Monday, April 13, 2009

EVERY HOPE OR DREAM

“Every hope or dream of the human mind will be fulfilled if it is noble and of God” (Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest).

Photobucket

Almost every day of my life begins with the daily devotional My Utmost for His Highest. This sentence from the February 22 reading is a two-pronged statement. “Every hope or dream of the human mind will be fulfilled” 1) “if it is noble” and 2) if it is “of God.” The two principles cannot be separated or you will always have imbalance and undesirable consequences..

Oswald Chambers ads to this principle in his March 22nd devotional: “The things we are going through are either making us sweeter, better, and nobler men and women, or they are making us more critical and fault-finding, and more insistent on our own way.”

In the days of yore, when there was a “noble class” in charge, they rarely ever turned out to be noble in character. They were more often than not little more than thugs, legal thugs taking what was not theirs, over-taxing the poor, and seeing to it that their own interests were paramount. Some acted in “the name of Christ” to their deeds, but that was only a means of slathering a foul stench with much perfume.

If you have the true and undefiled mind of Christ nurturing in your soul, then you cannot help but be turned toward the noble-minded. If your hopes and dreams are of God, then they are noble because they cannot be anything else.

That of course, is no guarantee that God is obligated to fulfill hopes and dreams. Hopes and dreams are to be brought subject to God’s will, not the other way around. Chambers also writes, “If our hopes seem to be experiencing disappointment right now, it simply means that they are being purified.”

If you are experiencing disappointments and frustrations, consider recasting your hopes and dreams, carefully taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5). “We will readily give up sin and worldliness, but God calls us to give up the very closest, noblest and most right tie we have, if it enters into competition with His call” (So Send I You, Oswald Chambers).

“The noble man makes noble plans and by noble plans he stands”