For thought and meditation

[rl69]

Do not quench the Spirit. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:19
The voice of the Spirit of God is as gentle as a summer breeze— so gentle that unless you are living in complete fellowship and oneness with God, you will never hear it. The sense of warning and restraint that the Spirit gives comes to us in the most amazingly gentle ways. And if you are not sensitive enough to detect His voice, you will quench it, and your spiritual life will be impaired. This sense of restraint will always come as a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12), so faint that no one except a saint of God will notice it.
Beware if in sharing your personal testimony you continually have to look back, saying, “Once, a number of years ago, I was saved.” If you have put your “hand to the plow” and are walking in the light, there is no “looking back”— the past is instilled into the present wonder of fellowship and oneness with God (Luke 9:62 ; also see 1 John 1:6-7). If you get out of the light, you become a sentimental Christian, and live only on your memories, and your testimony will have a hard metallic ring to it. Beware of trying to cover up your present refusal to “walk in the light” by recalling your past experiences when you did “walk in the light” (1 John 1:7). When-ever the Spirit gives you that sense of restraint, call a halt and make things right, or else you will go on quenching and grieving Him without even knowing it.
Suppose God brings you to a crisis and you almost endure it, but not completely. He will engineer the crisis again, but this time some of the intensity will be lost. You will have less discernment and more humiliation at having disobeyed. If you continue to grieve His Spirit, there will come a time when that crisis cannot be repeated, because you have totally quenched Him. But if you will go on through the crisis, your life will become a hymn of praise to God. Never become attached to anything that continues to hurt God. For you to be free of it, God must be allowed to hurt whatever it may be.

[Blackwater]

If we think about it, it really makes sense that while Satan shouts, screams and dances about, Christ is always the opposite, and only speaks to us when we WANT to listen, and have dropped our thoughts and desires for all those things we spend so much time chasing every day. And when He speaks, it's always in a whisper. It's not even audible, usually! We just open our hearts, and He enters in, and speaks to us in order to guide and direct us. Non-believers cannot abide being told things like this, but it's absolutely true. They're all entangled in the worldly affairs of life, and in following their appetites. Thus, they have simply never opened themselves up to hear such silent messages. If they only knew! But maybe at least some of them will come to Christ before they shuffle off this mortal coil, and when one does, all of Heaven rejoices. You can really tell who's a mature Christian and who's got a ways to go when they do. The mature Christian rejoices as well, and finds great satisfaction in the fact that our clan is one greater. Those who lack maturity oftentimes are disturbed by one who's spent so much time in revelry and disbelief, and I have a suspicion that it's because they envy all the "good times" that newly saved Christian had before making his or her profession. It's said by some that Mary Magdelene was a prostitute before she met Christ. That may or may not be true, but what we know is that when she came to Christ, she did it with all her heart and soul, and we know that Christ rewarded her by making her a part of his crew of disciples. Why can't we learn these lessons? I believe it's because of our sinful natures, that continually bring us to temptation. Making a profession and becoming a Christian doesn't make us immune to temptation. On the contrary, it only intensifies Satan's efforts to derail our belief! But if we "put on the whole armor of God," we can resist all temptations. Our main trouble is that most of us have chinks in our armor, because we haven't maintained us, just as the best armor will rust if we don't continually keep it well oiled and greased. Christianity is really simple, when you realize what it's all about. It's our sinful natures that make it "hard to understand."