do that. I say secular because they are a secular kingdom with religious trappings. They have created their monasteries and created a works mentality of goodness and righteousness based upon works and performance. If you don't perform properly, you then deal with the physical man, beating yourself with whips or crawling on your knees until they bleed or whatever other form of asceticism is chosen. How does that stack up with: "You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world"? The Scriptures say that we are to occupy until He comes. The Scriptures don't say to flee the world, but go into all the world and make disciples. We are in the world, but not of it. How are we going to stand in this hour?

The great problem the majority of us have is thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. We think because we're committed that we are going to stand. Better people than you have fallen. Look into the Scriptures and see what it was that caused Moses to sin, David to sin, Sampson to sin, and Peter to sin. Find those things in your life and make preparation to not put yourself in that same environment. All those men just named sinned for the same reason: over confidence, idleness, and wrong companionship. When we surround ourselves with the right people, there is safety in a multitude of counselors. If you are going to go out to make war, the wise man says to get some counselors around you. We are at war everyday. What are people telling you? Are they telling you that you're okay? Or is there preparation for warfare on a daily basis? Are the wounds of a friend coming and piercing your heart so that you would hear the truth about yourself and be ready to stand? Is a friend's sharpening of the iron in your life, the countenance in your life, bringing you the counsel that's necessary in this last day to stand?

Hebrews 12:1 says, "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us." There is a race before us. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Many of us start this race wide open, thinking as we take off that we're going to become "super-saint" overnight. We run and fall on our face after about eight hundred meters. That's about the end of the sprint range. For some of us it is eight meters.

So those of you that are discouraged sometimes by those periods in your life when it doesn't seem like you are sprinting. "It's impossible!" Don't get discouraged. Run with patience. Are you moving in the right direction? The fact is that many of us think that somewhere in this Christian life it is acceptable to coast, but it's not.

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