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The Corner
Dear Friends, I want to share with you an illustration that God recently showed me. It deals with how people claim to be servants of the Lord, how they supposedly are walking with Him, and yet, when the time comes to testify, pray or operate in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, they are found wanting. They are like Belshazzar when God told him he had been weighed and found wanting. (Daniel 5:27) It stands to reason that if you call yourself a Christian, shouldn’t you be striving to be like Christ all the time? So when God calls you to do something, you don’t panic and say “Oh Lord, let me pray and get myself ready.” It’s too late at that point; God will simply pass you by. God wants us to be ready at all times, just waiting for His command. I was thinking about the sponge that sits in my kitchen sink. It’s a little rectangular thing that is yellow on one side and green on the other. The yellow side is used on things that come off easily, and when it is not able to handle the job, I use the rougher green side. This sponge works very well and cleans my dishes without difficulty. The last time I went on vacation, I was gone for a week. When I came back home, I found my sponge sitting exactly where I left it. It was the same sponge but its properties had changed. It was now stiff and useless to me in its current state because it had no moisture and would not bend itself to the contours of my hand like it used to. My remedy was to hold it under the water until it was saturated with water; only then did it return to its former state. This sponge of mine is very much like what Christians need to be, for if we separate ourselves from God, we slowly dry up until we are powerless. Jesus said that He is the vine and we are the branches, but if the branches are cut off from the vine, how do they receive that life-giving moisture? I have found there are many Christians out there, myself included, who go through seasons of dryness. The all important moisture of walking with the Lord that makes us pliable and useful is our choice to reject. God has opened up the faucet and poured out His Holy Spirit but it’s up to us whether we want to be immersed in the water. This is how some people are in their relationship with the Lord. God wants us to be a sponge that is saturated with Him. He is the life giving water, for without Him nothing is accomplished. There are many dry sponge Christians who act like they’re wet. The truth is that we need constant fellowship with the Lord in order for Him to minister to us and for us in turn to minister to others. How can we ignore the Lord and think that we will have something to offer of spiritual value? Our walk with the Lord and witness for Him really should be fresh like today’s newspaper. After all, who would subscribe to a daily paper that never changed its articles? Likewise, nobody likes to hang around someone who is always focused on their past born again experience with nothing new to add. They are a hard, dry and dusty sponge, the complete opposite of how God wants us to live. If you haven’t done so lately, I would recommend that you read the fifteenth chapter in the Gospel of John and let it minister to your soul. May God richly bless you today,
Charles Thorell |
