Catching up with my daily devotional on 9th January 2010:
Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Thessalonians 5:23, New King James Version
It was a dreadful moment, the most frightened moment I could remember in my long-health-history. I’ve been close to the valley of death for many times, but last Friday was the worst for me. I couldn’t breathe; my chest was in so much pain, my heart beat very fast and hard – for about six times attacks in one single night.
When I started to have the attack at home that night, during the long minutes of pain and breathless moment, the things in my mind were about the ways I had in the end of my life. I thought about my parents, I thought about the pain in my chest, I thought about my life that has not been fruitful, I thought about my service in church – which I just tried to start again, I thought about the mistake I did before and then had the attack…
I knew for sure where I would head to if I should die, but I felt a trace of fear – what was the last thing I did? What have I accomplished here in this earth? What should I say to God when I had to stand before Him – face to face?
I cried in my pain, “O God, please forgive me, please erase my sin…”
Today I’m reading the Utmost for His Highest for 09 January 2010, the one that I skipped when I was hospitalized. Chambers has rewritten the Psalm 139 in a very beautiful phrase:
“O Lord, You are the God of the early mornings, the God of the late nights, the God of the mountain peaks, and the God of the sea. But, my God, my soul has horizons further away than those of early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, greater depths than any sea in nature. You who are the God of all these, be my God. I cannot reach to the heights or to the depths; there are motives I cannot discover, dreams I cannot realize. My God, search me.”
The writer of the Psalm realized the depth of his inner soul – which he couldn’t know himself, but then he was earnest to his fullest to be blameless in front of God so he cried to God to search him, into the greater depths of himself.
How far above is the urge implicated in 1 Thessalonians 5:23; may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord…
May your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless. Blameless! How to be blameless in front a Holy God? I can be sure that His blood has washed my sin and made me the member of the Kingdom of God – so I might have the right to enter His Kingdom when I finish my time on this earth, but to preserve – to keep myself blameless (after He washed my sin, after I accept Him as my savior)?
Chambers did explain further…
Do we believe that God can fortify and protect our thought processes far beyond where we can go? “. . . the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7 ). If this verse means cleansing only on our conscious level, may God have mercy on us. The man who has been dulled by sin will say that he is not even conscious of it. But the cleansing from sin we experience will reach to the heights and depths of our spirit if we will “walk in the light as He is in the light” (1 John 1:7). The same Spirit that fed the life of Jesus Christ will feed the life of our spirit. It is only when we are protected by God with the miraculous sacredness of the Holy Spirit that our spirit, soul, and body can be preserved in pure uprightness until the coming of Jesus-no longer condemned in God’s sight.
We should more frequently allow our minds to meditate on these great, massive truths of God.
How grateful I am for knowing this – that God is able to cleanse us from our sin, to the heights and depths of our spirit – to the places in ourselves that we might never seen or thought before, and preserve our purity into the end of time! But please remember, the precondition to experience this is to walk in the light as He is in the light.
Until today, I can’t really sleep peacefully, being traumatized by what I had on last weekend. I went to sleep on that evening, knowing that I didn’t feel well, and when I woke up to go to the toilet, the attack happened. Until now it still scares me to go to sleep, afraid that when I wake up, I would feel a sudden pain again.
The earlier part of 1 Thessalonians 5 has been a very serious warning – the one I personally had experienced these days:
For you yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so comes as a thief in the night. For when they say, “Peace and safety!” then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape. (1 Thessalonians 5: 2-3, NKJV)
Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober (1 Thessalonians 5:6, NKJV)
Well, of course I need to sleep. Though every single sleeping time has been transformed to be a very long prayer time for me lately (last night, I laid & prayed in my bed for 3 hours, unable to sleep because of the pain and fear altogether), but surely we will have to sleep every night.
But as Chambers has written that when we put our lives in God’s hands and live in His light, He will cleanse our souls – in days and nights, to the deepest part of our heart, even when we’re asleep.
May the grace of the Holy Spirit of God, will continuously work in me, change me and sanctify me, so I might be found blameless when I have finished my time here and meet my God above. And may God strengthen me to do my part, to live in Him alone and delight in His Words with all my might.
May I now go to sleep in peace, take His promise to guard me, and say to Him earnestly,
“You who are the God of all these, be my God and search me!”
