Unity

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:4

The Hebrew word “echad” gives the sense of unity from multiple parts.  It is this word that is used when God tells us that a man and his wife are to become one (echad) flesh.  The Bible is consistent, there is but one God, yet God consists of three persons have distinction from each other, yet are co-equal, co-eternal, infinite in unity and all sharing the same essence.  While this certainly is more than our minds can handle that is a good thing.  It is the fact that God, in His very nature is not fully comprehensible to us is further evidence that God created man…not the other way around.  When a man invents a god, he invents a god he can fully understand and manipulate.  The God who created man designed us to know Him, and respond to His love.  God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit dwell in eternal unity, order, and perfect fellowship.  The character of God is known to us through that unity.

Good Senses

An excerpt from 1-3 John: Life in Fellowship 
¹What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life-- " John 1:1

John here breaks his witness down to the very core level, his very senses and experience.  While he was the final remaining Apostle there may have been other disciples still alive who had seen Him.  John is also, possibly, invoking the memory of the other apostles that had passed away and saying, “We all had this experience.”

Hearing – The first sense with which John mentions having experienced the person and ministry of Jesus Christ is with his ears.  This is in the perfect tense which is “past tense completed action with results going into the present.”  There may be a sense of “we heard Him and His voice still rings in our ears.”  John heard Jesus and remembered very well what He said.

Seen – The next way in which John interacted with Jesus Christ during His earthly ministry is that he saw Jesus.  To the verb “seen” John adds “with our eyes.”  John wanted to make sure that everyone understood that this is not a metaphor for spiritually seeing Jesus.  He actually SAW Jesus.  He saw Jesus make footprints, he saw Jesus eat, He likely camped out close enough to Jesus to know that when He tossed in his sleep he upset the blankets that were draped over Him.  Then he says “we looked”, this is to look so as to gain insight.  They gazed at Jesus and studied Him!

Touch – Not just that, John touched Jesus.  He undoubtedly exchanged the traditional greeting of a holy kiss on the cheek and felt Jesus’ beard on his face.  John remembered that Peter was raised out of the water by Jesus’ own hand, and himself reclined against Jesus at the last supper.  Jesus had come fully in the flesh and it is of the utmost importance that He did.

A Minute for the Bible - The Branch Abides

The Right Prescription

Getting the wrong medication can be inconvenient, painful, and even life threatening. Even the wrong dosage of the right medication can be disastrous. Furthermore, many medications come with a list of side effects as long as your arm. What are we to do? Sometimes it seems like the cure is worse than the disease! Fortunately this is not the case in our spiritual life. As we continue to move on towards maturity and growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. His word is a precision scalpel, cutting to the heart of our need (Heb. 4:12). What is more the Lord is able to engineer ever circumstance, every difficulty, every trial to our exact needs. We can look at every day, every trial, every difficulty with the firm and confident assurance that this is the Lord's tool in my life to draw me closer to Him. Whether it is in my life by His permissive will, or His explicit will it is exactly what He is going to use to draw me to Him. That is an assurance, as we never need to ask if our prescription is correct. Praise the Lord, who cares for each of us!

Self-Control

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty,

And he who rules his spirit, than he who captures a city.

Proverbs 16:32

How often is a difficult situation made worse by a knee-jerk reaction? How many times is a relationship hurt or destroyed on the basis of a misunderstanding that quickly explodes? Sadly the stories of influential, famous or powerful people whose quick tempers destroyed their personal lives are known to each of us. The world system doesn't help us as we seek to understand this phenomenon. Some may use their angry, fearful, patterns of their flesh as an excuse to commit great atrocities. Saying, "I couldn't help it, I was just so mad." While our culture may at times accept this excuse it is not in keeping with the Biblical view of maturity...it is not what God is making us into as He conforms us to the image of Christ.

The Proverbs warn us that the person who is controlled by his emotions alone is in danger. This is not to say that anger is bad, but it is an extraordinarily powerful emotion and left unchecked can be incredibly destructive. In Ephesians 4:26-27 we are told: "Be angry, and yet do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not give the devil an opportunity." So we know that to feel the sensations and feelings surrounding the emotion of anger is by no means sin, but it easily leads to sin. By what means can we hope to control it? Counting to 10 never seemed to work for Donald Duck. Deep breathing and excusing yourself when you feel you are getting to hot? These types of methods may have some value, but the Bible offers us a more lasting solution:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Galatians 5:22-23

Notice all of these wonderful characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit! How does fruit grow on a branch? Why by remaining connected to the Vine (see John 15). Self-control is the character of someone who is resting in the Lord Jesus Christ. They are not controlled by anger, or the passing winds of any emotion. The one who is walking in the Spirit (Gal. 5:16) is able to experience anger, not be controlled by it, yet act appropriately to resolve it. On rare occasion it may exhibit itself as it did when Christ turned over tables, but most commonly the appropriate and Christlike response will be lead to a more peaceful conclusion.

A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.

Proverbs 15:1

All Used Up

Perhaps you've noticed it in your every day life, perhaps you only notice when things get really tough. It is a regular occurrence for many of us. We get to the end of our rope, out of energy, out of resources. We find ourselves looking dismally into the mirror and finding that there is nothing that we can do to fix things. We realize quickly how limited our resources are, and how little that we can do. This can even lead us to discouragement, frustration and depression. For some this is the darkest hour that life has to offer. For us, as believers, I believe there is another way to describe this moment: the most glorious moments of our lives.

Is this surprising? Are we shocked and disturbed when we come to the end of OUR resources quickly? Should we have expected more out of our own strength? Why should we expect more of ourselves when we know Apostle Paul understood his own limitations: "And He said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness.' Therefore most gladly I will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest on me." (2 Corinthians 12:9) Are we so much stronger than Paul that we can do on our own what He had to rest in the Lord's strength for? More to the point - are we foolish enough to believe that we are strong enough to do things on our own?

The moment when we have nothing left, we are used up, we are incapable of any more is the moment when we should realize that we are operating from the wrong power source. That is the moment when we cry out in honesty to the Lord and hear his loving reply, that he never intended us to be operating on our own power to begin with. That moment of darkness is the moment that we must turn "...to Him who is able to exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us..." (Ephesians 3:20). We don't have to run out of our own steam to rest in Him, it is our choice. Will you choose this day to spin your wheels, and see how much you can do; or will you rely on His resources and see what He will do through you? There is a correct answer. There will be a test.

Branching Out

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. John 15:4

As we continue to study the various ways our relationship with God is illustrated throughout the Bible I pray that we are are growing in the understanding of the reality that the Faith of the Bible is a relationship indeed, and one greater than we could ever imagine. This week we get to look at the image that Christ gave us proclaiming us to be branches connected to Him, the vine. The reality of this is easy to understand, as God commonly uses the physical world that He created to display spiritual realities to us.

As we imagine a branch attached to a vine we see that it gets all of its definition from the vine to which it is attached. The branch can only become stronger by being more firmly attached to the vine. The life, energy and power of the branch to produce fruit rest solely, wholly and completely with the vine. Christ speaks so clearly that apart from him we can do nothing, why do we question Him? Why do we waste our energy and spin our wheels trying to produce love, joy, peace, patience, etc. When we really can go only to the source. If those qualities and characteristics are missing from our life we don't need to "try harder" we only need to turn our eyes with Christ and abide, once again, in Vine apart from whom we can do nothing.