Seeing, Feeling, and Enduring the Wind - The Full Acceptance of the Mystery – Purity 742
Purity 742 05/27/2022 Purity 742 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s short video, also shared on YouTube, of weeds being
moved by the wind as I take my canine companion, Harley for a walk was recorded
yesterday as we walked along Waite Road near my country side home.
The strong wind blowing the weeds, and a recent teaching at my
local church on the Holy Spirit, reminded
me of Jesus’ words in
John 3:5-8 (NKJV) where He said:
5 … "Most
assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot
enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.'
8 The
wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where
it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the
Spirit."
For those who don’t know, the mysterious statement regarding
being “born in the Spirit” is quite simple. Those who put their faith in Jesus
Christ as their Lord and Savior are born of God (1 John 5:1) , are given
eternal life (John 3:16), receive the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit (Acts
2:38. Rom 8:9 ) and are simultaneously sealed by God (Eph 1:13-14, 4:30). Every person who makes Jesus their Lord and
Savior receives the Holy Spirit when their faith in Him and are guaranteed a
place in God’s family and eternal kingdom for all time, for there is nothing
that can separate us from His love when we become “born again”, when we become “born
of the Spirit”.
But that is just the beginning folks. Just like the wind blows in today’s video,
after we put our faith in Jesus Christ we will feel and see the presence of the
Holy Spirit in our lives.
After we come to faith in Christ and decide to follow Him
with our lives, we can feel the Holy Spirit in our lives, primarily through the
joy of our salvation. When we put our faith in Christ, we have joy because we
know that we have been forgiven, we have peace with God, we are made His
children, and we need never fear death or God’s wrath again. If we abide in the truth of who we are in
Christ, the joy of our salvation can be a continual well spring of hope and
motivation to live the Christian life.
Another way we can feel the Holy Spirit’s presence in our
lives isn’t warm and fuzzy. After
becoming “born of the Spirit”, we can feel convicted when we think and act in
ways that are contrary to God’s way. Even though we have the assurance of our salvation
and the forgiveness of our sins, somehow the sins we were very comfortable with
before coming to faith in Christ, aren’t as much fun as they used to be and we
feel a conviction in our spirit’s to repent. The Holy Spirit will cause us to
feel that our sins aren’t “okay” just because they are forgiven.
If we walk in the Spirit, where we attempt to follow Jesus’s example
and live according to God’s ways, we will feel the desire to stop doing what
used to do and start doing what God’s wisdom shows us we could do. The Holy Spirit’s conviction can sting but
healing and peace is found when we surrender to righteous and holy the life God
calls us to live.
The mystery of our faith lies in the acceptance of who we are
in Christ and the surrender to God’s will by rejecting all the world’s various
options for living that “seem right to a man” and making the decision to follow
the Truth, the Way, and The Life: Jesus Christ.
Our decision to be a disciple of Christ includes believing the
good news but it also includes the progressive seeking of the Lord where we
attempt to know Him more and His will for our life by understanding the word of
God and the implications it has for our lives.
The appropriate response to being “born of the Spirit” is to live
like it, to walk in the Spirit. And this
walk will confound you at times because like Christ’s words says about the wind
in general, the mighty rushing wind of the person of the Holy Spirit blows where
he wishes. We might not always know where He is coming from or where He is
going to send us to, but His leadings will never contradict the word of God and
always lead to our growing in our faith and in our love for God.
Now in man’s attempt to simplify the mystery of faith, we
often try to reduce it to pat slogan like: just do the right thing, all the
time. Do the right thing and good things will happen to you.
While this sentiment is seemingly a good one, it can easily
become corrupted as man can become prideful and believe that the blessings they
have in life are merely the result of their wise decision to work hard and be a
“good person” and it can also lead to a false belief of self sufficiency that
determines that they don’t need God, or can decide that their sins are okay,
because after all no one is perfect, and they work hard after all. These sentiments would lead to sin and cause us
to suffer which could possibly cause us to stop trusting God.
Yes, whether it is the product of our own or someone else’s
sin or whether it is just an affect of the conditions of a world that has been
broken because of sin, there is suffering and death in this world.
Do good, get good is not an equation that always works and in
light of the natural course of a life on the earth, where people get sick, age,
and die, if we don’t have an understanding of these things according to God’s
wisdom, we may think that we have been given a “raw deal”.
When the “winds of change and tragedy” blow into our lives,
our foundation our faith and our relationship with God will be tested.
If we don’t have an understanding of who we are in Christ and
who God is that can equally explain blessings and the “curses” of a fallen
world broken by sin, we will be blown all over the place in our emotions and in
our responses.
If we don’t investigate our faith enough to attempt to
understand and accept paradoxes such
as:
·
(Unless Christ returns first), we will die, yet we will live,
·
We are saints, but yet we can and will sin,
·
We are free from sin, and yet we can still choose to sin
·
We may prosper, but suffering may and probably will come
·
The Lord loves us but the world will hate us
·
People without faith in Jesus may prosper, while those with
faith in Christ may suffer
·
We can “do everything right” and still not get what we want or
suffer loss.
So walking in the Spirit may lead to feelings of great joy
and victory as we experience the fruit of the Spirit in our lives but it can also seem to at times to be like we are
walking against the winds of a hostile world of suffering and death, against the
winds of adversity, and against those constantly blowing winds of change.
But the Lord is over and above those winds. He calms the
storms. And regardless of the sufferings and loss that we will encounter in our
walk through life on this earth, if we walk with Him we will endure and be able
to know His peace no matter what storms come our way.
So accept the word of God and obey what it says to know God
more and to grow into the person He calls you to be. While much of our faith can seem mysterious, when
we seek the Lord and accept the truth of who He is, who we are in Christ, and
what He says about the ways things work we will discover that we can always trust
that Lord will “get it right” and that He “will do what’s right”.
So keep walking and talking with God, He will show you the way the wind blows and how we can endure it and be carried along by it to the place He wants us to go.
______________________________________________________________
Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book
for Men”.
This morning’s meditation verse is:
1 Timothy 2:5 (NLT2)
5 For there is only one God
and one Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity—the man Christ Jesus.
Today’s Bible verse plainly declares the truth that there is one
mediator between God and Man: Jesus Christ.
Enough said?
I hope so. The exclusivity of Christ to save is a challenge for the
world to accept because of the spiritual blindness that we suffer from before
we are graced with a revelation of the truth of the gospel by the Holy Spirit. In truth, The Lord saves us. We can’t save
ourselves. In our own wisdom we would never choose to follow the Lord. Our
salvation is a gift from God.
We can’t convince or argue anyone into God’s kingdom.
But imagine if we could, would we choose it? While our faith is logical when we understand
that it is the truth, when you are on the outside looking in it is “foolishness”
to those who are perishing.
The idea of a free gift, by itself is a hard pill for some people to
swallow as their experience has taught them that “there’s no such thing as a
free lunch”.
The idea of substitutionary atonement through blood sacrifice would probably
send us screaming and running for the exits. We have to explain how this works
to Christians so it is no surprise that those outside of the faith choose to
reject it.
But course of human history contains a man know as Jesus Christ of
Nazareth who influenced the course of global history, that not only established
the way we number our days with the “year of our Lord” but who also influenced
people to change the way they live their individual lives and cause some to
champion righteous causes that establish institutions that established law and
order and compassionate services to societies.
There is great evidence in the word of God, archaeology, and in the
testimonies of individuals lives to validate the truth of Jesus Christ as the
one Mediator who can reconcile mankind to God and I pray that Lord uses some of
it to open the eyes of the spiritual blind and welcome more into His kingdom today.
So let people know that they need to be reconciled to God and tell them
of the Way that God makes it possible. While
it can seem complicated explaining the gospel to someone, rest assured that
when you speak of it, you are telling the truth and if God wills it, it will be
heard and accepted.
Our mission on earth is tell others of the love, mercy, and grace that
God has given us through the revelation of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. So
be bold, tell the truth in love and leave results up to God.
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 continue sharing from John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life”.
As always, I share this
information for educational purposes and encourage all to purchase John
Pipers’ books for your own private study and to support his
work. This resource is available on many websites for less than
$5.00.
5. We make much of
Christ in our secular work by earning money with the desire to use our money to
make others glad in God.
Everything
I said in Chapter 7 assumed that we had money to use in a radical way to show
that Christ and not money is our Treasure. But money does not grow on trees; we
work for it. We provide some service or make some product that others will pay
for. So my point here is that, as we work, we should dream of how to use our
excess money to make others glad in God. Of course, we should use all our money to make others glad in
God, in the sense that our whole life has this aim. But the point here is that
our secular work can become a great God-exalting blessing to the world if we
aim to take the earnings we don’t need for ourselves (and we need far less than we think) and meet
the needs of others in the name of Jesus.
The
Able-Bodied Earners Help the Victims of Loss
God clearly tells us that
we should work to provide the needs of those who can’t meet their own needs.
It’s true that everyone should work if he can, and that, in general, if you
work you will have what you need. “Whoever works his land will have plenty of
bread” (Proverbs 12:11). But this general rule is not absolute. Drought may
strike your farm; thieves may steal what you’ve earned; disability may end your
earning power. All that is part of the curse that sin brought into the world.
But God, in his mercy, wills that the work of the able-bodied supply the needs
of the helpless, especially in hard times.
Three
passages of Scripture make this plain. In 1 Timothy 5:8 Paul speaks to children
and grandchildren regarding the aged widows: “If anyone does not provide for
his relatives, and especially for members of his own household, he has denied
the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” In Acts 20:35 Paul refers to his
own manual labor and then says, “In all things I have shown you that by working
hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord
Jesus, how he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ ”
Then in Ephesians 4:28 Paul doesn’t settle for saying, “Don’t steal, work!” He
says, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest
work with his own hands, so that he may
have something to share with anyone in need.” You can steal to have. Or you
can work to have. Or you can work to have to give. When the third option comes
from joy in God’s goodness, it makes him look great in the world.
6.
We make much of Christ in our secular work by treating the web of relationships
it creates as a gift of God to be loved by sharing the Gospel and by practical
deeds of help.
I
put this last not because it is least important but because some who put it
first never say anything else about the importance of secular work. I have made
this mistake myself. Personal evangelism is so important that it is easy to
think of it as the only important thing in life. But we have seen that the
Bible puts a lot of emphasis on adorning the Gospel, not merely saying the
Gospel. But now I want to say that speaking
the good news of Christ is part of why God put you in your job. He has woven
you into the fabric of others’ lives so that you will tell them the Gospel.
Without this, all our adorning behavior may lack the one thing that could make
it life-giving.
The
Christian’s calling includes making his or her mouth a fountain of life. “The
mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life” (Proverbs 10:11). The link with
eternal life is faith in Jesus Christ. No nice feelings about you as a good
employee will save anyone. People must know the Gospel, which is the power of
God unto eternal life (Romans 1:16). “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing
through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).
The
early church was a “gospelling” band of people. They spoke the Gospel. When the
believers were driven out of Jerusalem because of persecution after Stephen’s
martyrdom, they “went about preaching the word”—literally, “evangelizing or
gospelling the word” (Acts 8:4). The Gospel was on their lips in all their new
relationships. Their self-identity was “proclaimers”: “You are a chosen race, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies
of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9).
Freely they had received. Freely they gave.
They
were moved by the words of Jesus concerning the value of a single human life:
“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For
what can a man give in return for his life?” (Mark 8:36–37). They felt the
weight of what C. S. Lewis spoke twenty centuries later when he pondered the
relationship between winning one soul to Christ, on the one hand, and the value
of his own vocation as an Oxford scholar of English Literature on the other
hand:
The Christian will take literature a little
less seriously than the cultured Pagan.… The unbeliever is always apt to make a
kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences … and he commonly wishes to
maintain his superiority to the great mass of mankind who turn to books for
mere recreation. But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more
important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in
the world: and as for superiority, he knows that the vulgar since they
include most of the poor probably include most of the superiors.
The
point is not that Lewis quit his work and became a full-time evangelist, nor
that you should. The point is that he saw the meaning of his work in proper
perspective and knew that more than one thing gave it significance. To each of
the five ways that we have mentioned above, Lewis would add that his vocation
created a web of relationships in which he could speak the Gospel. Once when he
was criticized for oversimplifying the Gospel, he responded to his critic:
[He] would be a more helpful critic if he
advised a cure as well as asserting many diseases. How does he himself do such
work? What methods, and with what success, does he employ when he is trying to
convert the great mass of storekeepers, lawyers, realtors, morticians,
policemen and artisans who surround him in his own city?
Perhaps
one other thing should be mentioned in regard to the relationships created by
where we live and work. For many of you the move toward missions and deeds of
mercy will not be a move away from your work but with your work to another,
more needy, less-reached part of the world. Christians should seriously ask not
only what their vocation is, but where it should be lived out. We should not
assume that teachers and carpenters and computer programmers and managers and
CPAs and doctors and pilots should do their work in America. That very vocation
may be better used in a country that is otherwise hard to get into, or in a
place where poverty makes access to the Gospel difficult. In this way the web
of relationships created by our work is not only strategic but intentional.
Conclusion
In conclusion, secular
work is not a waste when we make much of Christ from 8 to 5. God’s will in this
age is that his people be scattered like salt and light in all legitimate
vocations. His aim is to be known, because knowing him is life and joy. He does
not call us out of the world. He does not remove the need to work. He does not
destroy society and culture. Through his scattered saints he spreads a passion
for his supremacy in all things for the joy of all peoples. If you work like
the world, you will waste your life, no matter how rich you get. But if your
work creates a web of redemptive relationships and becomes an adornment for the
Gospel of the glory of Christ, your satisfaction will last forever and God will
be exalted in your joy.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
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[1]
John Piper, Don’t Waste Your
Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2003), 150–154.
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