Day 07

“The Warning Against Desiring Spiritual Success”

“…Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you…” (Luke 10:20 NIV)

WORLDLINESS IS NOT the trap that most endangers us as followers of Christ, nor is it sin. The trap we fall into is excessively desiring spiritual success, that is, success measured by, and patterned after, the form set by this religious culture we presently live in. We should never seek after any approval other than the approval of Jesus, and always be willing to go “…outside the religious “walls” and bear his disgrace.” (Heb. 13:13 TPT). In Luke 10:20, Jesus tells His disciples not to rejoice in successful service, and yet this seems to be the one thing in which most of us do rejoice. We have a commercialized view—we count how many souls have been saved and sanctified, we thank God, and then we think everything is alright. Yet our work only begins where God’s grace has laid the foundation. Our work is not to save souls but to disciple them. Salvation and sanctification are the work of God’s sovereign grace, and our work as His disciples is to disciple others’ lives until they are totally yielded to God. One born again believer totally devoted to following Jesus is of more value to Him than one hundred lives which have been simply awakened by His Spirit in new birth. As followers of Jesus, we must reproduce our own kind of spiritually, and those lives will be His testimony to us as His workers. Jesus brings us up to a standard of life through His grace, and we are responsible for reproducing that same standard in others. Unless we as followers live a life that “is now hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3 NIV), we are prone to become irritating dictators to others, instead of an active, living disciple. Many of us are dictators, dictating our desires to individuals and to groups. But Jesus never dictates to us in that way. Whenever our Lord talked about discipleship, He always prefaced His words with an “if,” never with the forceful or dogmatic statement—“You must.” Discipleship carries with it an option.