Have you lost your song?
Recently my pastor told a story of a man who owned a small song bird who would sing continually during his waking hours. One day his owner was cleaning his cage with a vacuum cleaner, the phone rang and turning around with one hand to stretch to reach the phone as he did his other hand rose up just enough to suck the little song bird into the vacuum. In a panic he tore open the vacuum, dug into the bag to find a frightened and dirty bird, yet not harmed! He cleaned him off and put him back into his cage. This little bird has never sung a song since, he still has the ability to sing, but life happened, the vacuum cleaner stole his song.
Many today had the song. They walk around saying the right things, doing the right things, but they know in their heart the song is missing. Like that little bird they are numb from their trials, they pray to be delivered from this mountain that is before them, that difficult situation such as a strained marriage, the demanding business, the hopeless financial mess and countless other trials that can come upon God’s children to wash, purify and cleanse to bring them to a place right in the middle of the storm that they are content, joyful and thankful. God is teaching his people that they can go in the vacuum cleaner and KEEP THEIR SONG. Trials come to expose my heart when I am squeezed, what comes out of my mouth is really what is in my heart.
God himself has given us as a gift of love to His Son. It is the work of God to cleanse us; our work is to yield to His cleansing and keep faith in His ability to complete the work He has started in you. As we yield to His grace, you become honest about your weaknesses, face your fears and bring your sins to His throne of grace and call sin what He calls sin, DIRT! Then we shall find the hand of God’s forgiveness.
The testimony of every believer who turns to the Lord with all his heart, hungering after holiness and a deeper walk with Jesus includes the sudden breaking forth of strange and intense troubles and trails. “Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try (test) you, as though some strange thing happened unto you.” I Peter 4:12
God resist the proud, but His grace is drawn to the humble. Humility brings grace to our need and grace alone can change our hearts. The fiery trials will expose the impurities in our hearts and bring us to a place of true humility and our need for grace and that we fall prostrate before God for deliverance. Therefore, sanctification starts not with rules, but with forsaking the pride. Holiness begins with our determined refusal to hide from the condition of our heart.
The School of Christ: God sometimes drives you to the very end of your rope, into deep suffering so you’ll lose confidence in your ability to save yourself. He takes you into HIS SCHOOL.
In the beginning of our walk, we embraced life in our own strength, trusting in our own skills for success, yes we turned to God mainly in times of grief and trial, but as the school of Christ brings us into maturity, what we once considered strengths are actually subtle weaknesses. Our pride and self confidence keeps us from God’s help. As the trials expose our needs and we grow weaker, less confident in our abilities and our self righteousness crumbles.
My Pastors wife, who teaches adult Sunday school, was invited to come and hear a lady who knew Greek and Hebrew and was a really good teacher. A few days later she started feeling unworthy to teach, so she told her husband that she was going to quit teaching. He told her you better pray about it. Later she pulled Proverbs 14:30 out of a jarful of scriptures. It said, “But envy the rottenness of the bones”. She started to put it back in the jar, thinking this is not for me. Then she looked at it again. Then she realized she was envious of that other teacher who knew Greek and Hebrew. She never knew she was envious until the trial came and exposed the envy and a spot in her life, and then washed in THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB and freedom came.
Let’s look at the life of the apostle Paul; God used him in a mighty way, planting churches, working signs and wonders, God’s man of the hour. Then in a series of events he ended up in prison and from there he wrote letters and goes in detail about his conditions, his heart and his hope. In his letter to the Philippians 4:11-12 he wrote, “Not that I speak from want; for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I know how to live in prosperity, in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
Paul did not start off this way, his flesh had to die, he cried out in his letter to the Romans 7:24 wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? I am sure Paul was like you and I, he fasted, prayed and gritted his teeth and said, “I will be holy and blameless”, in the flesh, which is doomed to failure and frustration. This can ONLY be obtained by SUBMITTING TO CHRIST AND HIM ALONE. Jesus said in Matthew 16:24 “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”.
Paul said, “I DIE DAILY”, meaning he had to die to envy, strife, anger, lust, jealousy, and a host of other sins of the heart that the Lord exposed by his word and the trials that come upon Paul to try him. I am sure Paul thought it does not take a lot of power to work signs and wonders, but a whole lot to die to self.
In hearing evil reports of the wolves and tares coming into church’s teaching doctrines of demons that he had planted, you know there had to be some frustration, sitting in prison, he could not go and face the situation eyeball to eyeball, so he wrote various letters to individuals and churches and because God’s plan was throughout church history. We are reading these letters and Paul never knew he was writing two thirds of the New Testament.
Thank God Paul was in prison, he never knew he would be used to the end of the age. Paul had become a prisoner of Christ, crucified to his own interest and deeds of the flesh given over completely to the absolute will of God.
In his second letter to his young son in the faith, Timothy, Paul realized when he wrote this letter that his death was near by the Roman dictator Nero, he quotes “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power and love, and a sound mind.” II Timothy 1:7
You know the battle he had with fear, he was not just saying words about fear, and he experienced it but overcame because of TRUST in CHRIST JESUS. “For the which cause I suffer these things, nevertheless I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed and persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.” II Timothy 1:12
For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, and I have kept the faith. Soon afterward, according to tradition, he was beheaded on the Ostian way, west of Rome. A good soldier of Christ Jesus as in II Timothy 2:3.
Paul OVERCAME the devil, the flesh, and the world, he endured firm into the end. Jesus said, in the seven letters to the seven churches he who overcomes shall be saved. Paul went through the vacuum cleaner many times and kept his song, his first love. The man that had the Damascus road experience years earlier, that impure ore, became gold refined by fire, a valedictorian of the School of Christ.
How do we get our song back? Losing our song is the same as losing your first love. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee because thou hast left thy first love. Revelation 2:4