My Utmost for His Highest - April 24th - The Warning Against Wantoning

Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven. - Luke 10:20

    As Christian workers, worldliness is not our snare, sin is not our snare, but spiritual wantoning is, viz.: taking the pattern and print of the religious age we live in, making eyes at spiritual success. Never court anything other than the approval of God, go "without the camp, bearing His reproach. (Hebrews 13:13)" Jesus told the disciples in Luke 10:20 not to rejoice in successful service, and yet this seems to be the one thing in which most of us do rejoice. We have the commercial view--so many souls saved and sanctified, that God, now it is all right. Our work, begins where God's grace has laid the foundation; we are not to save souls, but to disciple them. Salvation and sanctification are the work of God's sovereign grace; our work as His disciples is to disciple lives until they are wholly yielded to God. One life wholly devoted to God is of more value to God than one hundred lives simply awakened by His Spirit. As workers for God we must reproduce our own kind spiritually, and that will be God's witness to us as workers. God brings us to a standard of life by His grace, and we are responsible for reproducing that standard in others.

    Unless the worker lives a life hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3), he is apt to become an irritating dictator, instead of an indwelling disciple. Many of us are dictators, we dictate to people and to meetings. Jesus never dictates to us in that way. Whenever Our Lord talked about discipleship, He always prefaced it with an "IF," never with an emphatic assertion--"You must." Discipleship carries an option with it.

- From Oswald Chambers, "My Utmost for His Highest" - Classic Edition

Highlights and Underlines are courtesy of Mom from her print edition. 

My thoughts

Wantoning - Gross negligence, without motive, though he defines it as spiritual success. 

"Go without the camp" - Go with Jesus as Calvary was outside Jerusalem, thus outside, in this context outside the Jewish church. 

This is a reminder that our focus always needs to only be on God and His approval, not focusing on results of souls saved or program success.