How to Find True Significance – An Encouragement from FICM’s Mark Eshelman – Purity 1198

How to Find True Significance – An Encouragement from
FICM’s Mark Eshelman – Purity 1198

Purity 1198 11/14/2023 Purity 1198 Podcast

Purity 1198 on YouTube:

Good morning,

Today’s photo of the view of Lake Moreau from the
top of the Spring Overlook Trailhead comes to us from yours truly as my wife
and I went to enjoy God’s creation, one another’s company, and the stillness of
His presence on a hike at Moreau Lake State Park this past Saturday on Veterans
Day.  

Well, it is Tuesday and lately, as we draw nearer to
Thanksgiving, I have been filled with thankfulness for my relationship with God
and the wonderful faithful people of God that 
He has put along the path of my life’s journey as I seek to grow in my
faith and into my purpose in God’s kingdom. 
I have so many “portraits” of these people as I have either encountered
them or remembered them recently that I could dedicate a blog post to “the
saints of my life” to fill the rest of the month, and I might do that, starting
today, because if I were to try to share about the meaningful friendships that
I have made in the body of Christ since coming to faith all at once, it
wouldn’t give a true picture of the mass of humanity – all those brothers and
sisters in Christ – that have passed through the life of someone who spent his
time alone in a basement and his own personal darkness.  God has not only filled my life with his
illuminating light of truth and love, but he also filled it with people.   

One of those people, even
though we don’t know each other too well, is Mark Eshelman.  Mark is Field Staff and the SW Regional Director of Prayer, for FICM-USA
but before that Mark was the NE Regional Director of Prayer, before going to
California  Mark lived in New Jersey, and
I made his acquaintance in San Antonio Texas at the FICM Practicum where I
completed my training to become a CFMA. After that I joined Mark for the online
monthly prayer meetings he hosted. As I said I don’t Mark too well, but in my
limited exposure to him I know Mark to be a faithful man of God with a real
heart for freedom ministry and encouraging others to live free in Christ.  Upon learning that I podcasted my blog and the
CFM classes I had taught at my local church in 2021, It was Mark who was the
first person to suggest that I become an online course facilitator for FICM, a
suggestion I took and was blessed by.  
In 2024, I will be leading another Freedom in Christ Course for Men
online ( register today for a FICM class 
by going to https://www.ficm.org/courses/level-1-get-started/ ) in part because Mark encouraged me
that I could do it. Thank You, Mark.  

But Mark
hasn’t stopped encouraging people to find or to expand their freedom in Christ.
Mark continues serving FICM as Field Staff and the SW Regional Director of
Prayer and he also contributes occasionally to the FICM newsletter/weekly
encouragement.  I recently was encouraged
by a message Mark shared back in October of this year on True Significance, and
because it inspired me, I am sharing it on the blog today. Mark writes:

“How
to Find True Significance

Significance
is defined in the online dictionary as “the quality of being worthy of
attention; importance.”  There are
several aspects of this that are worth discussing: 

·       How do feelings of insignificance
and significance make us act?

·       What is our true significance?

·       How can we grow in significance?

Let’s
look at each of these.

Feelings
of Insignificance vs. Significance

It
can be interesting to sit in meetings and look at how people relate to one
another.  Is someone besides the leader
trying to be in charge? Does someone need to be right all the time?  Does someone get angry when corrected or
shown they are wrong?  Does someone need
the last word?  Can people freely share
their ideas without being attacked or put down?

After
literally thousands of technical work meetings, I have memories of all of the
above events.  To be honest, I have even
played these roles myself.  But finding
freedom and significance in Christ has changed that for me.  As some of you may know from Neil’s writings,
the three main aspects we lost in the fall are acceptance, security, and
significance.  In Christ, these
have been regained.  But when we
don’t understand or believe that we are already significant, our
behavior is very similar to the non-believers around us.  Think about the meeting interactions
discussed above again. 

True
Significance

Our
true significance is actually defined by God, not by how we feel or what we
think of ourselves.  If we are in Christ,
we are already significant because we are:

·       “The salt of the earth and a
light on a hill;

·       A branch attached to God’s vine –
a channel of his life;

·       Chosen and appointed to bear
fruit;

·       God’s holy temple;

·       A minister of reconciliation;

·       God’s workmanship.” (from the Who
I am in Christ Bookmark)

Believing
these truths about ourselves will actually change the way we act.  When we believe the significance of who we
are, we act more gracefully.  We don’t
need to be in charge.  We don’t need to
prove we are right all the time. We don’t need the last word.  It changes us.  I have seen this occur over a several month
process in my own life. It really does make a difference!

 

Growing
in Significance

Beyond
our initial significance in Christ, we can also grow in significance. 
It may be difficult to understand this at first. How can I grow in
something that I already have?

But
life offers us many examples of this. I can play the guitar, but if I practice
more and play in a group, I will get much better. I already do gardening, but
if I read about soils and plant type needs, I will grow better tomatoes.  In the same way, we grow in significance
as we grow in godliness. 

We
all know that we are a work in progress. 
But growth can occur as we apply what we already know.  

As it
turns out, there is a Biblical pattern which Paul explains in Colossians
1:9-10. Paul prays that the Colossians will progress as they gain knowledge of
God’s will, wisdom, and understanding. 
They are then encouraged to enact what has been understood to bring
about fruit.  When the fruit is formed,
God gives us knowledge (Colossians 1:10).

In
other words, to actually grow, we need to move away from an intellectually
based Christianity, to one which includes the heart, soul, and actions*. 

How
does growth in godliness grow our significance?

God
trusts us with larger projects as we are faithful in the smaller ones. 

Do
you remember the parable about the talents? 
It seems unfair that the one who invested and bore fruit should actually
receive more.  But that is exactly what
Paul is saying. 

God
invests in those who embrace and put to use the understanding they have. 
Yet, we need to remember how this actually works. It is not by
personal effort alone. It is by letting God work and responding to His
promptings.  We are co-laborers, not just
laborers in the kingdom of God.

Personally,
I find that I need to relax into God’s care and let Him work through me in
order to actually accomplish anything. 

Many
of us are action people who like to “do things.”

But
God’s kingdom works differently. Growth and fruit appear as we abide, not as we
strive.

This
is the picture Jesus gives us in John 15:5. We need to let God work and not
just engage our physical, emotional, and mental capacities. As Jesus
reminds us, “apart from me you can do nothing (nothing that will be significant
in the end).” 

*See
Dr. Neil Anderson’s book Discipleship Counseling

Mark
Eshelman

Field
Staff & SW Regional Director of Prayer, FICM-USA”

 

Thanks, Mark for this awesome encouragement!  I have been blessed by encountering you on the
path of Christian discipleship and thank you for being one of many of the
“saints of my life”.  

——————————————————————————————–

Today’s
Bible verse comes to us from “The Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling” By
John G. Kruis.

(
While Bible verses on various topics of Counseling can be found with a quick Google
search, we encourage you to purchase this resource to support the late author’s
work. (https://www.amazon.com/Quick-Scripture-Reference-Counseling-Kruis-ebook/dp/B00CIUJZT2?ref_=ast_author_dp )

This
morning’s meditation verses come from the section on Church, Communion of the
Saints.

Ephesians 2:19-22 (NLT2)
¹⁹  So now you Gentiles are no
longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy
people. You are members of God’s family.
²⁰  Together, we are his
house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the
cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself.
²¹  We are carefully joined
together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord.
²²  Through him you Gentiles
are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit.

Today’s
verses fall under the third point of our counseling reference guide resource’s
section on Church,
Communion of the Saints.

 3. Together, Christians constitute God’s
household, in which he lives by His Spirit.

 

Today’s verses remind us
that God’s kingdom isn’t just some royal dictatorship, it’s a family and we are
joined together through our “ blood brother” Jesus Christ.

 

Forgive that sketchy pun,
but we are co-heirs with Christ, so He is not only our Lord and Savior, but He
is also our brother, and because of his shed blood and the faith we have put in
Him, we are forgiven of all our sins and washed clean and made righteous by the
precious blood of Jesus.  So, “blood
brother” isn’t too far of a stretch but I admittedly won’t be trying to make
that a “thing”, “blood brothers with Christ” , because I am more than content
enough to call Him Lord because it is through Him that I was made a “holy
temple for the Lord”  where God lives by
His Spirit.   The Holy Spirit lives in us
and so we live by the Spirit, and we walk by the Sprit and enjoy the fellowship
of the Spirit flowing through and out of the body of Christ.  

We are a part of God’s
kingdom and members His royal family so let us rejoice and worship Him in
Spirit and truth.

——————————————————————–

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.

Today we are sharing from A. W. Pink’s – The Arthur
Pink Anthology  – a collection of A.W.
Pink’s tracts brought together in one book and dispersed here on the blog for
your encouragement.

As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage you all to purchase A.W. Pink’s books for your own
private study and to support his work.  This resource is available online
for free as a PDF at many sites, but printed copies of collections of A.W.
Pink’s books are available for purchase wherever Christian books are sold. 

The Arthur Pink Anthology – 6

Christian Fools –
Part 2 of 8

Now very likely, the
sermon tonight will make some of my hearers angry: probably they are the ones
who most need the rebuke of the text. When a servant of God wields the sword of
the Spirit, if he does his work faithfully and effectively, then some of his
hearers are bound to get cut and wounded: and, my friends, that is always God’s
way. God always wounds before He heals. And I want to remind you at the outset
that this text is no invention of mine. These are the words of One who never
wounded unnecessarily, but they are also the words of the True and Faithful
Witness who never hesitated to preach the whole truth of God, whether men would
receive it or whether they would reject it. I know it is not a pleasant thing
to be called a fool, especially if we have a high regard for ourselves and rate
our own wisdom and orthodoxy very highly—it wounds our pride. But we need to be
wounded, all of us. We need to be humbled; we need to be rebuked; we need to
have that word from the lips of Christ which is as a two-edged sword.

Now notice, dear
friends, that Christ did not upbraid these disciples because they did not
understand, but because of their lack of faith. The trouble with them was they
reasoned too much. Very likely they prided themselves on their logical minds
and said, Well, surely we are not asked to believe impossibilities and
absurdities: both of these cannot be true; one is true and the other cannot be.
Either the Messiah of Israel is going to be a glorious and a triumphant
Messiah, or else He is going to be a rejected and a humiliated one: they cannot
both be true. That is why Christ said to them—not because of their failure to
understand, but because of their lack of faith—“O fools, and slow of heart to
believe all that the prophets have spoken.”

I am afraid that
today there are many who only believe what they can understand, and if there is
something else that they cannot understand, they do not believe it. If they
have devised to themselves a systematized theology (or more probably they have
adopted someone else’s system of theology), and they hear a sermon (no matter
how much Scripture there may be in it) which they cannot fit into their little
system of theology, they won’t have it. They place a higher value on
consistency than they do on fidelity. That is just what was the matter with
these disciples: they could not see the consistency of the two things and
therefore they were only prepared to believe the one.

The same thing, my
friends, is true today with many preachers. There are multitudes of preachers
in Australia tonight whose theology is narrower than the teaching of this Book.
Then away to the winds with theology!—I mean human systems of theology which are
narrower than Scripture. For example, there are men today who read God’s Word,
and they see that the gospel is to be preached to every creature, and that God
commands all who hear that gospel to believe in Christ; then they come across
some texts on election, predestination:—“Many are called but few are chosen,”
and they say, Well, I cannot harmonize this, I cannot see how it is possible to
preach, unhampered, a gospel to every creature, and yet for election to be
true. And because they cannot harmonize the two things, they neither believe
the two nor will they preach both. They cannot harmonize election with a gospel
that is to be preached to every creature, and so the Arminians preach the
gospel but they leave out election.^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
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My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Ask Seek Knock blog (https://tammylynask.blogspot.com/ ),  her
Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

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Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship