Pinecrest Bible Training Center
1968-2008

John 12:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.

Beginning in 2008 the vision and bible school that God so graciously gave Wade Taylor beginning in 1968 came to an abrupt end, falling into the ground and dying.-

We now wait for God to raise up and bring forth His seed of promise in another, that the vision fail not.

Summer 1993

Limiting God
Walter Beuttler

One of our difficulties in receiving things from the Lord is that we often attempt to come to Him with our own program and timetable. But it is impossible to limit the seeking of God to a fixed pattern. What makes things still more difficult both for ourselves and for the Lord is our mistaken use of Scripture to gain our point.

For instance, we might think that if we "fast" for four days, as Cornelius did, we too shall be favored with the appearance of an angel; or because Daniel mourned twenty-one days and ate no pleasant food until he received an answer, we shall accomplish spectacular results by means of a semi-fast for twenty-one days.

Merely copying patterns is wrong. The Lord certainly uses Scripture to guide us in particular cases. That is another matter. But to arbitrarily select such as our own pattern will not work, for the underlying condition of faith is missing and the motivation is not the same.

There is also the matter of God's purposes to be considered, which is contingent upon our individuality. As is said in John 21:22, "... what is that to thee, follow thou me."

This means a personal walk, by means of personal guidance, by a personal God. Naaman the leper had a preconceived plan as to how God would meet him. When the Lord wanted to heal him in an unorthodox manner he "was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I though, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper" II Kings 5:11. Naaman would have remained a leper had he not accepted God's own method, however humiliating it was and however strange it must have seemed to him.

Just as soon as we think we have found the "groove" in the way God works and settle there in self-complacency, with the mistaken belief that God will continue the same thing in the same way, we shall discover that this is not His groove, but our rut. Unless we are ready to follow Him along other paths, discovering that His mercies are new every morning, we might become buried in this rut.

It is delightful to learn the ways of the Lord, but our greatest delight is to learn that His ways are past finding out.

"O, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and
the knowledge of God" Romans 11:33.