Sunday, August 4, 2013

Ephesians Lesson 23 of 39 part 9

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.

So how do we know the deep things of God?

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment