Witness Bearers to the Truth

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king.
To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness
​unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Joh 18:37

THIS WAS our Lord's answer to Pilate's inquiry, and to a certain extent each of us may appropriate His words. Wordsworth's immortal lines suggest that we stood before God to receive our commission, ere we became clothed with this body of humiliation. Whether or not the poet is right in his surmise, that "not in utter nakedness or forgetfulness do we come from God, who is our Home," we need not argue. It is enough that God, who hates nothing that He has made, sent us forth to realize an ideal, to fulfil a purpose, to bear witness to some phase of Truth. Shall we not ask ourselves, as in His Presence, whether we are fulfilling the Divine purpose of what the Apostle calls "our high calling"?

​​Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, 
Php 3:14  I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. 

God created each soul with a purpose. The potter takes in hand a lump of clay with a distinct design. He means, when he places it on the horizontal wheel, to make of it a vessel to adorn a temple or palace, or he has in mind to serve some household use. The revolving wheel on the one hand, and his skillful manipulation on the other, will evolve and complete his purpose. "Cannot I do with you, as this potter? saith the Lord."
"Thou hast made me and fashioned me. Thou didst choose the time and circumstances of my birth, my parentage and heredity, my mental equipment and my physical frame. From the first Thou didst know the constitution of my body, which Thou didst fashion in secret, and curiously work in the lowest places of the earth."
To our humble challenge: "Why hast Thou made me thus?" God does not always give an audible reply. His answer is often voiceless, it steals in upon the soul insensibly, and we know that we are fulfilling His purpose. If you are engaged in some unwelcome task, which evidently is your duty; if you are shut up as companion with some uncongenial charge; if you are called to minister to people who seem unresponsive or unsympathizing, ask that the Savior and you may be yoked together, that His Will may be done through you, that His love and kindness may bear and forbear in you, and that you may witness to the truth, as it is in Jesus.  (Our Daily Walk)

My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; 
Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. James 1:2-3
God’s School of Trial

​This Epistle is marked by the austere features of the Jerusalem church, which refused to be affected by that wider contact with the Gentile world, by which the life and teachings of St. Paul were so powerfully influenced. “Brother to Jesus” was the designation that James might have used, but he preferred the more modest title of bond-servant. The slaves of such a king are nobles! The times were full of severe testing. Each believer had to face ignominy, loss and death for his testimony to Jesus and His saving power. But James encourages these harried souls by the immense revenues that would accrue, more especially in the acquisition of patience. While patience is drawn out almost to the breaking-point, God is developing our characters with perfect beauty, so that no side is incomplete.
There are three urgent requirements for us all: (1) Wisdom to act and speak wisely in the hour of trial; (2) faith that refuses to respond to the surging billows of doubt; (3) humility and contentment with God’s dealings.   (F.B. Meyer)

Trials are designed to reveal to us our own sinfulness and weakness, to discover the graces of the Spirit, to prove the strength of our faith, the ardor of our love, the constancy of our devotion. Like the tree which becomes the more firmly rooted by the blasts which toss and twist its branches, the believer only clings more tenaciously to his Lord when his soul is tried by affliction.
Trials develop character, and reveal to us, what is really in us. That we need to deal with our own lives, and go to the Lord for His help and ask for the strength and will to be renewed in our spirit.

Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are
​in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? 
Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay:
for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the
​thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding? Isa 29:15-16
God's Word to the Stiff-Necked

They that think to hide their counsels from God--
1. In effect deny Him to be their Creator.
2. Or, which comes to the same thing, deny Him to be a wise Creator.

​THEIR POLITICS DESCRIBED (Isa_29:15). The consultations they had about their own safety they kept to themselves, and never asked God’s advice concerning them. See what foolish, fruitless pains sinners take in their sinful ways; they seek deep, they sink deep, to hide their counsel from the Lord, who sits in heaven and laughs at them. A practical disbelief of God’s omniscience is at the bottom both of the carnal worship and carnal confidences of the hypocrites (Psa_94:7; Eze_8:12; Eze_9:9).
Isa 29:15  Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and who knoweth us? 
​Psa 94:7  Yet they say, The LORD shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. 
Eze 8:12  Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, The LORD seeth us not; the LORD hath forsaken the earth. 
Eze 9:9  Then said he unto me, The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceeding great, and the land is full of blood, and the city full of perverseness: for they say, The LORD hath forsaken the earth, and the LORD seeth not. 

THE ABSURDITY OF THEIR POLITICS DEMONSTRATED (Isa_29:16). Your inverting the order of things, and thinking to make God’s providence give attendance on your projects, and that God must know no more than you think fit, which is perfectly “turning things upside down,” and beginning at the wrong end,—“it shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay”; i.e., God will turn and manage you, and all your counsels, with as much ease, and as absolute a power, as the potter forms and fashions his clay.
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Isa 29:16  Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter's clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding?   (M. Henry)

Note: These commentaries, describe the behavior and corruption of our government's actions very well, and are a perfect "up to date" correction from God-to whoever may come here-and read them. This is God's mind on the lying, deceptions, and conniving's going on behind the doors and walls of the institutions in Washington D.C., and have been for a long time. 
What you do in the dark, believing your not seen or heard, is as being done at noonday to God-He's sees it, and records it. One day we all will have an audience with Jesus Christ, and He will give everyone the just rewards for their deeds. What you stood for, and the deeds regarding the people under your care-will all come to bear, and the lives that were destroyed by your policies, if you prove to be a tyrant, working with treachery.
Only those who have gone to Him in honest repentance, and turned from their sins, will be able to have the assurance of their sins "paid in full", by the blood of Christ. I pray, that the reader, will find it so for them, and hear Jesus say "Come, enter the joy of thy Lord".

All Have Sinned and Come Short of the Glory of God
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all
do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. 
And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee: for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us, because of our iniquities. 
​But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter;
and we all are the work of thy hand. Isa 64:6-8
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​​And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:  Php 3:9

The ancient Christians followed this example: they shared each other’s sufferings; they suffered one for another, the rich the poverty of the poor; they saw Christ in the poor, the prisoners, the captives, the sick, as He bade them and as He had told them, and underwent sufferings for them; they laid down their lives for the brethren. So then they well understood the two parts of the doctrine of the Cross, the cross which was borne for us by Christ and the cross which was to be borne by us, in Christ’s strength and for Christ’s sake, and this not for a brighter crown merely, but that they might finally be saved.
Every shade of self-denial, from the pettiest denial of our appetites to the martyr’s mangled and scored human form, is all included in bearing the cross, the least because He has commanded it, and He, for His own love’s sake, accepts it. All crosses are preparations for heaven; for though we know not its unspeakable joys or wherein they consist, this we know: that we must learn to do His will on earth as it is done in heaven, to be like the blessed spirits who do His pleasure, swift and instant as the lightning, to count nothing labor, toil, or cross, which is to do His will. This portion of the cross has a blessed privilege, in that it is taken willingly in obedience, not simply borne willingly, as the chastisement of disobedience; it is taken in order, in what little way regenerate man is capable of, to be like his Maker; it is taken out of love to Him and to do His commandments.
(Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times" vol. iii., p. 1)

LOSING ALL TO KNOW CHRIST

Precept must be on precept, line on line. The false teachers who dogged Paul’s steps insisted on rigid conformity to Judaism, with its rabbinical accretions, as the condition of being saved by Christ. Paul’s answer was that he had gone through all the requirements of Judaism, but had found it absolutely unsatisfactory and inefficient to subdue the sin of his soul. But in Christ he had found everything he needed. What had been gain to him now seemed but dross. He had found the pearl of great price, and was only too glad to sacrifice all else to purchase and keep it, as the talisman of complete victory.
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The essence of Judaism was not external but within. True circumcision was deliverance from the self-life, and that could only be gained by the Cross of Christ. The “Israelite indeed,” like Nathanael, had three traits of character-his worship was spiritual, he gloried in the Crucified, and he was delivered from reliance upon the self-life. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to teach us to know Jesus in the intimacy of personal fellowship, to feel the pulse of His resurrection life, to experience the power of His death, and to realize the whole of His divine program. For this we might be more than content to trample on our boasted pride.   (F.B. Meyer)