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Sunday, November 17, 2013

Spurgeon and Art Katz on Mark 9:29

"It will make men of you; you will be all the grander and the better servants of God in after years, when your own weakness shall have driven you back upon the divine strength, and you shall have learned to trust, not in man, much less in yourself, but to cast yourself confidently on God."...  "he wants to make us see the greatness of the mercy, so he occupies our thoughts with the greatness of the distress that needs to be relieved, and with this impossibility of that distress being relieved except by his own power and Godhead. That experience does us good, dear friends, does it not? It makes us feel that the mercy, when it does come, will be remarkably precious to us."  "I think also that I may spiritualize this expression now, and say that, when your mind gets into such a condition that you begin to sorrow over a lost soul, when you realize the meaning of that agonizing cry of Jeremiah, "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!"—it is then that the devil will have to go. When your soul is clothed in sackcloth and ashes, and you go mourning, without the light of the sun, saying, "I could die rather than that soul should die; I could wish myself accursed rather than that soul were accursed; I put myself in the dust before God, even in the dust of self-abasement on account of that soul, that I may win it to Christ," then that sort of devil will have to go out. Starving him out by starving yourself, and making your own spirit wretched and miserable for the poor sinner's sane, you will make that devil find the person untenable any longer as a lodging-place."   Spurgeon from here...    http://www.spurgeon.org/sermons/2454.htm

"This kind cometh not out, except by prayer and fasting"  both of which are acts of self-denial, this kind of devotional prayer (rising early in the morning) is as much an act of self denial of sleep, as fasting is a denial of food and there is something in the wisdom of God that affects issues in the heavenlies, by the act of denial because the powers of the air predicate their entire system not on denial but on gratification; on lust, on greed, on ambition, on satisfaction, on all that is carnal.  God's wisdom is exactly the opposite, relinquishing, yielding, letting go, forsaking,   It is that which brings it into tune with the whole universe as God's act."  Art Katz teaching on Mark 9:29 and quoting P.T. Forsyth on the Soul of Prayer.

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