Leaving Beyond – Grounded In Scripture

Written by: April J. Buchanan

Burden not another with your unfulfilled longings that arise from your own disobedience, your apathy toward God’s means of grace, and your neglect of the encouragement and strength found only in Him. Do not act as the pagan, the insolent unbeliever, or the hardened reviler of holy things.

Recognize your weakness for what it is. It flows from a heart deprived and neglected through your own sinfulness.

You are not weak because you need something from the world or from another. You are not weak because you faithfully attend to your soul, partake of the good things of God, and grow weary in doing good.

You are weak because you have neglected the greater things. If you continue in such neglect, you shall either prove that you were never saved at all or you shall be among the most miserable and pitiable of saints who reach the end with nothing to lay before their King and no fruit, no reward, and no testimony of faithful devotion.

Your life, dear saint, is meant to bring glory to God. As you find in Him all your delight, your life becomes a display of His grace at work within you and draws men to see and praise Him.

Be not as one who seeks merely to make it for his own sake and cares nothing for the glory of God. How shall a man stand before such grace and say that he was saved by grace yet cared nothing for the means of grace God provided and sought only to escape judgment for himself?

How shall he say that he cared not to grow in the image of Christ and cared not for the salvation of men? Such a confession would reveal a heart unmoved by the grace it claims to possess.

False teachers labor with great zeal to evangelize souls to hell, and pagans pursue their filth and abominations with eagerness and delight. Yet many who profess Christ show less devotion to Him who has granted them grace sufficient for all their needs.

They despise such grace by neglecting it and then complain of the miseries that follow their own neglect. They seek only to make it to the end for their own sake and care little for the glory of the One who saved them.

Are you saved at all, and do you bear the marks of a child of God? Be warned, for your miserable soul may have deceived you.

You think you stand, yet you must beware not only that you fall but that you never stood at all.