Ephesians
3:17-19a
"That
Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye being rooted and
grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is
the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love
of Christ,..."
For
us to comprehend and understand these things is the desire of God, and of this
Apostle for every believer. This is not just for the clergy, or
teachers, and the theologians in the seminary, but rather this is for
every believer. In fact those who go to these institutions many times
come out in worse shape than when they went in. Why? Because while in
them they rely more and more on mans knowledge and the intellectualism his than on
the Holy Spirit. In 1Corinthians chapter 2 we find
that this apostle makes it so plain how these things are understood
by the average believer. And remember, the Corinthian believers are
the weakest, they were in worst shape than the Hebrew-Christians of the Hebrews record, the most carnal of all of Paul’s congregations. They
had a lot of hang ups, but he could still wrote these things to them
in language that they could understand. And if they could, we know that anyone of us can. Let’s read verse 10 again as we start.
1Corinthians
2:10
"But
God hath revealed* them unto us by his Spirit:
for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God."
*the things that have not been seen or
heard in verse 9. God has revealed.
How
many believers today go into the deep things of God? Precious,
precious few. Most of the people that the Lord leads to me to tell me that they are confused and do not understand the message and teachings of their pastors and do not know upon what to place their belief, faith. Hopefully we are lighting the fire under a lot of
people, and evidently we are because people tell us, "For
the first time in my life I’m studying my Bible." I am getting the message and understanding it. These
people are reading and enjoying the Word of God, and that is all we
can ask people to do. That means far more to us than they will ever
know. So how do we know the deep things of God? By trusting Him just as Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Isaac and then Paul did.
1Corinthians 2:11b
"...even
so the (deep) things of God knows no man, but the
Spirit of God."
The
Holy Spirit is the One that has to enlighten us, tutor, train and teach us,
and direct us through the scriptures. It is His job to reveal all things of Truth and these things reveal Christ from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22:21. It also helps in this kind of
Bible study to have a good reference, cross index Bible, however
most only do a word search style of linking. So we need the Holy
Spirit as He will direct us to other areas that the average Bible
index does not go. We need to get a good Bible and hopefully one
with some footnotes to clarify some words, phrases and meanings and other
things that may be a little hard to understand. A good Dictionary, along with a good
concordance other than the one in the back of most Bibles. Then ask
the Holy Spirit for His help and it helps to request the Truth while
we are at it. Then just learn to do Bible study, comparing scripture
with scripture keeping in mind the Jesus said that the Spirit of
Truth will assist us in our learning of Him.He also said that a good householder will bring both old and new things to light, in fact it would be good to look closely at Matthew 13.
1Corinthians
2:12
"Now
we have received, not the spirit of the world*, but the
spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely
given to us of God."
*we are
not looking at this from a secular point of view. We are not looking
at this from what we have learned from education and experience in
the material world. In Other words we are not taking in all things
spiritual by our literal senses but rather by Faith's trusting.
This
is what we have to recognize. We can not go into this and say, "Well
I’m going to learn what this Bible says no matter what." It
just will not work that way, because we have to depend on the Spirit
of God, the Spirit of Truth. My wife and I had gone this rout for more years than we care to think about but thanks be to the Lord, He has caused us to redeem the time. An
inspiration just came to me, tell the Lord that your willing to take
His yoke upon yourself to learn of Him and that your willing to be
receptive in child like trust and then thank Him for directing the
Holy Spirits doing just that. As our being human, we like
words of encouragement, and over and over people have said that they
have prayed that God would open the scripture to them. And then the
next day they found our blogspot on the net or have seen our posts on
Face book, and we have had messages telling us that they have
recognized what is going on, and say, "THANK YOU LORD THIS IS
WHAT WE WERE LOOKING FOR" But we in and of ourselves can not
do it alone, because it has to be the Spirit that opens our
understanding. Other wise all we gain is the letter or the Law which
only KILL's.
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