Cling to what is Good

Jesus said, "Don't cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go to my brothers and tell them, 'I ascend to my Father and your Father, my God and your God.'" John 20:17

As I was reading this devotion, the sentence "We want to cling to our natural virtues" I was remembering the account of Christ telling Mary as she went to grab on to him in her excitement. Was He setting this example that we are not to cling to natural things. Things of this world crumble under the pressure when we cling to them. God has always warned us to cling to Him....will we listen? Or will we be as Judah is described in Jeremiah? Look at a few of these verses before you read Oswald Chambers devotion. It really deepens our understanding to read scripture in line with other scripture on subjects.

As a belt clings to a person's waist, so I have made the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Judah cling to me," declares the LORD. "I did this so that they would be my people and bring fame, praise, and honor to me. However, they wouldn't listen. Jeremiah 13:11

Let love be without hypocrisy Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Roman 12:9

"When the Day arrives and you're out working in the yard, don't run into the house to get anything. And if you're out in the field, don't go back and get your coat. Remember what happened to Lot's wife! If you grasp and cling to life on your terms, you'll lose it, but if you let that life go, you'll get life on God's terms.Luke 17:21

I pray that we have the same attitude as Christ had, not clinging to our own lives but to God who is capable of delivering us out of each and every situation that might harm us; that we not lean on our own understanding but on the wisdom of our Father who is mighty to save, and that where we have any unbelief he heal us so that we can be a mighty generation lifting Him up for His name to be glorified.

With Love,
Candace

"And Every Virtue We Possess"

. . . All my springs are in you —Psalm 87:7

Our Lord never "patches up" our natural virtues, that is, our natural traits, qualities, or characteristics. He completely remakes a person on the inside— ". . . put on the new man . . ." ( Ephesians 4:24 ). In other words, see that your natural human life is putting on all that is in keeping with the new life. The life God places within us develops its own new virtues, not the virtues of the seed of Adam, but of Jesus Christ. Once God has begun the process of sanctification in your life, watch and see how God causes your confidence in your own natural virtues and power to wither away. He will continue until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through this drying-up experience!

The sign that God is at work in us is that He is destroying our confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ— a life that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely on what they have by virtue of heredity. God does not take our natural virtues and transform them, because our natural virtues could never even come close to what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every part of our natural bodily life into harmony with the new life God has placed within us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.
And every virtue we possess

Is His alone.