the Third Week after Easter
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Daily Devotionals
Daily Open Windows
This is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.
(Philippians 1:9,10 NIV)
Personal, inward, spiritual intelligence is a very rare thing. No wonder that the enemy has such a successful line in delusions, counterfeits, and false representations. Our greatest safeguard against such will be a deep knowledge of the Lord through discipline. To know the Lord in a real way means steadfastness when others are being carried away – steadfastness through times of fiery trial. Those who know the Lord do not put forth their own hand and try to bring things about. Such are full of love and patience, and do not lose their poise when everything seems to be going to pieces. Confidence is an essential and inevitable fruit of this knowledge, and in those who know Him there is a quiet restful strength which speaks of a great depth of Life.
Let me point out that in Christ “are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden,” and the Lord‟s will for us is to come to an evergrowing realization and personal appreciation of Him in Whom all the fullness dwells. We have only stated facts as to the Lord‟s will for all His own, and their greatest need. The absence of this real knowledge of the Lord has proved to be the most tragic factor in the Church‟s history.
Every fresh uprising of an abnormal condition has disclosed the appalling weakness amongst Christian people because of this lack. Waves of error; the swing of the pendulum to some fresh popular acceptance; a great war with its horrors and many-sided tests of faith; all these have swept away multitudes and left them in spiritual ruin. These things are ever near at hand, and we have written this message to urge upon the Lord‟s people to have very definite dealings with Him that He will take every measure with them that they might know Him.
From: On Knowing the Lord
www.austin-sparks.net/english/000415.html
