I just published “Embarking” https://t.co/3RcHPussKd

— Dustin Butler (@revdustybutts) July 7, 2017

The Grace To BE Where You Are Planted And To Stay Focused On Jesus!

April 23rd
The worship of the work
Labourers together with God. 1 Cor. 3:9.

Beware of any work for God which enables you to evade concentration on Him. A great many Christian workers worship their work. The one concern of a worker should be concentration on God, and this will mean that all the other margins of life, mental, moral and spiritual, are free with the freedom of a child—a worshipping child, not a wayward child. A worker without this solemn, dominant note of concentration on God is apt to get his work on his neck; there is no margin of body, mind or spirit free, consequently he becomes spent out and crushed. There is no freedom, no delight in life; nerves, mind and heart are so crushingly burdened that God’s blessing cannot rest. But the other side is just as true—when once the concentration is on God, all the margins of life are free and under the dominance of God alone. There is no responsibility on you for the work; the only responsibility you have is to keep in living, constant touch with God, and to see that you allow nothing to hinder your co-operation with Him. The freedom after sanctification is the freedom of a child, the things that used to keep the life pinned down are gone. But be careful to remember that you are freed for one thing only—to be absolutely devoted to your co-Worker.
We have no right to judge where we should be put, or to have preconceived notions as to what God is fitting us for. God engineers everything; wherever He puts us our one great aim is to pour out a whole-hearted devotion to Him in that particular work. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

--Oswald Chambers My Utmost For His Highest

Don't Ruin Rest

From:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/22/why-time-management-is-ruining-our-lives

"One of the sneakier pitfalls of an efficiency-based attitude to time is that we start to feel pressured to use our leisure time “productively”, too – an attitude which implies that enjoying leisure for its own sake, which you might have assumed was the whole point of leisure, is somehow not quite enough. And so we find ourselves, for example, travelling to unfamiliar places not for the sheer experience of travel, but in order to add to our mental storehouse of experiences, or to our Instagram feeds. We go walking or running to improve our health, not for the pleasure of movement; we approach the tasks of parenthood with a fixation on the successful future adults we hope to create."

"...Friedrich Nietzsche, in what reads like a foreshadowing of our present circumstances. “Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.”"

From the Gospel Transformation Bible on Psalm 55

"Recalling that God is King allows the believer to calm his emotions (v. 19 ). He is calmed by the realization that his Shepherd-King “gives ear” to his “voice” and protects his soul in the battle (vv. 16– 19 ; 78: 72 ). The believer’s faith is reawakened when he remembers that God will bring justice upon the treacherous ( 55: 23 ). A fresh vision of a benevolent and all-powerful King creates a stable and steadfast faith, inviting other anxious souls to “cast [their] burden” upon the Lord rather than be cast about on the waves of doubt or even be cast down into the “pit of destruction” (vv. 22– 23 ; 1 Pet. 5: 6– 7 ). Even now, Christ rules over all ( Phil. 2: 9 )."

Waiting On God's Timing, Even With God's Vision

October 13th

Individual discouragement and personal enlargement

Moses went unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens. Exodus 2:11.

"Moses saw the oppression of his people and felt certain that he was the one to deliver them, and in the righteous indignation of his own spirit he started to right their wrongs. After the first strike for God and for the right, God allowed Moses to be driven into blank discouragement, He sent him into the desert to feed sheep for forty years. At the end of that time, God appeared and told Moses to go and bring forth His people, and Moses said—‘Who am I, that I should go?’ In the beginning Moses realized that he was the man to deliver the people, but he had to be trained and disciplined by God first. He was right in the individual aspect, but he was not the man for the work until he had learned communion with God.
We may have the vision of God and a very clear understanding of what God wants, and we start to do the thing; then comes something equivalent to the forty years in the wilderness, as if God had ignored the whole thing, and when we are thoroughly discouraged God comes back and revives the call, and we get the quaver in and say—‘Oh, who am I!’ We have to learn the first great stride of God—“I AM THAT I AM hath sent thee.” We have to learn that our individual effort for God is an impertinence; our individuality is to be rendered incandescent by a personal relationship to God (see Matthew 3:11). We fix on the individual aspect of things; we have the vision—‘This is what God wants me to do’; but we have not got into God’s stride. If you are going through a time of discouragement, there is a big personal enlargement ahead.”

https://ref.ly/o/utmost/449219 via the Logos Bible Android app.