Bibles for America Podcast: Recent Episodes
Bibles for America
Bibles for America (BfA) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to give away free copies of the New Testament Recovery Version and Christian books throughout the United States. The goal of our podcast is to help you to understand the Bible and to know God in a deeper way. To order your free copy of the New Testament Recovery Version visit bfa.org.
The beauty of the wonderful Jesus is what attracts us. He is so lovely! Our dear Lord Jesus is a magnet, and by His attracting us, we can look away from everything unto Him.
The Lord Jesus didn’t say that our difficult situations would change for the better or suddenly be resolved. Instead, His promise to us is if we come to Him, He will give us rest—even rest for our souls.
At a world-renowned American university, a professor routinely inquired on the first day of class, “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?” Usually, students would flippantly say they’d ask God for money or similar things. But on one particular occasion, a student said, “I’d ask God, ‘What’s the purpose of my life?’”
In order to contact God, who now is the Spirit, we must know where He dwells. Our human spirit is the residence of the Holy Spirit.
It’s not doing things for the Lord that keeps us in a proper relationship with Him. After all, the church in Ephesus did many good things for the Lord, but He had one thing against them: they had left their first love. Loving Him with our first love is paramount.
We know consistent physical exercise keeps our body fit and contributes to our overall well-being. And we also know mental exercise like reading and solving crossword puzzles helps our mind stay sharp.
But did you know that as Christians, we need an additional kind of exercise? For a healthy Christian life, we need spiritual exercise.
Listen to this inspiring testimony from a BfA staff member who has experienced much joy from sharing the gospel with those around him.
We all go through high and low points in our lives. But when faced with the lows—the puzzling and difficult situations—what do we do? How do we react? Do we wish things were different?
In 2 Timothy 1:6 Paul says, “I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you.” What is the gift of God in us, and what does it mean to fan it into flame?
God’s rich mercy extends even farther than His grace, reaching to the lowest pit, not only to save us, but also to continually bring us into a position to receive Him as grace.
How do we live our Christian life? Is it by imitating Jesus? Discover the way Christ wants His believers to live.
Learn practical lessons on how to pray from the story of two blind men in Matthew 20 that help you speak to the Lord about everything in your life.
Listen to this testimony to learn how to touch the Lord Jesus in a simple, enjoyable way.
Believers are inspired by the heritage of Christian hymns. A. B. Simpson’s classic hymn, “Once It Was the Blessing,” shares his discovery of “Christ in you.”
Discover what God’s complete salvation is for us in the Bible and how it gives meaning to our Christian life.
Understanding the Bible can be difficult. Read about getting guidance to understand the meaning of the Word of God.
Jesus Christ is the reality of all positive things, including virtues like patience and wisdom. He wants us to experience Him as the reality of all we need.
We received the blessing of God’s cleansing of our sins when we were saved. Knowing this truth greatly helps us in our Christian life.
In both a world filled with turmoil and in our own lives, is it possible to have inner peace? It is if we have the key.
A BfA staff member shares his experience of singing to the Lord as part of his daily Christian walk.
In Romans, Paul looks at the gospel of God in a rich and full way, describing our journey from sinners and enemies of God to sons of God.
God’s forgiveness is a wonderful gift to those who believe in Jesus Christ. Knowing the thoroughness of His forgiveness is a great help for our Christian life.
Ezekiel tells us that as Christians, we have a new heart with which to love the Lord. Each day, what can we do to keep our heart continually new?
Paul exhorts us 1 Thessalonians 5:18, “In everything give thanks.” How can we give thanks not just in the good things, but in everything?
After Jesus was crucified, a soldier pierced His side with a spear and out came blood and water. This detail, which only John records, has a deep significance.
Many of us would like to understand the Bible, but don’t know where to start. But good news! The first step in understanding the Bible is surprisingly simple.
When you hear the word gospel, what comes to mind? Romans 5:10 shows us something we may not always consider when we think of the gospel.
The book of Ephesians, though brief, shares 7 profound aspects of what the church is in God’s eyes.
The disciples found peace in the stormy sea by taking Jesus into their boat. Today, we can find peace by taking Jesus into our troubled lives.
Christians may have many friends, both saved and unsaved, but they also need spiritual companions who will run the Christian race with them.
Five verses from Scripture that show the powerful benefits of praying to God in our Christian life.
The Bible uses two Greek words for “word” in the New Testament: logos and rhema. Find out the meaning of these words and how they impact our Christian life.
Praying the words of the Bible is one way for God’s Word to become living and personal to you.
In Mark 16, Jesus says to “proclaim the gospel” to all the creation. Find out who Jesus is talking to and why we need to proclaim the gospel.
The day we get saved is a wonderful, momentous day. In this podcast, though, we want to talk about the days that follow. After experiencing the joy of salvation, a person may wonder how to continue experiencing the Lord Jesus. Questions such as these come up: How can I know Jesus personally? How can I experience Jesus in my life? Is being forgiven and saved from God’s judgment all there is to the Christian life?
Some may try different ways to experience Jesus like they did the day they were saved. Perhaps they try studying the Bible more, but though they learn something new, the Lord Himself still seems far away.
Similar to how we need the right key, not just any key, to enter into a locked room, we need to use the right key to experience Jesus. What’s the key for us to know Jesus personally in our day-to-day life?
Before we get into what the key to experiencing Jesus is, we need to grasp two important facts.
The first fact is that Jesus redeemed us by His death on the cross. How we thank Him for this! And Christ’s redemption made possible the second fact, that Jesus has come to live in our spirit! Through Christ’s death, He saved us from eternal judgment, and in His resurrection Christ as the life-giving Spirit came to live in us, specifically, in our spirit. Knowing and appreciating this second fact is crucial to our experiencing Jesus in a real and daily way.
God created human beings because He wanted to share His divine life with us. By having God’s life, we would be able to express Him in our living. But because mankind fell, two things happened: we became sinful, and our spirit was deadened, unable to contact or know God. So we had two great needs: we needed forgiveness of our sins, and our deadened spirit needed to be made alive.
When we received the Lord Jesus as our Savior, these two great needs were met! We were redeemed and forgiven of our sins. And we were reborn in our spirit with the life of God.
Now let’s talk about the key to experiencing Jesus.
For human beings, three realms exist in the universe. We’re all equipped with the key to each realm, because God created us with a body, a soul, and a spirit:
First, there’s the physical realm—the material world, consisting of what we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. The key to experiencing this realm is to use our body’s five physical senses.
Second, there’s the psychological realm—the realm of the human soul, which is deeper than the physical realm and consists of intangible things like thoughts, feelings, and decisions. The key to experiencing the psychological realm is to use the faculties of our soul: our mind to think, reason, and analyze; our emotions to experience joy, sorrow, and other feelings; and our will to decide, form intentions, and choose.
Last, there’s the spiritual realm—more mysterious and deeper than both the physical and psychological realms. John 4:24 says, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit.” In spirit here means in our human spirit. The key to experiencing the spiritual realm is to use our human spirit to contact God, who is Spirit.
To illustrate the importance of using the right key for each realm, let’s use the example of the delicious aroma of bread baking in an oven. To try to “experience” that aroma by using the faculties of our soul would be futile. Our soul is simply the wrong key. But with a single sniff, we can use our sense of smell and immediately experience that mouth-watering aroma.
In the same way, we can’t experience Christ if we use the wrong key. Jesus Christ is no longer with us physically, so our five senses don’t help us there. And even using our mind to think about Him or our emotions to try to sense Him doesn’t work, because God is Spirit. Using our God-created human spirit is the right key for us to experience Christ who lives in our spirit.
To use any part of our being means to exercise that part. So for example, physically we use or exercise our feet by walking. Psychologically, we exercise our mind by studying or considering.
So how do we exercise the key of our spirit to contact and experience the Lord Jesus? The best way to exercise our spirit is by praying. Our prayer doesn’t need to be long, formal, or in a particular place. In fact, simply calling on the precious name of our Lord Jesus is a good way to exercise our spirit to contact Him in prayer. When we call on the name of the Lord from our spirit, we experience Him as living water, satisfying us and quenching our thirst at any time during our day.
Another way to exercise our spirit is to pray with the Word of God. As we read the Bible, we can turn what we read into our prayer. When we pray with the Scriptures, we use not just our mind to read the Word, but more importantly we use our spirit to contact the Spirit in the Word. By exercising our spirit with the Word of God, we experience Christ as our spiritual nourishment.
We can also exercise our spirit by praising and thanking the Lord for all He is and all He has done for us. By giving thanks to the Lord for all things, we can be filled with Him.
By regularly practicing these different types of prayer, we can go on from our initial experience of salvation to know and experience Jesus more every day.
The Lord Jesus doesn’t want to be an objective figure to us whom we worship from afar. He redeemed us and regenerated us to live in us and be our life. Jesus lives in us, so we can experience Him subjectively as everything to us in our everyday life. In all matters of our life, big or small, we can experience Christ as whatever we need when we contact Him by using the key of our human spirit.
What a joy to experience Jesus by using this wonderful key of exercising our spirit!
We can pray, “Lord Jesus, thank You for living in me and for showing me that using my spirit is the key to experiencing You. Thank You that I can exercise my spirit by praying. Lord, thank You for opening my eyes to see that I can experience You in my everyday life by enjoying Your living presence in my spirit.”
The Bible mentions the flesh throughout the Old and New Testaments. But although Christians are clear about what sin is, many haven’t heard much about their flesh. Unfortunately, Satan’s obscuring of the truth about the flesh over the years has allowed him to damage many of God’s people.
What is the flesh, and why is it so bad? Is it still bad now that we’re saved? Does our flesh get better the longer we’re Christians, or the more spiritual we become? Let’s take a look at what the Bible says about the flesh.
First, what is the flesh and where did it come from?
God created man with a spirit, a soul, and a body so man could contain God and express Him. Every part of man was pure, including his body. But when Adam and Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, something terrible happened. They took in the sinful nature of the devil. This deadened their spirit, damaged their soul, and corrupted their pure body, changing it into the sinful flesh.
We can see the apostle Paul’s awareness concerning the flesh in Romans 7:18:
“For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, nothing good dwells.”
Paul’s words are emphatic. Nothing good dwells in our flesh. Why is that?
Note 2 on this verse in the Recovery Version gives a clear explanation of what the flesh is:
“The flesh here is the fallen and corrupted human body with all its lusts. This flesh was not created by God but is a mixture of God’s creature and sin, which is the life of Satan, the evil one. God created man’s body a pure vessel, but this vessel was corrupted and transmuted into the flesh by Satan’s injecting himself into it at the time of the fall. Now Satan as sin personified is in man’s flesh, making his home there and ruling as an illegal master, overruling man and forcing him to do things that he dislikes. It is this indwelling sin, which is the unchangeable evil nature, that constitutes all men sinners (5:19).”
Satan is sin personified, and as Paul says in verse 20, sin now dwells in us.
Now let’s consider the flesh after we’re saved.
When we receive Christ as our Savior, our sins are forgiven and we’re cleansed and saved. But what about our flesh? Is it repaired? Are we free from the lusts of the flesh once we’re born again?
The answer to these questions is hugely important to our Christian lives. After we’re saved, our flesh is exactly the same as it was before—it is still sinful and full of lusts. This is because when we received the Lord as our Savior, we were born again in our human spirit with the divine Spirit of God, but our flesh remains the flesh.
John 3:6 says, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
For as long as we live in this physical life, our flesh remains the same. It never improves, and it never changes, no matter how long we’re saved or how much we’ve grown in the Lord. Only when the Lord Jesus returns will we be rid of the flesh by God’s resurrecting and transfiguring our fallen body, as Philippians 3:20-21 tells us:
“We eagerly await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transfigure the body of our humiliation to be conformed to the body of His glory, according to His operation by which He is able even to subject all things to Himself.”
God’s full salvation promised in this word includes our fallen body. But for now, our flesh remains the sinful flesh.
Having the proper knowledge that even as believers our sinful flesh remains unchanged is essential, because it alerts us to the danger our flesh poses to us. Whether or not we know this can seriously affect us.
Let’s say we don’t know a particular substance is extremely toxic. Because we don’t know it’s so dangerous, we might be very casual, even careless with it and hurt ourselves as a result. But once we find out its true nature, we’ll be quite careful how we handle it in order to protect ourselves.
This illustrates how having proper knowledge of our flesh can help us believers, and how not having it can harm us. The danger to our spiritual life from our flesh is real. And unlike the toxic substance in our illustration, our flesh isn’t something apart from us that we can simply ignore; it’s part of us, ever present.
Satan’s strategy is to hide the truth about the flesh from Christians. He wants us to think that our flesh isn’t a problem once we’re saved, or that it has improved and is no longer a danger since we’ve been following the Lord Jesus for some time. He knows that if we think like this we’ll begin to drop our guard, and sin will result.
What do we mean by “drop our guard”? What does this look like practically?
Let’s say we’re confident we won’t fall into a particular sin because we haven’t committed it in a long time, or we’re confident we would never commit such a sin because we never have before. What happens when we think we’re safe? Often, we’ll allow ourselves to be in certain situations that we don’t realize could stir up our flesh to overpower us.
Perhaps before we were saved we went to bars with our friends and drank. And let’s say now our coworkers or friends invite us out to a bar. We go, thinking, “I can’t be tempted to drink anymore, now that I’m saved.” We don’t realize our flesh hasn’t gotten any better, and it’s still just as strong as before. Our flesh overcomes our willpower, drawing us back into the same life we previously had. We learn too late that we’re still subject to the lusts of the flesh.
Or, using another example, we know that immorality such as fornication is sinful. But we may think, “Now that I’m a Christian, I definitely would never have a problem with that. My strong morals will prevent anything from ever happening.” So we repeatedly spend time alone with a member of the opposite sex, whether at work or elsewhere, because we think we’re immune to the lusts of the flesh. But eventually, through being alone together so much, we become less cautious, and in an unguarded moment, sin can be the result. We don’t realize our flesh is much stronger than our morals. The flesh doesn’t operate only in a certain type of person; it operates in everyone. Every human being has the lusts of the flesh, and every human being, including a Christian, is capable of any sin. Just being in the wrong environment can lead us into sin through the lusts of the flesh.
In this way Satan damages believers, over and over again, lulling them into not guarding against their flesh.
In the book of Romans, a book written to Christians, Paul clearly warns the believers to be on guard not simply against sin, but against sin hiding in their own flesh.
Romans 6:12 says, “Do not let sin therefore reign in your mortal body so that you obey the body’s lusts.”
If we aren’t careful with our flesh, sin can reign even in a believer’s body. What a tragedy!
Seeing the danger of our flesh is the important first step in not letting sin reign. Our fallen, sinful flesh is like a wild animal that can never be tamed. Giving it the smallest amount of leeway can allow it to break free and cause great damage. Even things we see and hear can stir up our flesh. We really need to ask the Lord to show us the seriousness of our flesh and how to guard against it! If we give an inch to the flesh because we think we’re strong and can overcome it, or because we think we’re no longer subject to the lusts of the flesh, sin will be the outcome.
In a future podcast we’ll discuss practical ways we can cooperate with the Lord to not let sin reign through the flesh. In the meantime, we encourage you to listen to the podcast, “What 2 Timothy 2:22 Says about Fleeing Lusts and How It Applies to Us Today.”
This podcast presents a Bibles for America staff member’s testimony about discovering her human spirit and how it affected her. We hope you enjoy her story:
The blog post “A Life-Changing Discovery: My Spirit” really touched me because what it talked about is exactly what I have experienced. Since I began to see in the Bible that I have a human spirit, and then began to actually experience the Lord who lives there, my life has never been the same.
I had always felt deep within that something was missing in my Christian life. When you believe into the Lord and get saved, then what? What did God want? What was being a Christian all about in my daily life? For a period of time I thought that maybe the Lord wanted me to help people. For instance, I thought of becoming some kind of doctor, or joining the Peace Corps. And then other times, I thought He wanted to me pursue and fulfill my dreams.
There is a very specific moment in my life after graduating from high school that I’ll never forget. As I laid in bed with my two younger sisters, tears streamed down my face as I silently cried, trying not to wake them up. I was so desperate for something real. So I cried out to the Lord, “Lord, You have to be real to me! I can’t go on if You aren’t real to me!”
The Lord really answered that prayer when I went to college. I met a group of believers there who showed me in the Bible that God had a purpose, and that in order to fulfill this purpose, He created man with a human spirit to contain and contact Him. Even growing up as a Christian, I had never seen or heard about this crucial truth. I was helped to see that when I believed into the Lord, He came to dwell in my spirit!
I was also helped to see that God wants people to experience Him in their spirit. He isn’t this impersonal, faraway God that I had to try to please by doing good, or by doing something for Him yet apart from Him. No, the God of the universe was Someone I could turn to, fellowship with, and live by in my spirit. God became so real to me!
For so long there had been an emptiness within me that I could never explain or fill. But when I touched the Lord in my spirit, that emptiness was gone. There was a sense of, “This is it! This is why I was created!” We were created to receive the Lord Jesus and enjoy Him as the Spirit in our spirit.
I am so thankful to the Lord that this crucial truth has been revealed to me and that I’ve been able to experience the Lord Jesus in my spirit. My prayer is that so many others would be able to discover their human spirit and that the Lord would become as real to them as He has become to me.
You’ve managed to pick up the nasty cold that’s going around. Sniffling, headachy, stuffed up, and feverish, you feel awful. Seeking relief, you drag yourself to the store to pick up one of those multi-symptom relief medications. After taking the first dose, you start to feel better.
Nobody likes to be sick physically. But have you ever felt spiritually “sick”? You want to express Christ to people, but you find you’re not able to. You try to be patient with someone, but eventually you blow up. You’re “ailing” from a shortage of patience, or of kindness, or humility.
You ask the Lord to give you more love, more kindness, or you ask Him to help you be patient. Have you ever wished you had a multi-symptom dose of something for the many problems in your Christian life?
Well the Bible has good news: you do!
Just as different elements are compounded into one medication to address multiple cold symptoms, we have an all-inclusive, spiritual remedy, a dose compounded with the wonderful ingredients of all Christ is to take care of all our spiritual needs. This all-inclusive dose is the Holy Spirit.
Chapter 2 in The Economy of God by Witness Lee describes it this way:
“Have we ever realized that the Holy Spirit is the best ‘dose’ in the whole world? Just one dose is enough to meet all our needs. All that the Father and the Son are and all that They have are in this wonderful Spirit. Consider how many elements are within this dose: God’s divine nature with Christ’s human nature, His human living with its earthly sufferings, the wonderful effectiveness of His death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His enthronement. Such a dose is beyond our imagination. Yet, praise the Lord, every day we can enjoy it.”
When we believed in the Lord Jesus, He not only saved us from eternal judgment and forgave us, but He also came to live in our spirit as the life-giving Spirit. And His Spirit now includes every virtue, every element we need for our Christian life. When we contact the Lord as this life-giving Spirit, He supplies us with all that He is.
Do you need patience? The Lord Jesus is patience. Do you need humility? The Lord Jesus is humility. He is strength, comfort, love, kindness, self-control, meekness, endurance, and so much more. Whatever we need in any situation, He is.
Rather than giving us love, kindness, or patience by themselves, the Lord Jesus gives us Himself as the Spirit to be our love, kindness, and patience. He Himself and all that He is supply us for every demand. Whatever we may be short of is available to us in the one dose of the all-inclusive Spirit.
We can never have a love, kindness, or patience that expresses Christ apart from Christ Himself. So striving to follow teachings, learning more doctrines, or modifying our behavior to be “good Christians” won’t work. We simply need to contact Christ as the Spirit in our spirit. When we do, we get Him and enjoy Him as the wonderful, all-inclusive dose that can be everything to us and for us.
Here are just a few ways we can contact the Spirit to take Him as the healthy “dose” for our daily Christian walk.
First, we can read the Bible.
John 6:63 says, “It is the Spirit who gives life;…the words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” When we come to the Bible, we must use not only our mind to understand the black and white letters, but even more, we need to use our spirit to open ourselves to God’s speaking. This way, we contact the Spirit in the Word, receiving our “dose” from the Word.
Second, we can take the all-inclusive dose of the Spirit by praying.
First Corinthians 14:15 says, “I will pray with my spirit.” When we pray with our spirit, we contact the Lord who is the Spirit. Our praying with our spirit is like spiritual breathing. Just as we take in the air when we breathe, when we pray, we take in more of the life-giving Spirit as the divine air.
Third, we can sing.
First Corinthians 14:15 also says, “I will sing with the spirit.” We can also contact the Spirit by singing hymns and spiritual songs with our spirit. As we sing with our spirit, we spontaneously enjoy the Spirit as the all-inclusive One.
Next, we can call on the name of the Lord.
First Corinthians 12:3 says, “Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking in the Spirit of God says, Jesus is accursed; and no one can say, Jesus is Lord! except in the Holy Spirit.” When we call, “Lord Jesus,” or say, “Jesus is Lord,” we are in the Holy Spirit and contact the Lord as the Spirit. By calling on the name of the Lord, any time and any place, we receive more of Him as the all-inclusive dose.
Finally, we can take the Spirit as the all-inclusive dose as we read the Word.
Ephesians 6:17-18 says, “And receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit.” We can practice what’s taught in this verse by turning what we read into a prayer to the Lord. By praying with the Word of God, we “eat” the Word as our nourishment. The Word is full of nourishing, spiritual food that fills our hunger and sustains us. This is an excellent way to receive more of the all-inclusive Spirit.
As the life-giving Spirit with our spirit, Christ is everything that’s required for us to live our Christian life. Our need isn’t to try harder to do better; our unique need is to contact and enjoy the Spirit daily by reading the Bible, praying, singing, calling on the name of the Lord, and pray-reading. By practicing these things, we take the Spirit as the all-inclusive dose.
You’re not alone if you’ve asked yourself the question, “I’m saved. What comes next?” Many of us didn’t know what came next after we received the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior.
We surely greatly appreciate the tremendous steps God took to redeem us and to impart His eternal life into us so that we could be born again. But believing in Jesus Christ is just the beginning of our Christian life. So much more lies ahead! Let’s talk about some things that follow our first believing in the Lord.
First, we can be baptized.
Our believing in Jesus Christ is the inward aspect of our being saved, and our being baptized is the outward affirmation of our being saved. So after we believe, what comes next is the step of baptism. These two go together.
Mark 16:16 says, “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved.” The New Testament Recovery Version has a rich note on this verse that can help us understand why both believing and being baptized are necessary:
“…To believe and to be…baptized are two parts of one complete step for receiving the full salvation of God. To be baptized without believing is merely an empty ritual; to believe without being baptized is to be saved only inwardly without an outward affirmation of the inward salvation. These two should go together. Moreover, water baptism should be accompanied by Spirit baptism, even as the children of Israel were baptized in the sea [that is, in the water of the Red Sea]…and in the cloud [that is, in the Spirit]—1 Cor. 10:2; 12:13.”
We gain so much by believing and by being baptized!
Another step we need to take after we’re saved is to consecrate ourselves to the Lord. To consecrate yourself means to give yourself to the Lord. Paul says in Romans 12:1,
“I exhort you therefore, brothers, through the compassions of God to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, well pleasing to God, which is your reasonable service.”
By consecrating ourselves to the Lord, we become a living sacrifice, putting ourselves completely in God’s hands. Previously, our life was for ourselves; now it’s for Him.
Consecrating ourselves to God helps us to walk in God’s way, grow in the life of God, and enjoy God’s salvation. It also allows God to work in us.
Third, after believing and being baptized, we begin to undergo a lifelong process of Christ spreading out from our regenerated spirit where He dwells, to our entire being, filling us with Himself. This process is called transformation in the Bible.
Ephesians 3:17 says, “That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith.” When we believed in Him, Christ came to live in our spirit. But this verse shows us a further step: Christ desires to spread from our spirit into our heart to make His home there. He wants to “settle down,” make His home, in our heart, not as a guest but as the resident.
As Christ makes His home in our hearts, we’re changed, that is, transformed, in our inward parts: our mind, our emotion, and our will. Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight, but gradually over time.
In Romans 12:2 the apostle Paul exhorts us to “be transformed.” Note 3 on this verse in the Recovery Version helps us see what transformation is and how it takes place:
“Transformation is the inward, metabolic process in which God works to spread His divine life and nature throughout every part of our being, particularly our soul, bringing Christ and His riches into our being as our new element and causing our old, natural element to be gradually discharged. As a result, we will be transformed into His image (2 Cor. 3:18), that is, conformed to the image of the firstborn Son of God as His many brothers ([Rom.]8:29). Thus we will be suitable for the building up of His Body.”
A beautiful piece of petrified wood is an excellent picture of transformation. Petrified wood is the result of a process that takes many years. First, a branch from a tree falls and is buried in soil with constant exposure to water. As the water flows around and through the branch, elements in the water gradually replace the material of the wood. Over time, the wood is changed, transformed into an object that has the color, texture, and weight of a stone.
As we allow God’s life as the living water to saturate us and spread in us, we too are being transformed. But this incredible transformation takes place in our soul, with all the elements of who Christ is!
Since God never forces Himself on us but rather allows us our free will, our being transformed comes only with our cooperation. Here are a few ways we cooperate with God to be transformed:
First, by praying—speaking to the Lord in prayer, we open our hearts to Him and keep our hearts in a good condition with Him.
Second, by spending time with the Lord—a daily, dedicated time in prayer and the Word with the Lord is critical to our relationship with Him.
Next, by calling on the name of the Lord—whether loudly or quietly, we can call on the Lord to contact and enjoy Him throughout the day.
Fourth, by reading the Bible—the healthy habit of daily Bible reading is one of the best ways receive the new element of Christ. One major benefit of reading the Bible is that we’re nourished with spiritual food. First Peter 2:2 says, “As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow unto salvation.” Just as a baby needs milk to grow, we need the Word of God as our spiritual nourishment so we can grow unto salvation.
And finally, we can cooperate with God to be transformed by obeying the sense in our spirit from the Lord—we have a sense from the Lord dwelling in us concerning matters in our daily life. For example, perhaps we want to purchase a particular item, but we have an uneasy sense or feeling from the Lord in our spirit about it. That’s an opportunity to obey Him. Obeying Him to not buy that item allows the Lord to spread a little more into our soul.
Another item that follows our first believing in the Lord is that we should begin to meet with other Christians.
God doesn’t intend for Christians to be alone. After we’re saved, we need to find other believers in Christ with whom we can meet, fellowship, and go on. We can even pray, “Lord, lead me to others who love You and follow You.” Gathering together to fellowship with believers in Christ strengthens our faith and encourages us to experience more of Christ.
Additionally, when we gather with other believers to fellowship and praise the Lord, God can be expressed through a group of people to fulfill His plan.
So much awaits us after our first believing in Christ! We’re now on a lifelong journey of enjoying Christ’s rich presence and experiencing a rich and full salvation that continues throughout our entire lives.
In previous podcasts we talked about the importance of spending time with Jesus every morning and how to build up such a habit. This wonderful habit is key to our relationship with Christ.
Perhaps you see the benefits of this kind of habit and want to build it up, but aren’t sure what to do during that time. How do we spend time with Jesus? What do we do in our mornings with Him?
Throughout the centuries, Christians who loved the Lord and sought to know the Lord have discovered many enjoyable, beneficial ways to spend their mornings with Him. We’ll go through some of these discoveries. But first, let’s quickly refresh our view on what this morning time with Jesus is all about.
Spending time with the Lord Jesus each morning isn’t to fulfill some kind of religious duty or perform a ritual. If we just “clock in” and “clock out” without our heart being in it or our spirit engaged, we may develop a habit, but it won’t be an enjoyable one nor will it help us know the Lord more or grow in Him. Keeping a lifeless practice is pointless and fruitless.
Instead, we should approach our time in the morning as an opportunity to be with the One we love and who loves us, our dear Savior Christ. The Lord Jesus is a wonderful Person who lives in us. The goal of this time is to contact Him in our spirit, be fed by Him in His Word, enjoy Him, receive His speaking, and speak to Him.
With this in mind, let’s look at some ways we can spend time with Jesus each morning.
First, we can call upon the Lord’s name.
Sometimes just calling upon the Lord’s name is the best prayer. In our time with Jesus in the morning we can simply pray, “Oh, Lord Jesus.” Our calling on the Lord can help us begin to open our heart to Him and exercise our spirit to contact Him. As we call, we can pray further, “Lord Jesus, I turn my heart to You again this morning. Lord Jesus, I want to contact You in my spirit to receive Your life.” When we call, we contact the Lord as the life-giving Spirit in us, and we receive His life. In one of her wonderful hymns, M.E. Barber puts this well: “Just to breathe the name of Jesus is to drink of life indeed.”
Next, we can tell the Lord we love Him.
The Lord Jesus wants our love, and we have a sweet sensation when we greet Him each morning with, “Lord Jesus, I love You.” The more we tell our Lord we love Him, the more our love for Him grows, and the more we enjoy His love for us. Our hearts become soft and open to Him.
Third, we can praise and thank the Lord Jesus for what He’s done and for who He is. For example, we can praise Jesus with the wonderful facts we find in God’s Word:
“Lord Jesus, I praise You for Your accomplishment and victory on the cross.”
“Praise You, Lord, You are the resurrection and the life.”
“Praise You, Lord Jesus, You are God, and You are the perfect, sinless man.”
“Lord, You are the Lamb of God—praise You!”
Ephesians 5:18 and 20 tell us we can be filled with the Lord in our spirit by giving thanks. Besides the many specific things in our lives we can thank the Lord for, we can also thank Him for who He is to us and what He does, as revealed in the Bible. For example, we might pray:
“Thank You, Lord Jesus, for Your new compassions to me this morning.”
“Thank You, Lord, for being my life.”
“Lord Jesus, thank You for loving me and saving me.”
“Oh Lord, thank You for living in me and being in me always.”
“Thank You, Lord Jesus, for being the bread of life to me.”
Fourth, we can also confess our sins to the Lord Jesus each morning as He makes us aware of them through our conscience. This is very important in our fellowship with Him. We’ve all experienced the awkwardness of being with someone we’ve argued with or offended. It’s difficult to even talk together. We may care for one another but a barrier separates us that makes it hard for us to have a pleasant time.
Our relationship with the Lord Jesus is even more delicate. He lives in us and knows all things. Although He wants to fellowship with us, He can’t tolerate sin. So when we’ve sinned or disobeyed Him, a barrier separates us from Him.
But we can confess our sins to Jesus to be forgiven and washed. The barrier is removed, and we sense peace between us and the Lord. We can once again fellowship freely with the Lord with a light and open heart.
Fifth, we can read the Bible in the morning and even use it to pray. For this, it’s best not to read too many verses but to instead focus our prayer on one or two. We can use other times to study His Word. The goal in our morning time with the Lord is to be fed.
We can read a chapter in the Bible, or half if it’s a long chapter, and then go back and pray with one or two verses the Lord touches us about. Suppose, for example, you read John 4 for your regular Bible reading, and verses 10 and 14 stand out to you. You can pray with these verses: “Lord Jesus, You’re the living water. Oh Lord, I come to You right now to drink of You. You give me the water that quenches my deep thirst. Thank You, Lord, You are now the living water in me, a fountain of water springing up into eternal life. Keep me drinking You today.”
Whatever else we may do during our morning time with Jesus, we should always include time in the Word in prayer to receive substantial nourishment. We can speak to Jesus with His Word and He can speak to us in His Word. As we pray over and with the Word of God, His Word nourishes, refreshes, enlightens, and strengthens us.
Finally, we can also sing to Jesus.
Sometimes a hymn expresses our thoughts and feelings better than our own words can. Singing or prayerfully reading a hymn can open us deeply to the Lord Jesus. The mornings are a great time to sing to Him. Ephesians 5:18 and 19 tell us that singing with our hearts to the Lord is another way to be filled in our spirit with His Spirit. Hymnal.net is an excellent resource of hymns with their accompanying music.
We can certainly pray about different matters or persons in our lives, but the Lord Jesus is a living Person who wants to have a relationship with us. So we should first come to Him to enjoy His presence, rather than starting our day by bringing Him all the things on our “wish list.” When we’ve first contacted the Lord in our spirit and enjoyed Him in His Word, He will lead us how to pray for these matters according to His will.
The six matters we’ve talked about in this podcast are not in any particular order and shouldn’t be taken as a formula. Sometimes we might begin by praising the Lord Jesus and thanking Him. The Lord may then shine on us about our disobedience in something the day before, and we can confess that sin to Him. Or sometimes we may pray over His Word, call on His name, and sing to Him all at the same time.
The main thing is to open our heart and exercise our spirit to touch the living Person of Christ. This keeps our time from becoming something methodical, routine, or dead; instead we’ll enjoy our Lord Jesus freshly morning by morning. As we practice, the Lord will show us how to contact Him in a living and personal way.
In another podcast we discussed one of the biggest questions a Christian may have: Can I lose my salvation? We saw the clear and definite assurance the Bible gives us that once we believe in Christ and receive Him as our Savior, we’re saved eternally. We can’t lose our salvation.
But here’s another question: Does it make any difference whether we know we can’t lose our salvation?
The answer is yes, and in this podcast we’ll talk about why.
There are dangerous consequences of thinking you can lose your salvation.
To think you can lose your salvation at any time makes progressing in the Christian life extremely difficult, if not impossible. In fact, this thought can undermine your entire Christian life.
Let’s see how this could happen.
When we sin, we naturally feel ashamed and regretful. This is a healthy reaction. But if we don’t know that we can confess our sins to the Lord to be forgiven and washed, then we don’t know what to do about our sins. Our conscience becomes weighed down. And as we commit more sins, as we inevitably will, we may begin to think the accumulation of all our sins undoes our salvation.
A question starts to eat away at us: “Am I still saved?”
With this question constantly bothering us, we become disheartened in our Christian life. Instead of being joyful in our salvation, loving the Lord, and pursuing Him with an unburdened heart, we feel unworthy. We find it difficult to pray to Him or read the Bible. We become focused on our behavior, our failures, and ourselves, and begin to lose sight of Christ and all He’s done for us.
And in spite of our best efforts, we sin yet again. So our unconfessed sins continue to pile up, burdening our conscience even more, and making us feel hopeless.
Sadly, at this point, some give up on following the Lord because they’re convinced their Christian life has suffered irreparable damage. Feeling they’re already lost, they think to themselves, “What’s the use? I’ve already lost my salvation. Why try anymore?”
So they give up, go back to their old life, and live as they did before they were saved.
They don’t realize that the blood Jesus shed on the cross redeemed them and saved them eternally. And they don’t know that same precious blood of Jesus can also wash them of every sin they commit and confess to Him after they’re saved.
Knowing these things—knowing we can’t lose our salvation—has a positive effect on our Christian life.
God forgave us and washed us of our sins when we first believed in Jesus Christ and accepted Him as our Savior. At that time, we were also born again in our spirit with the divine life, and Christ came to live in us.
Now that Christ lives in us, He wants us to go on from being saved to knowing Him personally and experiencing Him subjectively. He wants us to enjoy Him and grow in Him. He wants to be our life so we can express Him in our living.
If we know we’re saved eternally, we can go forward with a lightened heart to build on that, unhindered by the erroneous and damaging thought that we could lose our salvation. If we don’t know this important truth, we’ll miss out on all that’s before us in the Christian life.
Of course, the Lord doesn’t want us to sin, and we grieve Him when we do. Even we ourselves don’t want to sin, and we feel guilty when we do. But when our conscience makes us aware we’ve offended the Lord, we’re not left hopeless and helpless. We can and should simply confess our sin to the Lord so He can forgive us and cleanse us from that sin.
Knowing we can never lose our salvation rescues us from despair and from giving up when we fail. Instead, we can leave the realm of doubt and despair by standing firmly on God’s faithful Word concerning His eternal salvation. Then we can go forward into the realm of experiencing and enjoying the rich, wonderful, and full salvation God has provided for us in Christ!
In a previous podcast, we saw the benefits of reading the Bible daily and why it’s an excellent habit for every Christian to develop. But how do we get started? What can we do to develop this healthy and necessary habit?
In this podcast, we’ll cover seven practical points to help you build up a daily habit of reading the Bible:
First, pray for a hunger for God’s Word.
In Psalm 119 we can see the psalmist’s love and hunger for God’s word. In verse 103 he overflows with his joyous experience of God’s word: “How sweet are Your words to my taste! Sweeter than honey to my mouth!” We, too, can have this kind of joy in God’s Word; we can simply ask God to give us a hunger and a taste for His Word. Surely this is a prayer God would like to answer.
Second, choose a set time to read the Word.
It helps to schedule a set time for reading the Bible. Morning is an excellent time, before the hustle and bustle of the day begins. Other times like during lunch or before going to bed can also be good. A scheduled time helps us remember to read the Word and makes it a part of our daily routine.
Third, read consecutively.
Perhaps we’ve read the Bible occasionally, reading here and there in the Scriptures. But a good way to help us regularly and consistently read the Word is to read it consecutively, chapter after chapter and book after book. This way we don’t have to decide what to read each time, and as we read the Bible cover to cover we’ll begin to see what a cohesive book it is.
Fourth, turn your heart to the Lord before reading.
Every time we come to the Word, it’s good to turn our heart to the Lord Jesus. Before we start our Bible reading, we can pray a simple prayer like this:
“Lord, as I come to Your Word, I turn my heart to you. I open to You and to Your speaking. Speak to me, wash me, and shine more light from Your Word on me today. Dear Lord, there is so much more for me to see in Your Word. Enlighten me more as I read today.”
Praying a simple prayer like this will help us be open to anything the Lord would like to speak to us in His Word. By opening our heart and spirit, we’ll contact the Lord Jesus in His Word and His Word will be food to us.
Next, pray over what you read.
Sometimes as we’re reading the Bible, a certain verse stands out to us. It may comfort us, convict us, or apply exactly to our situation. Other times, a verse may perplex us. Whatever our reaction, we can stop and pray what we’ve read back to the Lord. We might thank the Lord or praise Him for certain portions, we might ask Him to show us the meaning of a certain verse, or we might just talk with Him about a verse.
In this way the Bible can be a prayer book to us, helping us to spend time with the Lord. As we practice this, the Bible will become more than words on a page to us; it will become a place where we meet with our dear Lord Jesus.
Sixth, keep track of your Bible reading.
Keeping track of what you’ve read is helpful, and there are many ways to do so. You can check off what chapter or book you’ve finished in your Bible. You can use a blank page or the table of contents to check off each book as you read it. You can also mark the number of times you’ve read the whole New Testament and the whole Old Testament. Online tools like ReadHisWord.com and LettheWord.com are also available to help you keep track of your Bible reading.
Keeping track encourages us in our habit. For example, you may think you’re going too slowly if you read one chapter per day. But even if you only read one chapter per day, you’ll finish the entire New Testament in under one year. After five years of reading the Bible daily, you might look at your record and find you’ve read the whole New Testament seven times! Seeing this kind of progress really encourages us to continue on.
Finally, treasure your daily Bible reading time.
Reading the Bible daily is so important for us as Christians, so we must treasure and guard the time we’ve set aside to enjoy the Word of the Lord. Our lives are full of things that can interrupt or distract us, so we really have to be active to guard the time we set.
For example, you may want to silence your phone during your set time for reading the Bible so incoming calls, texts, and notifications don’t interrupt you. Resolving not to respond to these alerts will keep the time you’ve reserved for the Word from being eaten into. Some people find reading the Bible using an electronic device is less than ideal because of the distractions that are only a click away. In this case, so you can focus your whole attention on God’s Word, you could try using a print version of the Bible instead.
A daily Bible reading habit will lay a foundation for our Christian life, strengthen our Christian faith, and help us to know the Lord Jesus in a deeper way. May God grant us all His grace to daily read His Word so that we can be brought on to the full knowledge of the truth!
In our podcast on “The Best Time of the Day to Spend with the Lord Jesus,” we discussed the benefits of having a habit of spending morning time with the Lord. In this podcast we’ll discuss some helpful points for building up this healthy spiritual habit.
First, being motivated is key to building up any good habit. And knowing the advantages of a particular habit positively motivates us. Likewise, knowing the disadvantages of not having that habit also motivates us.
For instance, we know regular—not occasional—exercise helps us feel better, work more efficiently, and even live longer. Keeping these positive benefits in mind motivates us to get off our chairs, get active and moving, and persevere, especially when we don’t feel like exercising.
As another example, we know we’ll have dental problems if we don’t regularly brush and floss. So we floss, not because we enjoy it, but because the negative outcome if we don’t encourages us to.
Similarly, habitually spending personal time with the Lord Jesus each morning positively affects our spiritual life and our daily living. When we enjoy Him and His Word in the morning, we’re nourished and supplied with His life to face the challenges of the day. And by being nourished, we’ll grow in the life of Christ.
But not having this daily habit affects us negatively. Without being nourished regularly, it’s difficult to maintain our vitality and joy. And when we’re weak from a lack of spiritual nourishment, we succumb to temptations more easily. Our personal knowing of Christ and our growth in His life are hindered.
Next, a habit is something that’s part of your life; it’s a regular practice. If you do something only occasionally, it’s not a habit. Forming a habit takes time and repeated practice, and in the process, sometimes we fail. But when we remember that it takes repeated practice, our occasional lapses won’t overly discourage us. We’ll just pick up our practice again afterward.
To establish the habit of spending time with the Lord every morning is no different. It takes time and repeated practice, and restarting after our lapses.
So, here are some practical pointers for developing this habit:
First, spend time to pray about this matter. The Lord wants to have a personal relationship with us and will surely answer our prayers about this. He will faithfully remind us of our desire and intention to build this habit. We can pray, “Lord Jesus, I really want to start my day with You, not other things. Lord, supply me with grace in the morning to put everything else aside so I can be with You first.” Praying about this opens the way for the Lord to be the grace we need to build this healthy habit morning after morning.
Second, go to bed a little earlier so you can get up earlier in the morning to have time to be with the Lord. Burning the candle at both ends—staying up very late and trying to get up early enough to have this time—usually results in failure and discouragement. But by planning ahead this way, you’ll have specific time carved out to be with the Lord each morning.
Third, keep in mind that forming a lifelong habit takes time and practice. When you fail, don’t give up. You can simply start afresh the next day because, as Lamentations 3:22-23 says, the Lord’s mercy is new to us every morning. Just take one day at a time.
Next, determine the least distracting way for you to read the Bible. For instance, some find a printed copy of the Bible is better for them than a digital one during this time since email, news, and texts are all just a click away, and we can easily be distracted by things on our digital devices. Especially when starting out, it’s good to minimize distractions where we can.
Finally, begin by aiming for a short time each morning. This is easier and more realistic than trying to go from spending zero minutes with the Lord to spending sixty. After you establish a shorter time first, say ten minutes, you can add more time. As you taste the joy of being with the Lord in the morning, you’ll spontaneously want to add more time, building up to perhaps a solid twenty minutes. And as you go on, if you have more time, you can spend more time. It’s up to you.
Building up the habit of spending time with the Lord each morning is a worthwhile endeavor that benefits us for our entire life. For help on what to do during this morning time with the Lord, keep an eye out for an upcoming podcast on “How to Spend Time with the Lord Jesus in the Morning.”
We’ve all heard someone say, “I’ve been blessed by God,” usually in relation to success, health, family, wealth, or a job. We’ve even heard athletes say this after winning a big game. We all want to be under God’s blessing.
The common understanding of what it means to be blessed by God is that He gives us good things. In this respect, we can say that God’s blessing is on everyone, believers and unbelievers alike. Matthew 5:45 says that the Father who is in the heavens causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and unjust.
But does God’s blessing pertain only to material things? Though these are included, thinking of God’s blessing as mainly material things severely limits our understanding of what is in God’s heart for us as believers. So what is the fuller meaning of being blessed by God?
Let’s begin with the blessing of Abraham by God in Genesis 12:3: “And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” We might think being blessed here means something outward, like having a good life. But in Galatians 3:13 and 14, the apostle Paul specifically explained what blessed in Genesis 12:3 means:
“Christ has redeemed us out of the curse of the law, having become a curse on our behalf; because it is written, ‘Cursed is every one hanging on a tree’; in order that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.”
These verses explain both how we can be blessed and what the blessing of God is.
How can we be blessed?
As fallen sinners, we deserve nothing but judgment and curse, certainly not blessing. And our good works or behavior can never make us “blessable.” But Jesus became a curse on our behalf. On the cross, He bore the curse that was upon all humanity and died in our place. Because of the redemptive work of Christ on the cross for us, we cursed sinners can now receive the blessing of God through faith in Christ.
What is the blessing of God?
Galatians 3:14 makes clear that the blessing in Christ Jesus that God wants us to receive isn’t material things, but something far greater—the promise of the Spirit.
Note 2 on this verse in the New Testament Recovery Version helps us understand what this blessing is:
“In the gospel we have received not only the blessing of forgiveness, washing, and cleansing; even more, we have received the greatest blessing, which is the Triune God—the Father, Son, and Spirit—as the processed, all-inclusive life-giving Spirit dwelling in us in a most subjective way for our enjoyment. Oh, what a blessing that we can enjoy such an all-inclusive One as our daily portion!”
But in this verse what, or who, is “the Spirit” that we receive? The next note on verse 14 says this:
“This verse indicates that the Spirit is the blessing that God promised to Abraham for all the nations and that has been received by the believers through faith in Christ. The Spirit is the compound Spirit,…and actually is God Himself processed in His Trinity through incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and descension that we may receive Him as our life and our everything. This is the focus of the gospel of God.
“The physical aspect of the blessing that God promised to Abraham was the good land (Gen. 12:7; 13:15; 17:8; 26:3-4), which was a type of the all-inclusive Christ (see Col. 1:12 and note 2). Since Christ is eventually realized as the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45; 2 Cor. 3:17), the blessing of the promised Spirit corresponds with the blessing of the land promised to Abraham. Actually, the Spirit as the realization of Christ in our experience is the good land as the source of God’s bountiful supply for us to enjoy.”
Christ dwells in us as the all-inclusive Spirit, so we can experience Him in a personal, subjective way by contacting Him with our spirit. We can pray, call on His name, and read His Word. By simply turning to Christ in our spirit, talking to Him throughout the day, we can enjoy Him as our rich portion.
Suppose you pray for a better job and get a higher paying position. Happily, you thank the Lord for it. But what happens when the new work environment presents some difficulties? If you realize that God didn’t just bless you with a new job but with much more, with the all-inclusive Christ who lives in you, you’ll contact the Lord as the life-giving Spirit dwelling in your spirit. So instead of asking the Lord to take away the problems or bless you with another job, you’ll open your heart to Him and ask Him to be your wisdom, strength, or whatever you need, to face the troubles at work. You’ll begin to experience Christ as the bountiful supply in that difficult situation. You’ll enjoy Him—the top blessing.
If we think God’s blessing is mainly of things in the material realm, we’ll pursue these things, spend our prayer time asking God for them, and when we don’t get them, wonder whether we’re blessed by God. Meanwhile, we’ll miss enjoying the broader, fuller, and more real blessing of God—Christ for our experience and enjoyment. By focusing on and pursuing Christ, we can enjoy the all-inclusive Spirit as the top blessing of God!
Surely we should be thankful for the material things the Lord gives us. But we’re truly blessed when we experience Christ as our love, our peace, our patience, our satisfaction, our joy, and so many other aspects of Himself.
We have this wonderful Person now within us, the greatest blessing in the universe!
We can pray, “Lord, thank You for dying as a curse for me so I could be blessed with Yourself. Thank you for living in me as the Spirit. Open the eyes of my heart to see beyond the physical and material blessings You’ve given me. I desire to experience You as the highest blessing in the universe!”
Consider these two scenarios:
Scenario 1: You hear the alarm go off, roll out of bed, and start to get ready, already anxious about the day ahead. During a hurried breakfast, you catch up on news, texts, and email. Eventually you set off, preoccupied with your to-do list.
Scenario 2: You hear the alarm go off and begin your day by saying, “Lord Jesus, I love You.” You get up and spend time to talk with the Lord in prayer and to read His Word. Refreshed and nourished by His Word, you feel strengthened and supplied for the day’s challenges. You eat breakfast and head out.
We’d probably all prefer the second scenario. Our spiritual life would benefit greatly and perhaps change dramatically if we made a habit of starting our day with the Lord. But building up any habit takes more than a fleeting inspiration; it helps if we see the reasons why it’s worthwhile. Let’s look at three reasons for developing a habit of spending time with the Lord in the morning.
First, our spiritual health depends on it.
We can only expect to be physically healthy if we eat enough food every day. Sure, we can get some calories from a quick donut, but it’s better for our health if we take time to eat a nourishing meal. Similarly, we can only expect to be spiritually healthy if we take time daily to feed on God’s Word in prayer and to fellowship with the Lord.
Second, our spiritual growth depends on it.
First Peter 2:2 says, “As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow.” Just as babies need to eat food daily to grow physically, we need to eat spiritual food daily to grow in the Lord. By spending time with Jesus to feed on His Word each day, we’re supplied to live our Christian life and grow in His divine life.
Third, our relationship with Christ depends on it.
To have a meaningful relationship with someone requires spending quality time with that person. Email and texting are good ways to stay in touch, but they’re not the same as speaking directly with someone. By spending face to face time with others, we get to know them on a deeper level. Sometimes we have to rearrange our schedules or forego doing other things to get this quality time. But it’s worth it because we’re getting to know each other, speaking what’s on our hearts to one another.
In our relationship with the Lord Jesus, this kind of face to face time is even more critical. Jesus Christ is a wonderful person who lives in us, and who wants us to know Him. If we want to know Him beyond an objective or superficial level, we have to sacrifice time we might spend on other things to be with Him. Focusing on Him, we can open our hearts to Him, speak to Him in prayer, and let Him speak to us in His Word. This is how we get to know Him personally and deeply.
The Lord Jesus wants a living and personal relationship with us, not a formal or formulaic one. We can, and should, contact Him anytime, anywhere. He’s so accessible and near to us in our spirit, and we can call upon Him all throughout the day or night.
The best time, though, for us to have a little longer personal time with the Lord Jesus is in the morning. This has been borne out by the experience of believers throughout history and testified by God’s people in the Bible.
Exodus 16 tells how God fed His people as they journeyed in the wilderness, sending manna to them fresh every morning with the dew. If the children of Israel didn’t get up early enough, they would miss it, because as the sun became hot, the manna melted.
This account is a good picture for us. Today, God wants to nourish us with spiritual “manna” in His Word every morning. This way, before the “heat” and trials of the day begin, we’re refreshed and equipped with Christ to face the situations that come our way.
When we don’t have a time with the Lord in the morning, we’re easily swept up in all kinds of things once the day gets going. We simply run out of time to be alone with Him. Before we know it the day’s over, and we’re so tired. We may pray a little as we’re falling asleep, but we missed the special supply of Christ for the day available to us in the freshness of the morning.
It’s better to start our day off with the Lord, before so many things—plans, worries, situations—invade to rob us of our time altogether. Devoting time in the morning to be with our Lord Jesus ensures our having a substantial interaction with Him that day.
Those first minutes of the day we spend being alone with our loving Lord are particularly sweet. While things are quiet, we can easily open our hearts and our spirits to the Lord to be filled with Him through prayer and enlivened by reading His Word. His Word will become the gladness and joy of our hearts as we spend time in His presence.
After reading the post on the Bibles for America blog titled, “Can You Lose Your Salvation?”, someone wrote to us with the following comment and questions:
“I am so glad that I was able to find this article. I know that God’s decisions cannot be changed and that He holds us in His hands. Yet I still feel insecure about my salvation. Can you please answer these questions: Is the unforgivable sin not accepting Jesus as Savior? Can a Christian commit the ‘unforgivable sin’ talked about in Mark 3:28-29?”
In this podcast, we’d like to share with you our reply to this note in the hope that it will be helpful to others who have these questions.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for your comment asking us about the unforgivable sin and referencing Mark 3:28-29:
“Truly I say to you that all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they blaspheme, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit has no forgiveness forever, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.”
Let’s also look at Matthew 12:31-32, a related passage in the Word that gives us more detail:
“Therefore I say to you, Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, neither in this age nor in the one to come.”
First, you asked whether the unforgivable sin is not accepting Jesus as Savior. That is not the unforgivable sin, since the verses themselves tell us that the unforgiveable sin is to blaspheme the Spirit.
To get further help, let’s read the first note on Matthew 12:32 in the Recovery Version:
“In the economy of the Triune God, the Father conceived the plan of redemption (Eph. 1:5, 9), the Son accomplished redemption according to the Father’s plan (1 Pet. 2:24; Gal. 1:4), and the Spirit reaches sinners to apply the redemption accomplished by the Son (1 Cor. 6:11; 1 Pet. 1:2). If a sinner blasphemes the Son, as Saul of Tarsus did, the Spirit will still have the ground to work on him and cause him to repent and believe in the Son that he may be forgiven (see 1 Tim. 1:13-16). But if a sinner blasphemes the Spirit, the Spirit will have no ground to work on him, and there will be no one left to cause him to repent and believe. Hence, it is impossible for such a person to be forgiven. This is not only logical according to reason but also governmental according to God’s administrative principle, as revealed here by the Lord’s word.”
The background here is that the Lord Jesus had healed a demon-possessed man, casting the demon out of him by the Spirit of God. But the Pharisees and scribes accused the Lord Jesus of casting out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons. By saying this, they blasphemed the Spirit. Jesus strongly told them that to blaspheme the Spirit was an everlasting sin. Since it’s the Spirit who works on people to bring them to repentance and salvation, if one were to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, the Spirit has no way to work on that person to cause him to be saved and forgiven.
However, though it’s not the unforgivable sin, not accepting Jesus as the Savior has dire consequences. Only by believing in Jesus as the Savior and Redeemer can anyone be forgiven and saved from eternal judgment. God is not only loving but also long-suffering. As long as a person is living, even for one who had previously rejected Christ, the opportunity to be saved and forgiven continues to be available.
In fact, many who had previously rejected Jesus and even cursed His name eventually came to repent, believe in Him, and love Him. We can see a clear example of this in the life of the apostle Paul, who before his conversion not only himself didn’t believe in Jesus but also persecuted those who did.
All of us believers at one time were those who had not accepted Jesus as their Savior. But through the preaching of the gospel, the Spirit convicted us of our sins and brought us to repentance and faith in Christ. We were forgiven and saved!
However, if an unbeliever continues to reject Christ and His salvation and then dies in unbelief, he loses the opportunity to be forgiven and saved. Oh, may the Lord help us to pray for our unsaved friends and relatives and to preach the gospel to them a timely way!
Second, you asked whether a Christian can commit the unforgivable sin mentioned in Mark 3. By carefully reading the context of the above passages in Matthew and Mark, we see that the Lord spoke this word concerning the unforgivable sin of blaspheming the Spirit to the unbelieving religious Pharisees and scribes, not to His disciples, who already believed in Him. A Christian is one who has believed in and accepted Jesus as the Savior. When anyone does this, he is saved eternally, and his salvation is irrevocable; it can never be undone.
Let’s now discuss when a Christian commits a sin after being saved. Although we have believed in Christ, we do still sin. But the fact that we still sin doesn’t mean we aren’t saved or that we’ll become unsaved. We discussed this in our post, “Can You lose Your Salvation?”.
When we repented and believed in Jesus, we were reborn in our spirit with the life of God. But the problem is that, even though we now have God’s life, we still also have our fallen soul and our sinful flesh, which cause us to sin.
So what should we do when we sin? We need to confess our sins to the Lord so we can be forgiven and cleansed of those sins (see 1 John 1:9). This confessing of sins after we’re saved isn’t for us to secure our salvation—our salvation is already eternally secure. We don’t lose our salvation when we sin, but we do lose our joy and peace with the Lord Jesus. For peace to be restored between us and the Lord, we need to confess to Him any sins we become conscious of.
We don’t need to hunt for or wonder what possible sins we may have committed. The Lord Jesus lives in our spirit, and a major part of our spirit is our conscience, which makes us aware of the sins we commit. As we spend time opening our hearts to the Lord in prayer and in the Word, we give Him the way to shine in us. Then when He shines on a particular sin we’ve committed, enlightening us concerning that sin, we should confess it and ask for His forgiveness. His Word tells us that He is faithful to forgive us and cleanse us. Practicing to confess our sins quickly keeps us spiritually healthy.
Thank the Lord for this simple way to be forgiven and cleansed by Him! However, although we’re forgiven and cleansed by confessing our sins, we shouldn’t have a loose attitude about sin. The Lord’s forgiveness doesn’t give us a “license” to sin. Offending Him isn’t without consequences. When we disobey the Lord or sin against Him, we grieve Him. And being careless about sin damages our relationship with Him.
The Lord Jesus dwelling in our spirit is our new life, new person, and even new living. Our intention should be to maintain our fellowship with the Lord all the time and to build up a life of walking in our spirit. When we are actively one with the Lord in our daily life, His sin-overcoming life can be lived out of us. But we will have failures, and when we do, we should confess to the Lord so we can be forgiven and restored in our fellowship with Him.
We’d like to reiterate, once you receive the Lord Jesus as your Savior, you can never lose your salvation. Romans 10:9 says, “That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” This is God’s sure word to us. The security of our salvation isn’t determined by whether we feel saved but by God’s trustworthy Word, and God cannot lie.
We hope you find this reply helpful. May the Word of God be your solid foundation.
How did I get here? The young man took a long look at his life. He was penniless, homeless, filthy, and starving. You would never know that he had once lived under the loving care of his wealthy father.
But he had left home, cut off his relationship with his father, squandered his inheritance on a life of sin, and ended up in this pitiful state. He finally came to his senses, and a deep feeling welled up in him: I need to go back to my father. But he was so ashamed. After all he had done, he wondered whether his father would even want him as a son anymore. In desperation, he decided he would return home and ask to be a servant.
He was unaware of the depth of his father’s love. Little did he know that his father had been longing for him, waiting and watching for the day he would return. As the young man made his way home, his father spotted him, even when he was still a long way off, and ran to him, embraced him, and kissed him affectionately.
Filthy and ragged, the repentant young man confessed to his father his sinful life, telling him that he was no longer worthy to be his son. But his father responded by first clothing him with the best robe and then sacrificing the fattened calf to feed him. With rejoicing, he called for a feast for all to celebrate the return of his son, whom he declared had been dead and now lived again, who had been lost and was now found.
Like the son in this parable, each of us will eventually come to the realization that we are lost and need to be found by God, our real Father. We may feel too ashamed to come to God. But the Bible reveals His unchanging and infinite love for us. He longs for every prodigal to come back to Himself.
In God’s eyes, to be lost is actually to be dead in sins, and to be found is to be saved and made alive in Christ. If we return to God and repent of our sins, we will be cleansed and Christ will cover us like a robe of righteousness. Not only so, like the fattened calf, Christ who was sacrificed for us will also fill and satisfy us inwardly, becoming a rich feast for us to enjoy as sons in the household of our Father God.
Our loving and forgiving Father is waiting for us to come to Him. We can do this by praying this simple prayer:
“Dear Father, I’m lost and need to be found! I am dead in my sins! Come into my spirit and make me alive in Christ as a son of God! Lord Jesus, thank You for dying for me so that You could cleanse me, cover me, satisfy my hunger, and qualify me to feast with the Father in His house. Amen.”
In this podcast we’ll discuss a practice by God’s people seen throughout the entire Bible: the practice of calling on the name of the Lord. Let’s see what it is to call on the name of the Lord and how this practice can benefit us.
All Christians have at some point prayed to God. God hears these prayers, whether they’re silent, quiet, or loud. But the practice of calling, which is a form of praying, is definitely audible. In the Bible, the Hebrew word for call means to call out to, to cry unto, and the Greek word means to invoke a person, to call a person by name.
For example, when a little boy falls off a swing, he immediately cries out loud, “Mommy!” His mother hears and runs to him, wipes away his tears, and soothes him. Children cry out to their mothers when they’re hungry, tired, or scared. They cry because they’re helpless and they need to be cared for.
Similarly, by crying out to the Lord, we’re saying we’re hungry for Him, we need Him, and we can’t make it without Him.
When did people begin to practice audibly calling on the name of the Lord?
It might surprise you to know that Genesis 4:26 tells us the practice of calling on the Lord began long ago—by the third generation of mankind when Adam’s grandson Enosh was born: “And to Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time men began to call upon the name of Jehovah.”
But why did people begin to do this?
The meaning of the name Enosh gives us a clue. It means frail, mortal man. Because of mankind’s fall, man was frail and without God, the meaning of his existence. From the time of Enosh, men realized both the emptiness and vanity of life apart from God as well as their own fragility and mortality.
So they began to call upon the name of Jehovah, the Hebrew word for Lord. The meaning of the name Jehovah is I am that I am. He is the eternal God, the unique One who is. Everything and everyone else is not. Frail, mortal human beings realized they needed the eternal God.
Humanity’s condition is the same today as it was in Enosh’s time. We’re still frail and mortal, and life is often confusing, full of turmoil, and even overwhelming to us. We’re limited physically and psychologically. We need the eternal God.
Now let’s look at the benefits we receive when we call on the name of the Lord.
First, we’re saved. In the New Testament, the name of the Lord is Jesus. Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
When we believe and call on the name of the Lord Jesus, confessing Him with our mouth, we’re saved eternally from God’s judgment; we’re forgiven, justified in Christ, and born again with the divine life of God.
But that first time we call upon the name of Jesus to receive God’s salvation is just the beginning. After our initial salvation, by calling on Jesus we can continue to enjoy our full salvation in Christ. This includes daily salvation from many negative things, such as anger, depression, impatience, sadness, discouragement, and anxiety, to name a few.
How can calling on the Lord save us from these things? When we call, “Oh, Lord Jesus!” we’re not shouting random, meaningless words. That would be akin to yelling out words to relieve stress, as some do during a workout. Yelling unintelligible sounds or even inspiring words might release endorphins and temporarily make us feel better, but it doesn’t get to the root of our problems.
By calling on the Lord’s dear name, we contact the Lord who is dwelling in our spirit as the life-giving Spirit. And when we call on Jesus, He saves us by imparting more of His divine life into us.
The second benefit of calling on the name of the Lord is that we enjoy the riches of Christ. Romans 10:12 says the Lord of all is “rich to all who call upon Him.” Christ wants us to enjoy His riches in our daily lives.
Christ is rich to us when we call upon Him. He is rich to us as comfort, peace, love, hope, patience, kindness, endurance, longsuffering, strength, faith, and more—what riches are in His name!
The practice of calling upon the Lord as revealed in the Bible isn’t to say the Lord’s name as a lifeless ritual. It is our calling on the One we love, the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ.
Wherever we are and at any time, whether we call loudly or softly, just like a child gets the mother he calls out to, we get our living Lord. The Lord Jesus is always available—He’s just a call away!
Calling upon the Lord Jesus is like drawing refreshing water from a deep well that never runs dry. We receive Him as a fresh, satisfying supply. Our human spirit yearns for the pure riches we receive when we call on the Lord’s precious name.
John Newton, author of the well-known hymn “Amazing Grace,” was a person who enjoyed the riches in the name of Jesus. In another of his hymns, he speaks of his experience:
“How sweet the Name of Jesus sounds
In a believer’s ear!
It soothes his sorrow, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.”
To learn more about the practice of calling on the name of the Lord, we recommend reading Acts 2:21, note 1, in the Recovery Version. You can order a free copy of the New Testament Recovery Version at biblesforamerica.org.
We sometimes receive questions from our blog readers. After reading our blog post titled, “How Can I Be Sure I’m Really Saved?”, one reader wrote to us, concerned that they were not the kind of person that could be saved. We aren’t able to answer every question, but we responded to this one and we thought our response might be helpful to many others. So, here is our response, still in letter form.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for the question you sent in response to the post “How Can I Be Sure I’m Really Saved?” on our blog. You were concerned that you were not the kind of person that could be saved.
We’ll start by looking at what it means to be saved in the Bible. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone who believes into Him would not perish, but would have eternal life.”
This verse shows us God’s great love for all mankind, a love so great that He gave His only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us. Because of this, as the verse clearly states, every person in the world, each of whom is sinful and fallen, can be saved from perdition and receive eternal life by believing into Jesus Christ.
But a good question to ask here is, Why do people need to be saved?
To answer this, we have to see that the Bible tells us God created human beings as pure, sinless vessels to contain Him and to express Him. This was God’s intention for humanity. But, being deceived by Satan, mankind fell and was contaminated with something contrary to God’s nature—sin. Because God, who is holy, cannot enter into a sinful vessel, it seemed as if God could no longer carry out His purpose with humanity.
God could have given up on man, but instead, God became a man named Jesus Christ. Jesus died in our place to pay the penalty for all our sins and to redeem us back for God’s purpose. Jesus then resurrected, and in resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit, who is now available to people anytime and anywhere. So now, according to John 3:16, when any person believes into the Lord Jesus, the Son of God and Savior of the world, that person will not perish, but will have eternal life, the life of God.
This believing is more than merely believing Christ existed. Instead, it’s to open our heart and receive Him as our Savior. When we do this, we receive the forgiveness of our sins, and the blood Jesus shed on the cross washes us. By His death, we are redeemed back to God.
But that’s not all. When we believe into Christ, we also receive Christ into us as our new life and our new person; we are born again with the divine life of God. In this way, we are brought back to the purpose for which God created us. God in Christ comes to live in us, and He becomes our new source and our divine energy to put away our former life of sin in order to live a new life that pleases and expresses Him.
The Bible says in Romans 10:9, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”
You can be saved right now by praying this prayer with a sincere heart:
“Lord Jesus, I confess I am a sinner. Lord, thank You for loving me and dying on the cross for me. Forgive me of my sins and wash me with Your precious blood to make me a clean vessel. Lord, I believe into You, and I receive You right now. Lord Jesus, come into me and be my life. Thank you, Lord. Amen.”
We thank God that He loves each one of us and desires every man to be saved, and we hope you find this reply helpful.
Daily Bible reading is an excellent habit that can benefit every Christian in many ways. We’ll discuss three main benefits in this podcast.
When we read the Bible, we’re fed by God’s Word and supplied for our Christian life. Jesus mentioned this in Matthew 4:4 when He said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out through the mouth of God.”
Other verses in the Bible also make it clear that God’s Word is nourishment to us. For example, 1 Peter 2:2 says, “As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow unto salvation.”
And in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 15:16 says, “Your words were found and I ate them, and Your word became to me the gladness and joy of my heart.”
When we eat physical food, we’re supplied with the nutrients we need to live and be healthy. We get the energy to go to work, exercise, and spend time with family and friends. Conversely, when we skip a meal, we feel weak, tired, and even grumpy. And if we keep missing meals, we become susceptible to even greater problems, like illness.
Similarly, when we eat spiritual food we’re supplied to live our Christian life. But when we’re away from God’s Word for a while, we can become spiritually weak, tired, and “grumpy,” or, unable to handle difficulties well. We become more susceptible to temptation, doubts, and other kinds of spiritual sickness. We simply don’t have the means to cope with the many challenges that come into our lives as believers.
It’s very important, therefore, that we’re supplied by reading and feeding on God’s Word every day. To maintain a healthy and even joyful Christian life, we need daily Bible reading to receive the spiritual nourishment in God’s Word for us.
What if we don’t understand what we’re reading? We may wonder whether we should keep reading the Bible. Or maybe we’re discouraged because by the afternoon we’ve forgotten what we read in the morning. Should we keep on reading, even when we don’t remember much?
The answer is, yes, definitely. This is because a great benefit of reading God’s Word is that it washes us.
Ephesians 5:26 says, “That He might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of the water in the word.”
“Her” in this verse refers to the church, which is composed of all the believers in Christ, and “the washing of the water in the word” indicates something different from the washing of our sins by the Lord’s blood. So what is this washing?
Here’s what note 3 on this verse in the Recovery Version says about the washing of the water in the Word:
“The washing of the water here is different from the washing of the redeeming blood of Christ. The redeeming blood washes away our sins (1 John 1:7; Rev. 7:14), whereas the water of life washes away the blemishes of the natural life of our old man, such as the ‘spot or wrinkle or any such things’ mentioned in v. 27. In separating and sanctifying the church, the Lord first washes away our sins with His blood (Heb. 13:12) and then washes away our natural blemishes with His life. We are now in such a washing process, that the church may be holy and without blemish (v. 27).”
We may understand that we need the washing of our sins by the Lord’s blood, but we also need to realize that we need the washing away of our natural life by His life. How do we get this washing of life? The washing water of life is in God’s Word. So even if we don’t remember or fully understand what we read, our daily Bible reading still washes us from so many negative things.
Finally, as Christians, our faith is based not on our imaginations or concepts but on the Word of God, so it’s critical that we all know what God’s Word says. By reading the Word regularly, we’ll eventually read through the entire Bible and gain a basic knowledge of God and the things of God. Gaining this basic knowledge is like learning our ABCs. If we don’t learn the letters of the alphabet, it’s impossible for us to read or write. To understand even the simplest book or write a letter, we first have to learn our ABCs.
Knowing what’s in the Bible is like knowing our spiritual ABCs. Becoming familiar with the words, facts, stories, and expressions in the Bible forms in us the building blocks the Lord can use to show us more of the truth in His Word. This helps us to know Him in a deeper way and allows Him to speak to us more and more through the Word.
God has given us a powerful and wonderful gift in His Word. By reading it, we’re not only spiritually educated but also washed and nourished within.
When the love of the Lord Jesus first touched us and we repented and confessed His name, a previously unknown joy filled our hearts. What a joy it was to be forgiven and born again! God wants us to continue to be joyful in His wonderful salvation for our whole life. And this isn’t only for a select few; it’s normal for all God’s children, as we read in 1 Peter 1:8: “You exult with joy that is unspeakable and full of glory.”
We can never lose our eternal salvation, but we have to admit that at times we lose the joy of our salvation. Let’s talk about two reasons why that is, how we can recover our joy in the Lord, and what habits we can develop to have a joyful daily life.
First and foremost, the sins we commit cause us to lose the joy of our salvation. Although we’re saved, all of us have sinned, failed the Lord, or disobeyed Him. And after we sin, we feel something’s wrong; we sense a barrier has come between us and the Lord.
Isaiah 59:2 tells us, “Your iniquities have become a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.”
Our sins separate us from God because God is righteous; He can’t tolerate sin. This is why even a small transgression creates a barrier between God and us. Big or small, our sins cause us to lose the joy of our salvation.
Second, grieving the Spirit who indwells us also causes us to lose the joy of our salvation.
Romans 8:9 tells us clearly, “the Spirit of God dwells in you.” When we received the Lord Jesus as our Savior, He not only redeemed us, but He also came to dwell in us as the Spirit. Now we no longer live alone; we have another Person living in us, and He has His own thoughts, feelings, and preferences. Whenever we go along with the Lord who lives inside of us, He’s happy. And when He’s happy, we’re happy.
Paul said in Ephesians 4:30, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed unto the day of redemption.” Note 1 in the New Testament Recovery Version explains what it means to grieve the Holy Spirit:
“To grieve the Holy Spirit is to displease Him. The Holy Spirit abides in us forever (John 14:16-17), never leaving us. Hence, He is grieved when we do not walk according to Him (Rom. 8:4), that is, when we do not live according to the principle of reality with grace in the details of our daily walk.”
Let’s say, for example, we want to go to a certain place. But when we think about going, we feel uneasy. This feeling inside tells us that the Lord doesn’t want to go there. Though we try to reason to ourselves that it’s okay, the uneasy feeling won’t go away; the Lord Jesus in us simply doesn’t want to go there. But instead of agreeing with the Lord and obeying Him not to go, we go anyway. By not walking according to Him, we grieve Him and make Him unhappy. And it’s impossible for us to be happy when He’s grieved.
How can we recover and maintain the joy of our salvation?
Our joy in the Christian life can at times seem so elusive. We may even find ourselves crying out as David did in Psalm 51:12, “Lord, restore to me the joy of Your salvation!” What can we do to recover our joy in these times, and how can we avoid losing it in the first place?
Just as a delicate flower is maintained and nurtured by the proper soil, water, and sunlight, our joy is preserved by the right conditions. The following four healthy habits can provide the right conditions to maintain our joy.
First, we should confess our sins quickly.
Whether our sin is a small transgression or a serious offense, we must confess it to the Lord. This includes grieving the Spirit. Whenever our conscience makes us aware that we’ve sinned, we shouldn’t wait to confess our sin to the Lord. First John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” We confess, and God is righteous to forgive us and cleanse us. The problem of sin is dealt with and our fellowship with Him is restored, and we can enjoy the joy of salvation.
Learning to confess without delay is a good habit to develop. There’s no reason to wait. The sooner we confess our sins and failures to the Lord, the sooner we can enjoy sweet fellowship with Him once more.
Second, we can take in God’s Word as our spiritual food daily.
We all know how grumpy and irritable we can be when we haven’t eaten and are physically hungry and undernourished. We experience the same thing spiritually when we haven’t been eating the spiritual food of God’s Word. If we spend time daily to delight ourselves in the Lord in His Word, the Word we feed on becomes the gladness and joy of our heart, supplying us throughout our day.
Eating physical food is an enjoyment to us, but eating the Word of God brings us true enjoyment and inner satisfaction. A daily habit of taking in God’s Word as our spiritual nourishment will help us maintain our joy in God’s salvation.
Third, we can speak to the Lord in prayer all the time.
We don’t need to kneel down and solemnly recite a particular prayer when we pray to God. We can simply open our hearts and instantly speak to the Lord Jesus in a personal way. Any time of day or night, we can talk to Him. In John 16:24 the Lord Jesus told us “ask and you shall receive, that your joy may be made full.” Speaking to Him in prayer about everything brings us joy. We can even pray by simply calling upon the name of the Lord.
By opening to the Lord in prayer, not only at set times or during major life events, but each day and throughout the day, we strengthen our loving relationship with Him. By staying in fellowship with Him, we maintain our joy.
Finally, we should fellowship with other Christians regularly.
Having fellowship with other Christians also helps us maintain our joy in the Lord, since one of the joys of the Christian life is for believers to come together with others who love Jesus.
Concerning the believers’ fellowship, in 1 John 1:3-4 the apostle John showed us that genuine Christian fellowship is not a duty or a ritual but a matter of joy, even full joy: “That which we have seen and heard we report also to you that you also may have fellowship with us…And these things we write that our joy may be made full.”
Gathering with other believers to read the Bible, speak about Christ, and praise the Lord is a highlight of our Christian experience that refreshes us, encourages us, and makes our joy full.
May we be those who endeavor to build up these healthy habits in our daily life. By confessing our sins, feeding on God’s Word, speaking to the Lord in prayer, and getting together to fellowship with other Christians, we can maintain an overflowing joy in our Christian lives.
It’s interesting how we can read the Bible, even repeatedly, and miss something important. For example, we probably remember that the Bible mentions the Holy Spirit many times, but what about the human spirit? It may surprise you to know that the human spirit is mentioned scores of times in both the Old and New Testaments.
To see the place our human spirit occupies in God’s purpose and in our Christian life can be a life-changing discovery, enlightening our understanding and leading us into a real and living relationship with the Lord.
In previous podcasts, we’ve talked about how God created us as a three-part being with a spirit, soul, and body, and what the difference between the soul and the spirit is. In this podcast, we’ll focus specifically on our spirit, the deepest part of our being and the key to all spiritual experience.
First, let’s consider the significance of the spirit in God’s eyes.
Zechariah 12:1 says, “Thus declares Jehovah, who stretches forth the heavens and lays the foundations of the earth and forms the spirit of man within him.”
We can easily appreciate the awe-inspiring, God-created heavens and earth. But this verse shows us that the human spirit is equally awe-inspiring, ranking it on the same level as the heavens and the earth.
Furthermore, Zechariah 12:1 doesn’t just say in a general way that God “formed man,” but in a particular way that God “formed the spirit of man within him.” This indicates that the spirit of man is the most essential part of man, the most crucial part of our being.
Just this one verse shows us how important our human spirit is. So why is our spirit so crucial to God? Let’s look at how and why God formed our spirit within us.
Of the creation of man, Genesis 2:7 says, “Jehovah God formed man with the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”
In Hebrew, the original language of this verse, the word for breath is neshama. This same word neshama is used again in Proverbs 20:27, but there it’s translated as spirit: “The spirit of man is the lamp of Jehovah.”
From Genesis 2:7 and Proverbs 20:27, we can see that God’s breath, which He breathed into man, formed the spirit of man.
In His creation of the universe, God stretched forth the heavens and laid the foundation of the earth, both great acts. But concerning His creation of man, God formed the spirit of man within him, breathing into him His own breath. This shows us the precious worth of our spirit and the kind of relationship God desired to have with the human beings He created.
Of all God’s creatures, only man has a spirit. Why is this?
We have to remember that God created man because He had a purpose He wanted to fulfill. What God desired wasn’t to have beings that would worship Him objectively, in an outward way; He already had myriads of angels for that. Rather, God wanted human beings, made in His image, that He could impart Himself into, share His divine life with, and become everything to. By possessing the life of God, mankind could then express Him.
To impart Himself into us, God had to create us with more than a body and a soul; He had to create within us a special part with three particular abilities—our spirit.
Because our spirit is God-created and God-designed with these three particular abilities—to contact, receive, and contain Him—God can be our life in a subjective way. We can experience Him, live Him, and even express Him in our daily life. Let’s take a closer look at these three abilities.
First, our human spirit can contact God, who is Spirit. John 4:24 tells us, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit.”
The capital “S” Spirit, the divine Spirit, is worshipped in the lowercase “s” spirit, the human spirit. The true worship God wants from us doesn’t involve performing particular rituals or keeping certain traditions. True worship is to contact God the Spirit in our spirit in a living way.
We can use a radio to illustrate our spirit’s ability to contact God. Although we can’t see radio waves, they’re all around us, and many radio waves convey music. But to perceive or apprehend that music, we must use a device that’s capable of contacting those radio waves. A toaster doesn’t have this capability, but a radio does, for inside its case is a specially designed receiver for contacting radio waves. When we turn on a radio, we apprehend the radio waves as beautiful music.
God the Spirit is real. We can’t see Him with our eyes, but our human spirit can contact and apprehend Him. We can contact Him any time throughout our day. Especially when we call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, we “tune” the radio of our spirit to contact Him and even enjoy Him as a refreshing drink.
Second, our human spirit can receive God.
God wants to impart Himself as the divine life into us, and because we have a spirit, we can receive Him. When we receive this eternal life of God, we’re born again. John 3:6 tells us, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
Again we see the Spirit of God and our human spirit. When we believe in and receive Jesus Christ as our Savior, we’re redeemed by the death of Christ on the cross for us, and we’re reborn by receiving the Spirit with the life of God in our spirit. Our being born again is once-for-all. But our receiving of God continues even after we’re reborn.
To illustrate our need to receive more life after we’re born again, we can use the example of a baby. A baby is born once physically, but afterward it needs to continually receive life-sustaining supply, such as air, food, and water, in order to grow and develop.
Similarly, although being born of the Spirit in our spirit is a one-time occurrence, we must continue to receive more of Christ as life every day so we can grow in His life. To receive more of Him, daily with our spirit we can breathe Him in by prayer, eat of Him in the Word, and drink of Him by calling upon His name.
Third, our human spirit can contain God.
A cup is a vessel designed to contain liquid; we are vessels designed to contain God Himself. First Corinthians 15:45 says, “The last Adam [that is, Christ] became a life-giving Spirit.”
Our Savior Jesus Christ lived a perfect human life, died on the cross, and resurrected from the dead. In resurrection Christ is now the life-giving Spirit. The moment we received Jesus Christ as our Savior, He as the life-giving Spirit came into our spirit to live in us forever. Our spirit now contains the Spirit!
But we contain Christ in our spirit in a much more wonderful way than a cup contains liquid. Whereas a cup and the liquid it contains remain two separate things, we contain Christ in the way of being one with Him. First Corinthians 6:17 tells us, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.”
The two, the Spirit and our spirit, are no longer separate and apart. They are mingled together as one spirit. As vessels containing Christ, we are one spirit with the Lord Himself. And now we can enjoy our oneness with Christ and live by Him in our daily life.
Our God-formed and God-designed human spirit is truly wonderful. Without it, God couldn’t impart Himself into us as the divine life, and we couldn’t experience Him inwardly as our life. He could only be an objective God outside of us. But with our spirit, we can contact, receive, and contain God, not just initially at our salvation, but every day for our whole life.
We don’t have to stumble through life, trying somehow to find the Lord each day. If we know our spirit, we know exactly where He is! We can locate the Lord Jesus any time of any day at His permanent address—our spirit. Second Timothy 4:22 tells us, “The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you.”
No one can be nearer or more available to us than the Lord Jesus is. This means at any time, in any place, under any circumstance, we can contact Him and fellowship with Him in our spirit. No matter how low or dry we may feel at times, we can receive more of Him as life, again and again, enlivening and refreshing us. We can turn away from everything else and turn within to our spirit where Christ is to enjoy Him. Praise God for our spirit!
People, even Christians, have many concepts about what the church is. But what is the church exactly? Is the church a building Christians go to on Sundays to worship? Is the church an organization of people who believe in Jesus Christ? To discover what God’s thought is concerning the church, we must come to the Bible.
While we can’t cover this enormous matter in a single podcast, we’ll begin to look at what the church is according to God’s Word.
A good principle in reading the Bible is to pay special attention to the first mention of a matter. This sets the stage for understanding that matter in the rest of Scripture. The first mention of the word church in the entire Bible is in Matthew 16:18.
In this passage, Jesus brings His disciples outside Jerusalem and asks them who they think He is (v. 15). Peter responds by declaring, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). Jesus tells Peter that he received this revelation from God (v. 17). After such an important revelation, we might think the Lord would speak more about it. But instead, as soon as Jesus confirms this revelation, He responds by declaring: “Upon this rock I will build My church” (v. 18).
The revelation of the church here is of such importance to Christ that He pairs it with the revelation of who He is. So we need to find out, what is the church Christ reveals here in Matthew?
Let’s look at the word church in the original language of the New Testament. The Greek word for church in this verse is ekklesia, which means out-calling, or assembly of called out ones. So the church, the ekklesia, is the assembly of all people who have been called out of the world by God. The church isn’t a physical building; it’s a group of people.
But what makes a person one of these people?
Listen to 1 Corinthians 1:2:
“To the church of God which is in Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, the called saints.”
In this verse, Paul addresses his letter “to the church of God,” and in apposition, “to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, the called saints.” Note 3 on this verse in the New Testament Recovery Version explains these two phrases:
“To the church of God equals to those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus. This strongly indicates that the church is a composition of the saints and that the saints are the constituents of the church. The two should not be considered separate entities. Individually, we are the saints; corporately, we are the church.”
Both phrases refer to the same thing but have a different emphasis. The phrase the church of God tells us Paul is addressing the ekklesia, the assembly of called out people, and the phrase those who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus tells us something about those called out people.
The people who comprise the church are not simply a group of people who believe the same doctrines or have the same ideas and preferences. They aren’t even a group of people who have decided to meet together to worship God. No, the people who compose the church have been sanctified, that is, made holy. How are they sanctified? The verse says they are sanctified in Christ Jesus. Let’s look at the note on this phrase in the New Testament Recovery Version to see what it means:
“In Christ means in the element and sphere of Christ. Christ is the element and sphere that separated us, made us holy, unto God when we believed into Him, that is, when we were brought into an organic union with Him through our faith in Him.”
How wonderful! It’s in Christ that we’re made holy, that is, separated unto God, and thereby become constituents of the church. So the church isn’t composed of people who have attained to a certain standard or who have fulfilled any outward rule or regulation. The church is composed only of people who have received Christ Jesus through faith in Him!
When we receive Christ as our Savior, we are reborn with the divine, eternal life of God. This life, which is just Christ Himself, is the sole qualification for our membership in the church. There’s no other criterion. The church isn’t a club or an organization of like-minded individuals that we can join. It isn’t even a group of people who are knowledgeable about the Christian religion. The church is the assembly of all the people from all of time who have believed in Christ and received the life of God; therefore, we must be born into the church through our regeneration.
We’re used to hearing things like, “Where do you go to church?” or “I went to this or that church on Sunday.” But according to the Bible, all those who have received Christ Jesus are the church. We are part of this wonderful, important ekklesia that Christ values so highly. Thank and praise the Lord for all He’s done to redeem us and regenerate us so we could become members of the church!
We’ve only touched on what the church is in a simple way in this podcast. Keep an eye out for more podcasts on this enormous and rich topic in the future!
Have you ever thought, “Why do I experience so much unrest? Why do I feel as if I’m not at peace with myself?”
Although you try different ways to find a solution, the inner peace you yearn for seems unattainable. We’ve all felt this disquiet within, regardless of our background, education, or social status. Why is that? The source of this feeling is rooted in a fundamental problem—we’re not at peace with God. And when we’re not at peace with God, it’s impossible for us to be at peace with ourselves.
The disharmony between us and God is the result of sin. Satan, God’s enemy, deceived and poisoned mankind with his evil nature of sin. And although God is truly loving, He’s also righteous and holy. He can’t simply ignore sin.
We may think, “I’m not such a bad person.” But can any of us claim we’ve never had a sinful thought, spoken a lie, or done anything we felt guilty about? This is evidence that sin affects every one of us and makes us contrary to God. And in opposition to God, we reject Him, profane Him, and even dare to say, “There is no God.” Sin estranges us from God to such an extent that we become enemies of God.
Perhaps we think that by doing good deeds we can offset our sins. But that’s impossible. The poison of sin automatically causes all our thoughts, words, and actions to be something against God. The Bible tells us plainly, “There is none righteous, not even one.” Our being is fundamentally in conflict with God.
For us to be reconciled to God and have peace, the conflict must be resolved; the enormous problem of sin must be removed. Yet we’re helpless to bring this about.
So God Himself did something. Although we were His enemies, even hating Him, God never ceased to love us. Out of His immense love for us, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross for the sins of all mankind. The Bible says, “God commends His own love to us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus shed His blood for us so our sins could be forgiven. His death fully resolves the conflict between us and God. If we accept Jesus as our Savior, the Bible tells us that we enemies are reconciled to God through the death of His Son. Our sins are forgiven, God welcomes us gladly, and in place of turmoil, our heart is filled with deep peace and the love of God.
Are you at peace with God? You no longer have to be His enemy. God loves you and longs for you to be reconciled to Him. Jesus died for you to make this possible. This is an accomplished fact. But for it to be your personal reality, you must accept what He did for you. Simply repent, that is, turn your heart to God. Confess your sin to Him, and accept the Lord Jesus as your Savior by praying:
“Lord Jesus, I repent. I confess I’m a sinner, and I’ve been Your enemy. Forgive me of my sins. Lord Jesus, thank You for loving me and dying on the cross for me. I receive You as my Savior right now. Thank You for reconciling me to God and bringing me peace with God. Amen.”
We need to eat food to sustain our physical life and to keep us healthy. But just because we have to eat doesn’t mean it’s a tedious chore. In fact, eating is an enjoyment to us, especially when the food is tasty.
Similarly, the Bible tells us that God’s Word sustains us and keeps us spiritually healthy. But how do we feel about reading the Word of God? Is our time in God’s Word a dry, tedious duty we must fulfill? Or is it a time of enjoyment and nourishment? God desires that our time in His Word would be not a duty but a delight.
God doesn’t want us to know Him just mentally in our head. Many verses throughout the Bible indicate God actually wants us to taste Him in our heart through His Word. Let’s look at a couple of them.
Psalm 119:103 says, “How sweet are Your words to my taste! Sweeter than honey to my mouth!”
And 1 Peter 2:2-3 says, “As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow unto salvation, if you have tasted that the Lord is good.”
Since God’s words come out of His very being, they carry the flavor of God. The verses we just read tell us that the flavor of God in His Word is sweet and good.
Many verses in the Bible reveal that God can be enjoyed in His Word, so if the Word is tasteless to us, the problem can’t be with the Word. It must be with the way we come to it.
Suppose someone is invited to a feast. When he arrives, he sees many tasty and delicious dishes. But he didn’t come to eat the feast. Instead, he came to study the food and gather information about each dish. He even came hoping the host would give a lecture about food.
Obviously, this guest won’t enjoy much of the feast, not because the food isn’t enjoyable but because he came with the wrong intention. He has to come with the intention of eating, tasting, and enjoying each dish. No matter how much he learns about the food, he can’t taste it if he doesn’t eat it.
Since the Word of God is a real feast set before us by God, how do we come to it with the intention of enjoying Him?
First, we should come to the Bible with our heart turned to and hungry for God.
Our heart is the gateway of our whole being. If our heart is turned away from the Lord, we won’t see Him or taste Him in His Word. We need to come to the Word not with a cold mind but with a warm and open heart.
Praying a little before we even open our Bible helps warm and turn our hearts to the Lord. We might pray, “Lord Jesus, I love You. I turn from other things to You. I come to You in Your Word not out of duty but because I love You. I’m hungry for You, Lord. I open my heart up to You.”
Second, we should come to the Bible to eat Christ by using our spirit.
If we approach the Bible as if it were a textbook, we’ll miss receiving nourishing life from God’s Word. We may get some objective knowledge about God or learn something interesting, but we won’t taste the Lord’s goodness or sweetness. As we illustrated previously, we experience the taste of food not by studying it, but by eating it.
We must consider God’s Word as spiritual food for us to eat. The Lord Jesus told us in John 6 not that He is the textbook for us to study but that He is the living bread for us to eat, and that we must eat Him in order to live by Him. Of course He didn’t mean we must eat His physical flesh, for in verse 63 He said, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”
Since His words are spirit and life, we must use our human spirit to touch the Spirit in the Word in order to receive life. Besides using our mind to read the Word, we must use our spirit to go further to touch the Spirit. Only our spirit can contact the life-giving Spirit.
As we come to the Bible we can pray, “Lord Jesus, thank You, Your words are spirit and life. I turn within to my spirit to contact You as the Spirit in the Word. Feed me, Lord, with Yourself. May Your Word be the bread of life to me.”
Third, we should come to the Bible to focus not on ourselves but on the Lord’s wonderful Person and all He is.
If we read the Bible mainly to get help on how to behave, how to live a good life, or how to improve ourselves, we’ll miss eating and tasting the Lord. Physically speaking, it’s food that changes us and makes us grow. Similarly, we are truly changed and even spontaneously transformed to the image of Christ not by outwardly improving our behavior but by inwardly receiving nourishment as we eat and enjoy Christ in His Word.
A simple prayer can focus us on Christ in His Word: “Lord Jesus, I focus on You. I want to see and enjoy Your wonderful Person in Your Word. Show me more of Yourself, Lord.”
Even short prayers can help us turn our heart, eat the Lord as food in the Word, and focus on Christ; they can make all the difference to our experience of tasting God in His Word.
When we taste how sweet and how good God is in His Word, we’ll gladly come back for more because we experience a joy beyond words. Our daily time in the Word won’t be a dry chore. Instead, the words of Jeremiah 15:16 will be our testimony:
“Your words were found and I ate them, and Your word became to me the gladness and joy of my heart.”
Have you ever been troubled by questions like these: Can I lose my salvation? Can I be “unsaved” if I do something wrong or if I sin?
It’s extremely important for us believers to be clear about several fundamental matters. One of these is having the assurance that we’re saved once we believe in Christ. Another fundamental matter we must be clear about is the security of our salvation. Just how secure is our salvation? What safeguards it? Does its security depend on us? Can we lose our salvation?
In this podcast, we’ll discuss five points regarding the security of our salvation.
First, we need to see that God initiated our salvation, and His calling us is irreversible.
Not one of us initiated our salvation. Ephesians 1:4-5 shows us that God initiated our salvation before we knew anything about salvation, before we were even born: “Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and without blemish before Him in love, predestinating us unto sonship through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will.”
Our salvation didn’t start with us; it started with God. And Romans 11:29 gives us this reassuring word: “For the gracious gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
Irrevocable! This means our God-initiated salvation is irreversible, permanent, final, and unalterable.
Next, we should realize that God’s love and grace are eternal.
We may withhold our love from others if they don’t love us in return, or we may have certain conditions we want others to meet to gain our love. But not God. He loved us even when we were His enemies, dead in offenses and sins. First John 4:10 tells us, “Herein is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins.”
This is how great God’s love is for us. In fact, God’s love for us is eternal. In Jeremiah 31:3 God says, “Indeed I have loved you with an eternal love.” And God’s grace to us is also eternal. Second Timothy 1:9 says that God “has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to His own purpose and grace, which was given to us in Christ Jesus before the times of the ages.”
God gave His grace to us before the times of the ages, that is, in eternity past. Both His love and His grace to us are eternal. Just as we can’t lose God’s love or grace, we can’t lose our salvation. God’s love for us, God’s grace to us, and God’s salvation of us are all eternal.
Third, we need to recognize that God is righteous in regard to our salvation.
God’s salvation surely arises from His love for us. But it is also a matter of His righteousness. Our sins violate God’s righteousness, and we should pay the penalty for them.
But Christ fulfilled that demand of God’s righteousness by paying the penalty for us. He died in our place for our sins, bearing them in His body on the cross. Because Christ paid our debt on the cross, God must righteously acknowledge that our debt was paid; He can no longer demand that we pay it.
As an illustration, let’s say we violate a traffic law and a police officer gives us a ticket. But we have a problem—we can’t pay the fine. However, someone pays the fine for us. Since that person paid the fine, a judge can’t require us to pay it again. The judge has to acknowledge that the fine was paid.
The righteous God can never take away our salvation because our debt was fully paid, once and for all, by Christ’s death for us. We were forever redeemed by His precious blood.
The fourth item regarding the security of our salvation is that God begot us with His eternal life.
When we were saved, we were born again with the life of God. John 1:12-13 tells us, “As many as received Him [the Lord Jesus], to them He [that is, God] gave the authority to become children of God, to those who believe into His name, who were begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
Once we’re born of God as His children and receive His eternal life, we can never be “unborn,” even if we do things that aren’t pleasing to God. The life we received from God is eternal, and our life relationship with God is also eternal.
To illustrate, let’s say our child’s behavior isn’t pleasing to us. While this makes us unhappy, it can’t cancel or undo the fact that our child shares our human life. His bad behavior can’t annul the fact that he is our child, begotten with our human life.
We are the children of God, born with His eternal life, and nothing can undo that.
Finally, we need to see that God holds us in His hands.
John 10:28-29 tells us we’re held in the strongest hands in the universe: “I give to them eternal life, and they shall by no means perish forever, and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of My Father’s hand.”
No one, not even Satan, can snatch us away from these hands! Our salvation cannot be more secure.
The verses in these five points show us definitely that our salvation is eternally secure, safeguarded by God Himself. We must be absolutely clear about this. Understanding the verses related to each point will help us to be clear that we can never lose our salvation.
But what if we sin?
We should never think that because our salvation is eternally secure, that fact gives us a license to sin. Although we can never lose our salvation, we shouldn’t be careless about sin. When we sin, we do suffer the consequences. We don’t lose our salvation, but we do lose our joy because sin interrupts our fellowship with the Lord. And when our fellowship with the Lord is interrupted, we’re automatically on a downward slope.
So what should we do when we sin? When the Lord makes us aware of any sin through the speaking of our conscience, we should confess it to Him so we can be forgiven and cleansed from that sin. We shouldn’t let unconfessed sins remain on our conscience; we should keep short accounts with the Lord. Daily we should be in the habit of confessing our sins in order to maintain our fellowship with the Lord and our enjoyment of Him, but never forgetting that our salvation is eternally secure.
Although we believed in the Lord Jesus and received Him as our Savior, at times we may have wondered, “How do I know I’m saved?” Sometimes we feel we’re definitely saved; at other times, we’re not so sure. When we’re tossed back and forth between certainty and uncertainty, it’s difficult for us to progress in our Christian life.
But we don’t have to be unsure, since God provides three clear ways for us to have the full assurance of salvation. In this podcast we’ll discuss these ways.
The first way we can know we’re saved is that the Bible says so. We have to realize that the Bible isn’t an ordinary book; it’s the speaking of the living God Himself. And God does not lie, so we can absolutely believe, trust, and rely on His Word.
First John 5:13 says this: “I have written these things to you that you may know that you have eternal life, to you who believe into the name of the Son of God.”
This verse shows us God doesn’t want us to be unsure about our salvation. We have something in writing—the Word of God—and by these written words we can know we’re really saved. God wants us to be assured of our salvation by His written Word.
Note 1 on this verse in the New Testament Recovery Version speaks about the assurance of salvation we can have through God’s Word:
“The written words of the Scriptures are the assurance to the believers, who believe into the name of the Son of God, that they have eternal life. Our believing to receive eternal life is the fact; the words of the Holy Writings are the assurance concerning this fact—they are the title deed to our eternal salvation. By them we are assured and have the pledge that as long as we believe into the name of the Son of God, we have eternal life.”
We have a pledge concerning our salvation! Our “title deed” is the Word of God.
John 3:16 is another word we can be assured by: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that everyone who believes into Him would not perish, but would have eternal life.”
This word tells us that when we believe into Jesus Christ, we’re saved; we have eternal life and we will not perish. We’re saved when believe in Him and receive Him as our Savior. This is God’s unchanging and reliable Word.
Relying on the facts in God’s Word, as opposed to our own feelings or deductions, is one strong way we can be assured we’re really saved.
A second way we can be sure we’re saved is through the Spirit.
God gave us two wonderful gifts: the Bible, which is something outside of us, and His Spirit, who is inside us. Both testify that when we believe in Jesus, we’re saved eternally.
When we were born again by believing in Jesus, the Spirit came into our spirit to live in us forever.
Romans 8:16 tells us clearly of these two spirits: “The Spirit Himself witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God.”
The Holy Spirit witnesses deep within us, in our spirit, that we are truly saved. Even if we doubt this and say, “I don’t think I’m a child of God,” the Spirit within us witnesses to confirm that we are.
One reason we may wonder whether we’re saved may be because we don’t know how to experience this witnessing of the Holy Spirit with our spirit. Instead, we may rely on our fluctuating feelings or our doubting mind to assure us we’re saved. But the key to experiencing this witnessing is to realize that it’s with our spirit, which is deeper than our emotions or our mind.
To help us experience this witnessing of the Spirit, listen to 1 Corinthians 12:3: “No one can say, Jesus is Lord! except in the Holy Spirit.”
Note 3 on this verse explains how saying, “Jesus is Lord” is crucial:
“This indicates that when we say with a proper spirit, ‘Jesus is Lord!’ we are in the Holy Spirit. Hence, to call on the Lord Jesus is the way to participate in, to enjoy, and to experience the Holy Spirit.”
Whenever we’re doubting our salvation, we can say aloud, “Jesus is Lord!” As we declare this, we’re in the Holy Spirit, not in our questioning mind or our fluctuating emotions, and the Spirit in our spirit witnesses and assures us that we most certainly are children of God.
In addition to the Word of God and the Spirit in us, we can know we’re saved because we have a genuine love for our fellow Christians, even for those who are very different from ourselves.
This love isn’t something we had before we were saved, and it’s not something we manufacture after we’re saved. It’s the spontaneous result of our receiving the life of God at our regeneration.
The apostle John in 1 John 3:14 said, “We know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brothers.”
Note 1 explains the relationship of life and love in this verse:
“Death is of the devil, God’s enemy, Satan, signified by the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which brings death; life is of God, the source of life, signified by the tree of life, which issues in life (Gen. 2:9, 16-17). Death and life are not only of two sources, Satan and God; they are also two essences, two elements, and two spheres. To pass out of death into life is to pass out of the source, the essence, the element, and the sphere of death into the source, the essence, the element, and the sphere of life. This took place in us at our regeneration. We know this, i.e., have the inner consciousness of it, because we love the brothers. Love (the love of God) toward the brothers is strong evidence of this. Faith in the Lord is the way for us to pass out of death into life; love toward the brothers is the evidence that we have passed out of death into life. To have faith is to receive the eternal life; to love is to live by the eternal life and express it.”
This love in us for our brothers in the Lord is evidence to us that we’re genuinely saved.
Once we receive Christ as our Savior, we have such wonderful assurances of our salvation in the written word of the Bible, the Spirit witnessing with our spirit, and a love for our brothers in the Lord. Thank God we can know with certainty that we’re saved eternally and that we’re truly God’s children! With this assurance as our solid foundation, we can have a joyful Christian life and go on to experience Christ and grow in Him.
The Lamb of God is a precious name referring to the Lord Jesus. Perhaps you’ve heard it before, or remember reading it in the Word. Many of us may have sung it in Christian songs and hymns to praise the Lord as the Lamb of God. To increase our appreciation of our Lord Jesus as the Lamb of God, in this podcast we’ll dive into the meaning and importance of this profound name of Christ in the Bible.
To understand the meaning of the name Lamb of God, we have to go back to the beginning in Genesis. After God created Adam and Eve, He put them in the garden of Eden, and in the garden was the tree of life. God wanted Adam and Eve to eat of that tree, which represented the eternal, divine life of God. God desired to share His life with them and be everything to them. By partaking of that tree, they would be made one with God, He would become their life inwardly, and they would express Him outwardly in their living.
God also specifically warned Adam and Eve not to eat of another tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He told them that if they did, they would surely die, since that tree represented Satan as the source of death to mankind. Sadly, we know that Satan seduced Adam and Eve to eat of that tree. They disobeyed God, and by eating of that tree, they were poisoned with the sinful nature of Satan.
Since God is righteous and holy, He couldn’t simply overlook their disobedience; God cannot tolerate sin. And as Romans 6:23 says, “The wages of sin is death.” They had to die. But God didn’t want the human beings He created to die. So what could He do?
Instead of killing them, God made Adam and Eve coats out of the skin of an animal to cover them. Based on the further revelation in the Old Testament, the animal was probably a lamb.
That lamb took their place and died for them. So instead of Adam and Eve being killed, that lamb was killed. Instead of their blood being shed, that lamb’s blood was shed. A guiltless lamb died for them, the guilty ones. And because it died for them, God could clothe Adam and Eve with the skin of that substituting lamb. When God looked at Adam and Eve then, He didn’t see their sinful condition; He saw the lamb.
From then on throughout the Old Testament times, a person could not come to God without offering a lamb. What was required was that a lamb be sacrificed to die in the offerer’s place and to shed its blood for the sins of the offerer. The death and the shedding of the blood of a lamb was the only way sinful human beings could be accepted by God. Hebrews 9:22 tells us clearly, “Without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”
But the lamb the Old Testament people of God offered up was only a temporary solution, a picture of the coming of Jesus as the real Lamb of God who would take away His believers’ sins for all time.
In the Old Testament, every lamb offered up was the lamb of a man, prepared by the offerer. But in John 1:29 in the New Testament, when John the Baptist saw Jesus he declared this: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
John the Baptist declared that Jesus was the Lamb of God. Jesus was the real Lamb purposely prepared by God Himself to take away the sins of the entire world. As the uniquely spotless and sinless One, Jesus alone was fully qualified to die for fallen mankind, shed His precious blood, and take away the sins of the world.
How did Jesus take away the sins of the world?
God so desired to bring fallen mankind back to Himself that He provided Jesus, the Son of God, to be the Lamb of God to bear our sins for us. Although Jesus was the Son of God with divinity, through incarnation He put on a body of flesh and blood so He could die for us.
The account of the Gospels tells us that it was on the cross that Jesus, the guiltless One, bore our sins, died, and shed His blood for us, the guilty sinners. There, God put all the sins of all mankind on Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb of God. Isaiah 53:5 says, “He was wounded because of our transgressions; He was crushed because of our iniquities; the chastening for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we have been healed.” Consider how heavy the load of sin that was laid upon our dear Savior!
While Jesus was bearing the sins of the whole world, God judged Him as our substitute. This is why at a certain point, Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” God had to forsake Jesus on the cross, not because Jesus was sinful but because He was taking the place of all of us sinners.
God’s righteousness required the shedding of the blood of Jesus for us to have forgiveness of sins. Oh, our dear Lord Jesus bore our sins on the cross, suffered death for us, and shed His own blood for us! His blood washes away our sins and brings us back to God. Jesus, the Lamb of God, accomplished a perfect and eternal redemption for us.
When we realize the meaning of Jesus being the Lamb of God, how can we help but love Him with all our hearts?
In Genesis we saw man’s fall and a lamb slain for Adam and Eve as a picture of Christ as the Lamb of God. In the New Testament, we see the reality of that picture—Jesus the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world by His death on the cross.
Now in resurrection, He is still the Lamb of God for us. May we never forget that whenever we come to God to fellowship with Him, we come not through any merit of our own but through the shed blood of the Lamb of God.
Even in Revelation, verses that speak of eternity future still refer to our Lord as the Lamb of God:
Revelation 22:1 says, “And he showed me a river of water of life, bright as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb in the middle of its street.”
For all eternity, Jesus will be the Lamb of God to us, His redeemed ones. Praise Him!
Consider these additional verses regarding Jesus as the Lamb of God. May our hearts and our tongues be filled with thankfulness and praise to Him!
Isaiah 53:6 says, “We all like sheep have gone astray; each of us has turned to his own way, and Jehovah has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.”
In Matthew 27:46 we read, “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is, My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
2 Corinthians 5:21 tells us, “Him who did not know sin He made sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”
Peter writes in 1 Peter 1:18-19, “Knowing that it was not with corruptible things, with silver or gold, that you were redeemed from your vain manner of life handed down from your fathers, but with precious blood, as of a Lamb without blemish and without spot, the blood of Christ.”
And 1 Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also has suffered once for sins, the Righteous on behalf of the unrighteous, that He might bring you to God, on the one hand being put to death in the flesh, but on the other, made alive in the Spirit.”
If you hadn’t heard of Jesus being the Lamb of God before, you might be wondering, “How can I have this forgiveness and know the Lamb of God?” Although it is an accomplished fact that Jesus the Lamb of God took away the sin of the world, this fact has to be applied to you personally. You simply need to repent, that is, turn from being away from God and turn back to God. Believe in Jesus and all He did for you, and receive the Lamb of God as your Savior. You can do this by opening your heart and praying this prayer:
“Lord Jesus, I turn to You. I confess I am a sinner. I need Your forgiveness. Lord Jesus, I believe in You and all You did for me. Thank You for dying for me as the Lamb of God. I receive You as my Savior right now. Thank You, Lord Jesus. Amen.”
Our God is exceedingly great.
You only have to look up at the stars at night to see how wondrous He is as the Creator. When we view the physical universe, we’re awed by His greatness and beauty. Yet though His magnificence fills us with wonder, God sometimes seems far away from our personal universe.
We know God is real, but as we go about our daily activities and even when we pray, it can seem like He’s distant from us, way up in the heavens. At times we might find ourselves asking, “God, where are You?”
We long to access, to contact, to be close to this Person we’ve believed in. And on God’s side, He wants to be close to us, too. In fact, God wants to live in us and to have an intimate and personal relationship with each one of us. So He did some significant things to make this possible.
First, God created our human spirit.
God never intended to be a distant divine Being worshipped from afar by us. This is why God created man with a very special part—the human spirit. Our human spirit enables us to contact God and even receive Him into us. He made our spirit so He could enter into us to be near to us by dwelling within us.
Next, God became a man.
The eternal, limitless God in heaven became a man on earth, the man Christ Jesus. He was God, and at the same time, a real man, and experienced all the aspects of human life, yet without sin. Because He possessed a body of flesh and blood, Jesus was able to die on the cross for our sins to redeem us and bring us back to God.
Finally, Christ became the life-giving Spirit.
After the Lord Jesus died on the cross for us, He was buried, and after three days, He was resurrected. First Corinthians 15:45 is a tremendous verse: “So also it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living soul’; the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.”
The last Adam, our Savior Christ, in resurrection became the life-giving Spirit. Now as the Spirit, He can enter into anyone who believes in Him.
When we believed in Jesus Christ, we received Him as the Spirit into our spirit. We were joined to Him, and He as the Spirit came not to temporarily visit us, but to dwell in our spirit forever. Christ lives in us!
So, where does God live today?
For those who believe in Christ, He is not just the Creator who dwells in heaven far away from us. He is also the life-giving Spirit who lives in us, in our human spirit. He entered our personal universe when He entered our very being. He is no longer a faraway God, but our Redeemer and Savior who is near to us because He lives in us. Because He’s so near to us, He’s available to us anytime, anywhere. And He can meet all our needs with Himself.
God is near to us, nearer than anyone could ever be to us. This is a fact. We simply need to focus on our spirit where He is and come to Him there by faith. As we learn how to live and walk by our spirit, contacting Him, talking with Him throughout the day, we’ll enjoy more and more of what God has for us, and of what He wants to be to us in our lives.
We can pray, “Lord Jesus, thank You for coming to live in my spirit. You aren’t far away at all! You are right now in me, in my spirit. You’re so near to me. Lord, I love You, and I want to know your presence in my spirit more and more each day.”
We Christians naturally want to please God and make Him happy. But what exactly makes God happy?
To please God, we first need to know what He wants. Otherwise, we can spend a lot of time doing things we think He wants, but end up not pleasing Him. Let’s take a look at what we think God wants, and what God actually wants for our Christian life.
Some of our ideas about a life that pleases God include things like good behavior, helping others, and endeavoring to live in a way that sets an example for people.
All these aren’t bad. But are they what God wants from us? Actually, we shouldn’t assume our own ideas match what God really wants.
To really understand what God wants, we have to go all the way back to creation. In a previous podcast, we saw that God created human beings to share His divine life with them so He could be their life, and they could be His expression. This is why He created us not as instruments or tools to use, but as vessels to fill with Himself. And even after mankind fell into sin, this desire in God’s heart didn’t change.
But it’s impossible for fallen human beings to have God’s divine life since God can never fill a vessel contaminated by sin. Instead of giving up, however, God became a man named Jesus Christ. Jesus lived a perfect human life on earth and was crucified on the cross to take away our sins. Through His sacrifice, our sins can be washed away. When we believe in Jesus Christ and receive Him as our Savior, we receive forgiveness of sins. But that isn’t all.
After three days, Jesus resurrected from the dead, and 1 Corinthians 15:45 tells us that in resurrection, He “became a life-giving Spirit.” As the Spirit, He enters into us cleansed vessels that believe in Him. God—in Christ, as the Spirit—comes to live in us. How incredible! But He doesn’t just want to exist in us; He comes into us to be our life so He can be expressed through us. This is why God created us and why God saved us.
When we were saved, Christ came into our spirit, the deepest, innermost part of our being. This was the beginning of God’s filling us. Our spirit is where Christ now dwells in us and where we fellowship with God. It has the unique ability to contain God, contact God, and receive God.
But God also made us with a soul. Our soul experiences emotions, thinks and considers, and makes all kinds of decisions. Our outward actions spring from our soul, and our soul is the means by which God expresses Himself through us.
So if Christ remains confined in our spirit and doesn’t fill our soul—our mind, emotion, and will—He’ll never be expressed through us. Instead, our living will only express our own thoughts, feelings, and decisions, not His.
What’s the problem that hinders God from getting what He wants?
The problem is that our default mode is to live by our strong willpower and good intentions, striving to attain excellent virtues. And if we aren’t clear about what God wants, we’ll be satisfied to live this way. But God won’t be satisfied because He isn’t interested in a goodness that’s apart from Him. If He were, we wouldn’t need to be reborn with His life.
We may attempt to emulate the actions and demeanor of Christ, but what’s expressed won’t be Christ, but ourselves. The source is our natural life, not the life of Christ within us. Imitation isn’t the same as expression.
For instance, we realize we need to love people, so we’ll strain to love a particular person at work or in our class who irritates us. We might even muster a little love for the person, but what comes out is our natural love. It’s not the love of Christ in us expressed through us. Instead, our love is like an artificial flower. It kind of looks like the real thing, but it doesn’t have the same feel, scent, color, and overall expression of the real thing because it doesn’t have the life of a flower. If we are to express Christ, the life of Christ must spread into our soul. Only Christ living in us and through us can express Christ.
Christ wants to spread from our spirit into our soul, but He needs our cooperation. We need to open up every part to Christ—every thought, every consideration, every feeling, every decision—and give Him a free way to spread there.
This is the very thing the apostle Paul prayed for in Ephesians 3:17: “That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith.”
Note 1 on “hearts” in the Recovery Version explains what this means:
“Our heart is composed of all the parts of our soul—mind, emotion, and will—plus our conscience, the main part of our spirit. These parts are the inward parts of our being. Through regeneration Christ came into our spirit (2 Tim. 4:22). After this, we should allow Him to spread into every part of our heart. Since our heart is the totality of all our inward parts and the center of our inward being, when Christ makes His home in our heart, He controls our entire inward being and supplies and strengthens every inward part with Himself.”
It’s a great thing for Christ to make His home in more parts of our heart. But He won’t force His way in. To allow Him in and cooperate with Him, we can pray every day, “Lord Jesus, make Your home in all my heart. I don’t want to keep any area off-limits to You. Lord, I give you the freedom to move into every bit of my mind, emotion, and will.”
The more we allow Christ to fill us day by day, the more our words, actions, and demeanor will express Him. When He lives in us and through us, our compassion, our kindness, all our virtues, will be His. This is what God really wants.
Have you ever felt unsatisfied, let down, even inexplicably empty, after you got what you thought would make you happy?
You’re not alone. This perplexing feeling has been known to strike the most accomplished and wealthy people as well as the less accomplished and less wealthy. In fact, King Solomon had it all—a kingdom, untold wealth, and profound wisdom and knowledge—yet after pondering his life, he said that there was nothing new under the sun, and that everything was vanity.
It’s as if something compels us to find the elusive missing piece that would bring lasting satisfaction. We may pursue a successful career, meaningful relationships, material possessions, or fun and entertainment. But nothing cures that mysterious empty feeling way down inside. Why do we feel this way?
It turns out that to have this sensation is to be human.
The Bible shows us that God created us in a certain way. We can easily realize we have a body, the part of our being that enables us to contact the physical world. But we’re not just a physical being made up of so many atoms. We also have a soul, an inward part that enables us to experience things in the psychological realm. This, however, isn’t all there is to us.
First Thessalonians 5:23 says, “May your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete.” It is clear that besides our body and soul, God made every human being with a third part—our spirit—the deepest and most hidden part. This God-designed third part has a specific capability: our spirit can contact, receive, and experience God. Because He is the intended content, our spirit can’t be satisfied with anything other than God Himself.
The famous French scientist and mathematician Blaise Pascal said that within mankind is a “God-shaped vacuum.” Only God can fit into this vacuum. As long as our spirit is empty, without God, we cannot obtain true satisfaction; only He can answer the longing of our third part. When God gets into our spirit, He fills its aching emptiness with Himself as our real enjoyment, wealth, and meaning. We are finally and lastingly satisfied with the eternal and divine life of God.
God took some monumental steps so that He could enter our spirit. He became a man named Jesus Christ. Jesus lived a perfect human life on the earth, died to take away our sins, was buried, and then rose from the dead. When He resurrected, He became a life-giving Spirit and can now enter our human spirit. He is waiting for you to open to Him.
You can be filled in this third part—your God-created spirit—right now. Just turn your heart to God and pray this simple prayer: “Lord Jesus, I believe in You. I confess that I am a sinner. Forgive me of all my sins. I open to You. Come into my spirit and fill me with Yourself. Lord Jesus, I receive You. Thank You, Lord. Amen.”
In a previous podcast, we spoke briefly about the life and background of Watchman Nee, one of two authors of the books we give away. The other author is Witness Lee. But who is Witness Lee?
In this podcast, we’ll provide a short biography of Witness Lee. By looking into his testimony, we can gain an increased appreciation for his depth as a believer and his ministry of the Word of God.
Witness Lee was born into a Christian family in 1905 in northern China. His mother made a great financial sacrifice for him to attend a Southern Baptist Chinese school and later the Presbyterian English Mission College. However, although he received an excellent education, he was not saved at the time.
After one of Lee’s sisters experienced the salvation of Jesus Christ, she began to pray for her brother and bring him to church meetings in their hometown of Chefoo. In one of these meetings, the gospel preaching of a sister in the Lord touched Lee deeply, and at the age of 19 he received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.
Previously, Lee held lofty ambitions for his future. But at his salvation, he consecrated himself to serve the Lord for his whole life. From the very beginning of Lee’s Christian life, he loved the Bible and became a serious student of God’s Word. He read and collected Bible expositions and also read other Christian writings.
Lee was particularly helped in matters of the divine life by articles and books by Watchman Nee, and began corresponding with him about the Bible. At the same time, he began to meet with the Brethren Assembly in Chefoo to learn from their extensive expounding of biblical truths; he stayed with them for seven and a half years.
Eventually, Lee realized that though he’d amassed a great deal of teaching and scriptural knowledge, he had experienced very little of the divine life. This caused him to have a deep repentance to the Lord. Climbing to the top of a small mountain near his home each morning, Lee cried out to the Lord, wept, and confessed his deadness and fruitlessness. He continued to pray in this way for several months.
In 1932, Lee and others invited Watchman Nee to visit Chefoo. The two had much fellowship, and Nee emphasized to Lee the importance of experiencing the divine life.
In his biography of Watchman Nee, titled Watchman Nee—A Seer of the Divine Revelation in the Present Age, Witness Lee testified: “My time with Watchman during those days deeply impressed me with the sweetness, loveliness, attractiveness, and newness of the Lord. Those days provided a new start for me in following the Lord and caused me to have a basic turn from knowledge to life. Because of those days with Watchman Nee, I began to have fellowship with the Lord in a more intimate way. The Lord became more precious to me. That experience was even greater than my experience of salvation. Those days with Watchman affected my pathway in the Lord throughout all the following fifty-nine years, since 1932. For eternity I can never forget those days! What a mercy and grace it was to me.”
Shortly after his time with Watchman Nee, Lee began to sense the Lord Jesus calling him to serve Him full time. After much struggling and prayer, Lee obeyed the Lord in faith and resigned from his job. His decision to serve the Lord was confirmed afterward by other brothers and a timely letter from Watchman Nee concerning the matter. He remained faithful to this calling for the rest of his life.
Lee then spent several months with Nee in Shanghai and received much fellowship from him regarding knowing Christ as life; the Lord’s move in China from the time of Watchman Nee’s salvation; church history; and knowing the Bible in the way of life. When Lee later moved to Shanghai, Watchman Nee entrusted him with the responsibility for Nee’s publishing work.
Witness Lee and Watchman Nee worked closely together in China for the next 20 years in the ministry of the Word, both spoken and written, traveling throughout the country to preach the gospel, perfect the believers, and raise up churches. Through the labor of these two brothers, the Lord gained over 400 churches in more than 30 provinces in China.
With the Communist takeover of China in 1949, Watchman Nee foresaw the persecution of Christians there. Realizing this persecution would imperil the spread of the truths they’d seen in the Word, Nee commissioned Lee to go to Taiwan and continue their ministry. Nee wanted to ensure that all the scriptural truths and spiritual principles the Lord had shown them would not be lost but would continue to nourish and edify believers outside of China.
Witness Lee moved to Taiwan in 1949. Through his labor and the Lord’s blessing, the small number of believers increased rapidly, reaching over 40,000 in six years. Lee continued the publishing work in Taiwan, as commissioned by Nee. He also ministered for several months each year in the Philippines, where eventually over 100 churches were raised up.
In the late 1950s, Lee received invitations to minister in London and Copenhagen. He also made several visits to the United States of America, and became deeply burdened for the many Christians he met who lacked the deeper truths of the Word. In 1962, the Lord led Lee to immigrate to the US, leaving the work of the Far East in the hands of co-workers he’d trained there.
Witness Lee settled in Southern California and gave his first conference in Los Angeles in December of 1962. The messages from this conference now comprise the book The All-inclusive Christ, which Bibles for America gives away for free.
Lee received invitations to minister from a wide variety of Christian groups and traveled often throughout the US. He also frequently traveled to minister in Europe, the Far East, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. He continued to publish in America, as he had in China and Taiwan. He also wrote extensive notes, outlines, and cross-references for a new translation of the Bible, the Recovery Version.
Near the age of 70, Witness Lee began his major work, Life-study of the Bible—a rich, comprehensive, book-by-book exposition of the entire Bible, focused on the experience of Christ as life in the Word; it took twenty years to complete. Simultaneously, he gave thousands of messages on Christian life and service, much of which has been published as over 400 books. His ministry emphasizes the experience of Christ as life and the practical oneness of the believers as the Body of Christ.
Lee spoke publicly for the last time at a conference in 1997, just months before his death. At the age of 91, God’s faithful servant went to be with the Lord Jesus.
Today, over 2,300 churches have been raised up globally, and tens of thousands of Christians have come to know Christ as life through the ministries of Witness Lee and Watchman Nee.
Excerpts by Witness Lee and Watchman Nee are featured in the commentary of the Mosaic Bible, published by Tyndale House Publishers. Witness Lee’s entire body of published work is available through his publishing company in the US, Living Stream Ministry.
Witness Lee’s biography of Watchman Nee, A Seer of the Divine Revelation in the Present Age, published by Living Stream Ministry, includes some details of Lee’s own life, especially as it relates to Nee’s. For a more detailed biography of Witness Lee, visit witnesslee.org.
Have you ever felt very discouraged after you experienced a failure in your Christian life? Perhaps you even asked yourself, “Why does God let me fail? Couldn’t He have prevented me from making this mistake? Doesn’t He want me to have a good Christian testimony?”
To answer these questions, it’s helpful to first realize what happened when we were saved. We know we were forgiven of our sins and saved from eternal judgment; the Lord’s marvelous salvation took care of our past and assures our future. But more than that, we were also reborn with the divine life, which is for our life today.
When we were born again, the Spirit came to live in and be mingled with our human spirit. So 2 Timothy 4:22 tells us that the Lord is now with our spirit. Christ came to live in us so that His life could be our life and His living could be our living. When we live in oneness with Him, we express Him to everyone around us. This is the Christian life.
Since this is the Christian life, the Lord doesn’t focus on our successes or failures. He focuses on whether He can live in us and through us. We can see this in Paul’s words in Philippians 1:21: “For to me, to live is Christ.”
Note 1 on this verse in the New Testament Recovery Version explains what this means:
“Christ was not only [Paul’s] life but also his living. He lived Christ because Christ lived in him (Gal. 2:20). He was one with Christ in both life and living. He and Christ had one life and one living. They lived together as one person. Christ lived within Paul as Paul’s life, and Paul lived Christ without as Christ’s living.”
With this in mind, we can see that God doesn’t want to build us up in the natural abilities and virtues we have in ourselves. He wants us to live Christ. If we don’t realize this, we’ll spend our time attempting to live a God-pleasing life by ourselves, by our own life, rather than by His life. We’ll try to serve Christ and do things for Him, all without knowing or experiencing Christ as our life.
This is where failures come in. It’s not that God wants us to fail. But He knows our failures can help us by showing us our need for Him.
So for this reason, the Lord faithfully provides the perfect environment to uncover our inadequacies. We may think we’re spiritually strong, but He arranges just the right circumstances to show us how weak we really are. For instance, we might think we’re kind, loving, and patient. And perhaps to some extent we are. But then the Lord brings someone into our life that taxes our love, making it evident it’s really only skin deep. So given the right circumstances, we’re not so kind. And on top of it, this person also strains our patience; despite ourselves and before we know it, we blow up in anger.
Such difficulties show us we’re not the “good Christians” we thought we were. But this isn’t a negative thing! It helps us see that Jesus Christ is the only One who can live a proper Christian life, and He came into our spirit to live this life in, through, and for us.
Through our failures, the Lord is able to shine into our heart, exposing our real inner situation before Him. His light reduces us in our own eyes. He shines so we can recognize how short of Christ we are, causing us to turn to Him, to call on Him, and to even cry out to Him. It’s when we fall that we begin to grasp how much we need to experience Christ living in us.
Under the Lord’s light we’re humbled, our self-assurance is broken, and we become fearful of relying on ourselves. Consequently, we’re more open to Him than when we thought we were doing fine. And when we’re an open vessel, Christ can come in to fill us. For the Lord to grow in us, He needs this kind of openness.
Furthermore, when our shortcomings are laid bare by the Lord’s light, we become more willing to turn to Him and behold Him, to love Him, and to spend time with Him to enjoy His presence. We aren’t quite so self-reliant, trusting in our own ability or goodness, and we’re more willing to let Him live in us and through us.
None of this means we should deliberately fail or think it’s okay to be careless with sin. To maintain our relationship with the Lord, we need to care for the condition of our heart, and we need to heed the voice of our conscience. And when the Lord makes us aware of sins we’ve committed, we need to confess those sins to Him to receive His forgiveness and cleansing. These are all daily, healthy, and necessary spiritual practices for us to exercise if we want to have a normal Christian life.
We will have failures, however, and when we do, we can allow them to give Christ more opportunity to shine on us, turn us, and open us to Him. If we have this understanding, we won’t be overcome by discouragement and disappointment when we fail. Instead, we’ll turn more quickly to Christ and even thank Him for His wisdom in dealing with our independence from Him. We’ll open to Him in a deeper way so that He can live in us and we can live Him out.
In the entire universe, the name Jesus is a special name. How special? Philippians 2:9-11 tells us that God highly exalted Jesus and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that in the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue should openly confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
In addition to the name Jesus, we can find many other names in the New Testament for our Lord. Each is rich in meaning, communicating a particular aspect of what He is to us.
In this podcast, besides the name Jesus, we’ll cover four other names for Jesus from the books of Matthew and John. Seeing what these names mean will increase our appreciation for this wonderful Person and enhance our experience of Him.
Jesus is the very first name in the New Testament in Matthew 1:1 and is the Lord’s God-given name.
Matthew 1:21 says, “And she will bear a son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for it is He who will save His people from their sins.”
But what does the name Jesus mean?
Note 1 on this verse in the Recovery Version says this about the name Jesus:
“Jesus is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew name Joshua (Num. 13:16), which means Jehovah the Savior, or the salvation of Jehovah. Hence, Jesus is not only a man but Jehovah, and not only Jehovah but Jehovah becoming our salvation. Thus, He is our Savior.”
Jesus means Jehovah the Savior, and Jehovah is the eternal, ever-existing God. Jesus is Jehovah Himself who became a man to be our salvation. Only Jesus can save us from sin. Only Jesus saves us from God’s judgment, Satan, the world, a life of vanity, and so many other negative things.
Jesus is also the Greek form for Joshua. In the Old Testament, Joshua was the one who led God’s people into the good land of Canaan, which became a rest to them. Jesus is our Joshua today who brings us into rest. Whenever we call on the name of Jesus, we are inwardly saved from many bothering things and are brought into real rest.
Second, Matthew 1:23 tells us another name for the Lord in the New Testament:
“‘Behold, the virgin shall be with child and shall bear a son, and they shall call His name Emmanuel’ (which is translated, God with us).”
This verse itself tells us that the meaning of the name Emmanuel is “God with us.”
Note 2 on this verse in the Recovery Version also tells us this:
“Jesus was the name given by God, whereas Emmanuel, meaning God with us, was the name by which man called Him. Jesus the Savior is God with us. He is God, and He is also God incarnated to dwell among us (John 1:14). He is not only God but God with us.”
For God to dwell among us and to be with us is a tremendous thing. Before He was incarnated as the man Jesus, God was far away from us, dwelling in the heavens in unapproachable light. But as a man on earth, the Lord Jesus, the very God Himself, was a touchable, reachable, approachable man. He was truly Emmanuel, God with us.
In Matthew 28:20, after His death and resurrection, the Lord Jesus reassured His disciples by saying, “Behold, I am with you all the days until the consummation of the age.” This word is for all of us believers. This Emmanuel, who is God with us, became in resurrection the life-giving Spirit who lives in our spirit. By His living in us every day, we can experience God with us always!
Third, the name Christ, first mentioned in Matthew 1:1, is the Greek word for Messiah. Christ means the anointed One, the One appointed by God to carry out His eternal purpose. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the One uniquely commissioned by God to accomplish His will through His crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming. He was the One of whom the prophets spoke and for whom God’s people looked.
Isaiah 61:1 in the Old Testament is a prophecy of the Christ who was to come:
“The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon Me, / Because Jehovah has anointed Me / To bring good news to the afflicted; / He has sent Me to bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted, / To proclaim liberty to the captives, / And the opening of the eyes to those who are bound.”
Our Lord is the One who brings the good news of His salvation to us, who heals our broken hearts, proclaims liberty to us, and opens our eyes. And when we receive Him, Christ becomes the One in us who will work out God’s purpose to fulfill God’s desire.
A fourth name of the Lord Jesus is the Word.
John 1:1-4, a very deep and profound portion in the Bible, says,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him not one thing came into being which has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
The Word, who was in the beginning with God, was God. Without Christ as the Word, God would be mysterious and unknowable. The Lord as the Word defined, explained, and expressed God to us. He declared to us who God is.
Not only so, through the Word all of creation was brought into being. In the Word was life itself. This life became the light of men.
John goes on to say in verse 14, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”
The Word, who is the very God, didn’t remain in eternity, but stepped out of eternity into time to become flesh. That is, He became incarnated as a man—Jesus. The eternal Word who was with God, who was God, and through whom all things came into being chose to join Himself to humanity. He came as God’s tabernacle, or dwelling place, on earth among mankind. His habitation is now with all His believers.
As the Word, Christ declares who God is. He is the eternal God, yet He became flesh to be a man. He is life and light to us, and we are His dwelling place!
Fifth, Jesus is also the Lamb of God. In John 1:29, when John the Baptist was baptizing people in Bethany, “he saw Jesus coming to him and said, Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
Lamb of God is a particularly sweet name to all those who believe in the Lord. Hebrews 9:22 says, “Without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” This means that for God to forgive us of our sins, it was necessary for someone to die. That Someone was the precious, spotless Lamb of God who gave His life to redeem each one of us.
Jesus as the Lamb of God was slain in our place. When we see all that He went through to fulfill God’s righteous requirement so that we could be brought back to God, we can’t help but praise and love Him.
As we see more and more of who our wonderful Lord is, we’re able to appreciate Him more and more, and our love and praise for Him grow.
Just from the names in this podcast, we can love Him as Jesus—God who came to be our Savior, and as Emmanuel—God with us. We can praise Him as Christ, God’s anointed One who carries out God’s purpose, and as the Word, the One who perfectly expressed God in everything. And we can thank Him for being the Lamb of God, without spot or blemish, who sacrificed Himself to accomplish redemption for our sins.
We can only touch upon these five names in a simple way in this podcast. It would take more time than we have here to cover the depths of the significance of each. We hope what we’ve shared will enrich your knowing and appreciating of our inexhaustibly rich God. He is Wonderful!
It seems daily we’re assailed by harrowing reports of conflict, hatred, and violence between people, both here domestically and abroad. These events are heartbreaking, disturbing, unsettling.
The hatred and violence between people is proof of the fallen condition of humanity. If nothing else convinces us that we human beings are deeply sinful and need a Savior, these traumatic events should.
The well-meaning efforts of people to bring peace to this extremely troubled world can only go so far. As believers in Christ, what should our reaction be?
The Lord Jesus told us that we should pray and not lose heart. If there ever was a time for us to pray, it’s now.
What should we pray for? We’ll discuss two matters to pray for in this podcast.
In Matthew 6:9-13 the Lord teaches us how we should pray:
“Our Father who is in the heavens, Your name be sanctified; Your kingdom come; Your will be done, as in heaven, so also on earth. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”
The first part of this prayer is related to God’s need, and the second part, to our need. We’ll focus on the first part.
Today God needs us to pray for His holy name to be sanctified, for His kingdom to come, and for His will to be done on earth, just as it is in heaven. In the midst of the world’s cursing of God’s name and the rebellion of sinful mankind against God, He needs us, His believers, to pray in such a way.
Note 1 on verse 10 in the Recovery Version helps us understand why we need to pray this way:
“After the rebellion of Satan (Ezek. 28:17; Isa. 14:13-15), the earth fell into his usurping hand. Thus, the will of God could not be done on earth as in heaven. Hence, God created man with the intention of recovering the earth for Himself (Gen. 1:26-28). After the fall of man, Christ came to bring the heavenly rule to earth so that the earth could be recovered for God’s interest, so that the will of God could be done on earth as in heaven. This is why the new King established the kingdom of the heavens with His followers. The kingdom people must pray for this until the earth is fully recovered for God’s will in the coming kingdom age.”
In 1 Timothy 2:1-4 the apostle Paul also urged us to pray, saying,
“I exhort therefore, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercessions, thanksgivings be made on behalf of all men; on behalf of kings and all who are in high position, that we may lead a quiet and tranquil life in all godliness and gravity. This is good and acceptable in the sight of our Savior God, Who desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth.”
Note 1 on verse 4 says,
“We should pray on behalf of all men (v. 1) because God our Savior desires all men to be saved and know the truth. Our prayer is required for the carrying out of God’s desire.”
Today we should pray for God’s need: for His name to be sanctified, His kingdom to come, and His will to be done on earth. We also should pray for mankind’s need: for our relatives, friends, neighbors—all men—to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth.
In Matthew 6 we have the Lord’s teaching us to pray for God’s need for His kingdom. In Matthew 28:18-20, we also have the account of the Lord’s appearing to His disciples after His crucifixion and resurrection, commanding them with a particular word:
“All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and disciple all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you all the days until the consummation of the age.”
Here the Lord Jesus commands us to go preach the gospel to everyone, to all the nations. As we do, we go out with the Lord’s authority and with the Lord Himself, who is with us always.
Note 2 on verse 19 explains the result of our going to preach the gospel to unbelievers:
“This is to make the heathen the kingdom people for the establishing of His kingdom, which is the church, even today, on this earth.”
Speaking to people about the Lord Jesus and leading them to receive Him as their Savior is the greatest help we can render to them. By receiving Christ, people can receive the divine life of God to become His kingdom people and be delivered from this Satan-corrupted world.
In John 10:10 the Lord Jesus said of the devil, “The thief does not come except to steal and kill and destroy.” Satan began his evil activity on mankind in the garden of Eden, when he deceived and poisoned Adam with sin, bringing in the fall of the entire human race. Since then and up to today, Satan has not ceased to carry out his vicious mission to steal, kill, and destroy the precious humanity God created for His own purpose. Today’s terrible events are evidence of his work.
People may not realize that what they’re witnessing are the evil doings of the thief. But they are distressed by the continuing incidents of ever more violence. They can’t help but be anxious and fearful. They despair of there ever being an improvement in the world’s condition. They feel shaken, having nothing solid to stand on or any hope to cling to.
They need the gospel of Jesus Christ, to know Him and His salvation. How can we who do know the Lord Jesus withhold from them the good news of the Savior?
The Lord Jesus speaks of the devil and his evil activity in John 10:10, but He doesn’t stop speaking there. In contrast to the thief who comes to steal, kill, and destroy, Christ says of Himself: “I have come that they may have life and may have it abundantly.” What a gospel this is! The Lord Jesus is the Almighty God Himself who became a man through incarnation. He came to this dark world and fallen human beings to give us life—eternal, divine life. Because of Jesus’ perfect human living, death, and resurrection, we damaged human beings can have divine life, even abundantly.
People see the horrific acts of violence in the world, but they need to see something else—the wonderful Savior of the world. In John 10:11, Jesus says, “I am the good Shepherd; the good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.” The lost sheep of the world need to know Jesus as the redeeming, life-giving Shepherd.
God needs our prayer to bring in His kingdom and His will to the earth. People need our going to them to tell them of the good news of Jesus Christ so they can receive the Savior to have eternal life and become kingdom people.
May the Lord increase our prayer for His kingdom and His will, and increase our speaking to others the good news of our Savior, who is the Desire of the nations and the hope of all mankind.
One of the authors whose books we give away is Watchman Nee. Have you ever wondered why we chose this author? And who is Watchman Nee?
In this podcast, we’ll give you a brief biographical sketch of Watchman Nee. The testimonies of believers can be truly edifying and helpful, and more particularly, the testimony of Watchman Nee can give us a sense of his depth as a believer and thereby increase our appreciation for the ministry in his books.
First, let’s consider the backdrop to Watchman Nee’s testimony.
Starting in the early 1800s, God put a calling into the hearts of many Western Christians to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to China. Through much sacrifice, these missionaries gave themselves to preach the gospel in a place where it hadn’t gone before. As a result, slowly but surely, people who had previously never heard the name of Jesus were brought to Christ the Savior.
Then in 1900, during the violence and upheaval of the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese believers were persecuted and martyred. Many missionaries were also killed. In the aftermath of such sacrifice and loss, Christians in the West persevered in their burden for China and continued to offer up fervent prayers for its people.
In the 1920s, the Lord answered these prayers and began to call young people to Himself in China. The gospel reached the educated circles, and many college students were brought to Christ. One hundred years of missionary work and sacrifice, followed by years of desperate prayer, had paved the way for the Lord to raise up a whole generation of young Chinese Christians. It was from among this generation that the Lord called Watchman Nee.
Watchman Nee was born into a Christian home in China, but he hadn’t received Christ as his Savior. As an educated young man, he considered Christian preaching to be the lowest occupation on earth. He was very intelligent, very capable, and had big plans for his future.
In 1920, when he was 17 years old, Watchman Nee attended his parents’ church where a well-known evangelist came to preach the gospel. Many in the congregation believed in the Lord and were saved right then. But Watchman Nee was not, for though he was moved by the gospel, he also realized that if he received Christ as his Savior, that meant he would also receive Christ as his Lord and serve Him for the rest of his life.
For a young man with such capacity and such dreams as Nee, this realization created great inner turmoil. Not long after hearing the gospel preached that day, however, Nee was alone in his room and recognized that he had no peace. Troubled, he was unable to sleep, so he knelt down to pray. One after another, his sins came before him. He saw that he was a sinner. He also saw a wounded Savior on the cross, with open arms waiting to receive him.
Overwhelmed by such love, Nee wept. He confessed his sinfulness to the Lord and immediately felt the burden of sin lifted. For the first time in his life he felt real peace and joy. His immediate and willing response was to consecrate himself to the Lord for His service for the rest of his life.
After his salvation, Watchman Nee immediately sought to know the Lord Jesus in the Word of God and through classic Christian books and the spiritual writings of other believers. He read voraciously and, blessed with a keen mind, was able to remember what he read. In a short time, he himself began to write on matters of the Christian life in magazines, tracts, and books. He also translated important Christian works from English into Chinese for others’ benefit.
In addition to carrying out his ministry through writing and publishing, Nee also gave spoken messages in various places in China. In 1938 he gave messages in Europe that eventually were published as The Normal Christian Life.
Nee was manifested as a particular gift from God to the Body of Christ, ministering from the Word in a country that had long been deprived of not only the basic truths in the Bible, but also the deeper truths revealed in God’s Word. Through his ministry, the Lord raised up hundreds of believers and churches in China. Not only so, countless other believers have received light and spiritual nourishment from God’s Word through Nee’s written ministry. Even now, the writings of Watchman Nee continue to have great impact on Christians all over the world.
Nee was arrested by the Chinese government for his faith in 1952. He remained imprisoned for 20 years, steadfast in his faith until his death in a labor camp in 1972. In 2009, the United States Congress recognized Nee for his devotion to his faith and his contributions to Christianity worldwide.
After Nee’s death, a guard found these words he’d written on a piece of paper in his room:
“Christ is the Son of God who died for the redemption of sinners and resurrected after three days. This is the greatest truth in the universe. I die because of my belief in Christ.”
The books Bibles for America gives away for free were chosen because of the tremendous help we ourselves have received from them and other writings by the authors, Watchman Nee and Witness Lee. We have greatly benefitted from the light and life in their ministry, and our ardent desire is for our fellow believers to have the opportunity to receive the same help that we have.
It’s beyond the scope this podcast to get into the full details of the biographies of these two men of God, which are truly edifying. But we hope the few facts brought out in this podcast about Watchman Nee’s life will inspire you, edify you, and lead you into the wonderful ministry found in his books.
As Christians, we realize that Jesus shed His blood for the forgiveness of our sins and that because of this we can receive Him and be saved from eternal perdition. But once we’re born again, what is our relationship with Christ’s blood? What does the blood of Christ mean to us right now, today, in our Christian lives?
Certainly we want to live in God’s presence. But we have a problem—sin.
Sin separates us from God, fills us with guilt, and gives Satan ground to accuse us.
But God has given us a solution to these three problems: the precious blood of Christ.
Isaiah 59:2 says, “Your iniquities have become a separation between you and your God. And your sins have hidden His face from you so that He does not hear.” God is holy, and He can’t be in the presence of sin. So when we sin, we lose God’s presence.
But 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The blood of Christ washes away our sins, and removes all distance between us and God.
When we sin, we also feel guilty. Guilt is the stain of sins on our conscience. Our conscience is like a window. When the window’s clean, we’re full of light. But when we sin, guilty stains cloud our conscience. If we let our sins accumulate, they block out light and leave us in darkness. No detergent, no chemical on earth, can wash these stains away.
But Hebrews 9:14 tells us that the blood of Jesus is powerful enough to purify our conscience. Whenever we sense guilt in our conscience, we can pray: “Lord, forgive me for what I did. I claim Your precious blood to cleanse my conscience from any stain of guilt.”
Finally, sins also bring in Satan’s accusations. Revelation 12:10 calls Satan the accuser of our brothers because he accuses them before God day and night. Satan tries to keep us away from God by reminding us of our sins. If we listen to these crippling accusations, we end up feeling hopeless and weak.
But the blood of Christ is stronger than any accusation from Satan. Revelation 12:11 says, “And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb.” When we confess our sins, we are cleansed, and we can boldly reject the devil’s accusations.
The blood of Christ is precious and powerful! It restores God’s presence to us, cleanses our guilty conscience, and defeats Satan’s accusations. The blood gives us the way to daily live in God’s presence!
Today it’s common to hear about people being “socially conscious” or having a “social conscience.” We hear about the need for corporations to be socially conscious, meaning they should care for the environment and natural resources, or help the less fortunate with business profits. We also hear about famous people who go to help in other countries; they are admired and said to have a social conscience.
Charitable works are surely admirable, and as believers in Christ we should take heed to the words of the Lord Jesus telling us that we should remember the poor, be cheerful givers, and love our neighbor as ourselves.
But concerning the definition of conscience, as Christians we must look to the Bible, and not merely to society’s meaning today. In this podcast, we’ll consider some verses and study notes from the Recovery Version to see what the Bible says about our conscience.
Every human being, regardless of culture, ethnicity, or background, has a conscience. Our conscience is the part of our human spirit that tells us when we’ve done something wrong, when we’ve offended God. Listen to what Romans 2:15 says:
“Who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness with it and their reasonings, one with the other, accusing or even excusing them.”
The study note on conscience says this:
“Man’s conscience corresponds with the God-created human nature and enables man to know what God justifies and what He condemns.“
How can we know what God justifies, or approves of, and what He condemns? How can we know when we’ve sinned or offended God? That’s the role of our conscience. When we’ve sinned, offended God, or offended others, the job of our conscience is to let us know. It acts like a smoke alarm, sounding out when we’re wrong and remaining quiet when we have no problem with God.
We’ve all heard the voice of our conscience when we’ve sinned or done something that doesn’t correspond with God’s holy, righteous, or loving nature. Our conscience convicts us, no matter how we try to suppress its voice or attempt to reason our actions away. It persists in condemning us. This is actually a good thing; otherwise, we’d be like a house without a smoke alarm; we wouldn’t know when we’re under God’s disapproval. Our conscience lets us know in no uncertain terms what God condemns.
Because of our conscience, we knew right from wrong even before we were saved. When we were unsaved, our conscience told us that we were sinful and in need of a savior. After we’re saved, the Lord lives in our spirit, and our conscience is even more sensitive and active than before. It tells us when we’ve sinned, and our sins create a problem between us and God, disrupting our fellowship with Him.
What is a good conscience?
First Timothy 1:5 says, “But the end of the charge is love out of a pure heart and out of a good conscience and out of unfeigned faith.”
Note 3 on this verse explains what a good conscience is:
“A good conscience is a conscience without offense (Acts 24:16).”
Our conscience is “good” not because we’ve done good deeds, but because it’s without offense. We have a good conscience when we have nothing our conscience must condemn us for. Our conscience is good when we haven’t offended God or anyone else.
So according to what we see in God’s Word, it’s quite possible for us to do good works, to be socially conscious, to help the poor and assist those in need, yet still not have a good conscience.
It all depends. If we’ve offended God, our conscience condemns us; at that time, we don’t have a good conscience, a conscience void of offense, regardless of the charitable acts we’ve performed. Those acts cannot expunge, outweigh, or cover an offense against God in the conscience.
Since we’re still fallen sinners even after we’re saved, we’re prone to sin. It takes no effort on our part to offend God by sinning or disobeying Him, or to offend others by our words or actions. And when we do, our conscience condemns us.
So how can we have a good conscience, one without offense? Many times when our conscience makes us aware we’ve sinned, our first reaction is to reason in our mind to justify or excuse our actions to ourselves.
But actually, only the blood of Christ can purify our conscience and deal with the offenses there. Hebrews 9:14 gives us this wonderful word:
“How much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”
Christ’s blood alone, not our doing good works, making up our mind to do better, or regretting our wrongdoing, can purify our conscience and wash away our offenses. We must simply confess to God the sins our conscience makes us aware of. When we confess our sins to God, He immediately forgives us and cleanses away the stain of sin. God is satisfied with the blood of Jesus, and our purified conscience is peaceful and good again.
Why is a good conscience important?
The Bible gives Christians a particular word to show us how important having a good conscience is in 1 Timothy 1:19:
“Holding faith and a good conscience, concerning which some, thrusting these away, have become shipwrecked regarding the faith.”
The first part of note 1 on this verse explains further:
“Faith and a good conscience go together. Whenever there is an offense in our conscience, there will be a leakage, and our faith will leak away.”
Since faith and a good conscience go together, the state of our conscience affects our faith. When we allow an offense to remain undealt with in our conscience, our faith leaks away. This leakage can cause us to eventually lose faith in the Lord, even to such an extent that we become “shipwrecked” regarding our faith.
Note 2 explains shipwrecked:
“This shows the seriousness of thrusting away faith and a good conscience. To hold faith and a good conscience is a safeguard for our Christian faith and life. The word shipwrecked implies that the Christian life and the church life are like a ship sailing on a stormy sea, needing to be safeguarded by faith and a good conscience.”
The graphic imagery of a shipwreck shows us the consequences of not caring for our conscience and ignoring its speaking when we’ve offended God. What a sobering word!
We don’t want to become shipwrecked regarding our faith. For us to continue in our Christian life, we must maintain a good conscience. This is achieved by being right with God and man, by our having a conscience that has no offense in it to condemn us for.
Thank the Lord for His clear Word concerning our conscience in the Bible! Let us learn to pay attention to our conscience. Instead of trying to reason our sins away, let us deal with any offense by confessing that sin to God. We can daily experience our conscience being purified by the precious blood of Christ and go on in our Christian life holding faith and a good conscience.
When we repent to God and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior, some wonderful things happen to us. We are forgiven of all our sins and delivered from God’s condemnation and eternal punishment. As a result, for the first time in our lives we have untold happiness and peace. We can’t help but love the Lord Jesus who died for us on the cross.
Being forgiven by God and delivered from eternal punishment are truly wonderful, yet there’s even more! Perhaps the most amazing thing that happens to us when we believe in the Lord Jesus is that we’re born again, or, regenerated.
What do the words born again mean? Some think it’s a figure of speech, like the saying turn over a new leaf, meaning you set out to be a better person. But being born again is more profound than that. According to the Bible, born again isn’t a metaphor for having a new beginning. It’s an actual birth, spiritually, with God’s life.
Why do we need to be born again?
Since we’re forgiven, isn’t that enough? We were born with the physical life of our parents, and through them, we have our human life. But God wants us to have His divine life in addition to our human life. We obtain His divine life by believing in Christ and being reborn with the divine life of God.
Regardless of whether we’re a good person living the most moral life, quite the opposite, or somewhere in between, every one of us needs to be reborn spiritually to have the divine life of God.
In John 3:3 the Lord Jesus makes it clear that we all must be born again:
“Unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
For His plan to be worked out, God wants us to be people who are not just forgiven and cleansed, but also who possess His divine life.
This is why God created us as vessels to contain Him. And for this, He made us with a human spirit, the deepest part of our being. Our spirit is able to contact, receive, and contain God.
The Lord Jesus said in John 3:6, “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” “Born of the flesh is flesh” refers to our physical birth, and “born of the Spirit is spirit” refers to our spiritual birth.
“The Spirit” (with a capital “S”) is the Spirit of God, and “spirit” (with a lowercase “s”) is our human spirit. When we believe in Jesus Christ, our human spirit is born of the Spirit with the divine life of God.
How can God, who is holy and righteous, give His eternal, divine life to sinful human beings? Because of the death of Christ on the cross, God can forgive and thoroughly cleanse all who repent and believe in Him. Now the holy and righteous God can come into our spirit and beget us with His life.
We need to realize that God’s forgiving us, cleansing us, and delivering us from eternal punishment is so that we can have His eternal life.
To illustrate, let’s say we want to pour delicious juice into a cup. But there’s a problem—the cup is filthy. We first have to wash the cup; then we can fill it with juice.
Similarly, God wants to fill us with Himself as the divine life, but first we sinners need to be cleansed with the blood of Jesus. Once we believe and are cleansed, the divine life can enter into us with no obstacle.
A hymn by Charles Wesley beautifully speaks of what the Lord Jesus did for us so we could be born again. Here are a few lines:
“Mild He lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth.”
Just as being born physically of our parents makes us their child, being born of God spiritually makes us a child of God.
John 1:12-13 tells us of this fact:
“As many as received Him [Jesus Christ], to them He gave the authority to become children of God, to those who believe into His name, who were begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”
Isn’t it amazing that we human beings can have God’s divine life and be His children? What wonderful things happened to us when we were saved!
For all eternity we’ll thank the Lord Jesus for dying on the cross for us so we could be forgiven and washed of our sins. We’re so thankful we’re no longer under God’s condemnation, headed for eternal punishment. But we thank God that His salvation goes even further. We were born of the Spirit in our spirit! We have the life of God!
With the apostle Peter, we offer up this praise from 1 Peter 1:3:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has regenerated us unto a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
Imagine you go out to eat with someone you love. This is a time to share your thoughts and experiences with each other, to get to know each other more, and to build up your relationship. But what if right in the middle of your conversation, you get out your phone and read your emails? Or you’re distracted by a television in the restaurant? Or you don’t really hear what the other person is saying because something else is occupying your heart? The opportunity to build up a loving relationship is lost.
Our relationship with Jesus Christ is like this, too. He wants to have a loving, personal relationship with us, but often, even in our times of fellowship with Him, we’re distracted and preoccupied. In a previous podcast, we saw that our relationship with Jesus is both begun and maintained by our heart. But the problem is that while we want to cultivate our relationship with the Lord, many things in our world vie for our heart’s attention. We need to learn how to care for our heart so we can really get to know the Person who loves us and wants to have the deepest relationship with us possible.
In this podcast, we’ll discuss four ways to care for our heart.
The first way to care for our heart is to turn our heart to the Lord. Second Corinthians 3:16 says, “But whenever their heart turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”
Being with someone we love requires us to be present not simply in body but in heart, and it’s the same with the Lord. We may carve out the time to spend with Him, but if our heart is somewhere else, it’s as if we’re not really with Him. Our heart can be turned away from Him to things such as our anxieties, worldly distractions, or even just the day to day matters of life.
Although we love the Lord Jesus, it’s so easy for our hearts to be turned to any number of things. So we need to build up a healthy habit of turning our heart to Him all the time, every day, even throughout the day. We can begin each morning when we wake up with a simple prayer: “Lord Jesus, this morning I turn my heart to You.”
Then, when we have our morning time with the Lord, even before we read the Bible, we can take time to pray again, “Lord Jesus, I love You. I turn my heart to You again.” Since we’re coming to be with a real, living Person and not just punching a time clock, we must draw near to Christ with our heart. When we turn our heart to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Nothing separates us from Him, and we enjoy Him in the Word.
Throughout the day, when we sense our heart has drifted away from Christ, we can pray again, “Lord Jesus, I turn away from everything and back to You again. Oh Lord, I love You.” Calling upon the Lord Jesus can help us to turn our heart to Him instantly. And what a wonderful promise His Word gives us—“whenever”! This means at any time, at any place, no matter our condition, we can turn our heart to Him and the veil is taken away.
Second, we can care for our heart by exercising our heart to believe. Romans 10:9-10 says, “If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart there is believing unto righteousness, and with the mouth there is confession unto salvation.”
According to these verses, believing is a matter of the heart. To believe, with our heart, in the Lord’s Word and His actions in our life is crucial to maintaining our relationship with Him.
For example, let’s say we doubt the words or actions of someone we love. This lack of trust would certainly undermine our relationship.
Titus 1:2 says plainly that God is one “who cannot lie.” He is the most trustworthy Person in the universe! His word is truth and we can believe it. Doubting His words and actions negatively affects our relationship with Him.
Instead of doubting, when we come to God’s Word we should turn our heart to the Lord and exercise our heart to say, “Lord, I believe in Your Word. I receive it, Lord, and I say Amen to Your Word.” This will help keep our relationship with the Lord from being damaged by doubting His Word.
Concerning the Lord’s actions, we must also exercise our heart to believe in His arrangement in our lives and environment. In Romans 8:28 the apostle Paul assures us that “All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” Especially when we face difficult situations, it’s easy for us to even question the Lord’s love for us. But in Romans 8:37 Paul goes on to say, “In all these things we more than conquer through Him who loved us.” Eventually, Paul concludes by saying that nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
It’s certainly easier for us to believe in God’s will for us when things are smooth. But when we have difficulties, it’s even more important to exercise our heart to believe and tell the Lord in faith, “Lord Jesus, I believe in all Your arrangements in my life. I believe You have nothing but good in Your heart for me and that You know what I need.”
By exercising our heart to believe in God’s Word and in His will, we honor Him and keep our relationship with Him in a healthy and normal state.
The third way that we can care for our heart is to have our heart sprinkled from an evil conscience. Hebrews 10:22 says, “Let us come forward to the Holy of Holies with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.”
Our conscience is the main part of our heart and lets us know right from wrong. When we’re wrong in our conscience, we know we’re wrong with the Lord or with others. We can’t maintain our relationship with the Lord if we neglect or ignore the sense in our conscience that tells us we’re wrong with Him.
We may not think we have any problems in our conscience, especially if we don’t spend time with our heart turned to the Lord and open to Him. But when we turn our heart to the Lord, we open ourselves to Him, and He has the way to enlighten our conscience. Spontaneously we begin to feel we’ve sinned and are wrong in certain areas of our living. The sense from our conscience convicts us, for instance, when we have a poor attitude toward someone, when we say or do something we shouldn’t have, or when we weren’t honest in a certain situation. Our conscience also convicts us when we disobey the Lord. So when our conscience makes us aware that something is wrong, what should we do?
Instead of trying to cover up or deny our sin, we should simply confess our sins to the Lord. When we confess, He forgives us. Our heart is cleansed from an evil conscience by the precious blood of Jesus. Then we have peace, our fellowship is restored, and our relationship with the Lord can be sustained.
Finally, we can care for our heart by having our heart renewed. Ezekiel 36:26 says, “I will also give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take away the heart of stone out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh.”
When we were first saved, God gave us a new heart that is soft and loving toward Him. This is wonderful! But to keep our heart renewed, we need to turn our heart to the Lord, believe in Him, confess any sins our conscience convicts us of, and experience the cleansing of the blood of Jesus. By doing this, our heart is renewed over and over, and we spontaneously love the Lord more.
These four ways of caring for our heart are not something we do once and for all. Daily, for the rest of our life, we need to pay attention to our heart in these ways.
In his book The Economy of God, Witness Lee speaks of the importance of caring for our heart properly, and the result:
“All spiritual experiences start with love in the heart. If we do not love the Lord it is impossible to receive any kind of spiritual experience.” (p. 68)
“We all must learn how to continually turn and exercise our heart, to have our heart purged from an evil conscience and renewed again so that we may love the Lord more and more. It was the loss of its first, fresh love to the Lord that was the cause of the Church’s fall and degradation. When our heart is not fresh in loving the Lord we have fallen. We must turn our heart back to the Lord again and again and have it continually renewed that we may have a new and fresh love toward the Lord.” (p. 69)
May we all learn to turn our hearts to the Lord; exercise our heart to believe in the Lord and His Word; take heed to the sense from our conscience by confessing our sins; and have our hearts renewed every day. May we care for our hearts so that our relationship with the Lord can be properly maintained and grow deeper, and so that our love for the Lord can also grow in strength and freshness!
As Jesus made his way through the throngs of people surrounding him, he suddenly stopped and asked, “Who touched Me?”
It seemed obvious to His disciples, so they answered that it was the crowds pressing upon Him. But Jesus insisted, “Someone touched Me.” He knew a particular someone had touched Him, because at that moment, divine power had gone out of Him.
A woman stepped out of the crowd and confessed to Jesus that it was she who had deliberately touched Him, and something wonderful had happened to her.
For twelve long years she had been suffering from an uncontrollable hemorrhage, year after year losing more blood. She had seen many physicians and spent all that she had, but nothing helped. She knew she was dying. Then she heard about Jesus. Desperately making her way through the crowd, she came close enough to touch Him, believing that if she touched even just His garment, she would be healed. And as she touched Him, her flow of blood stopped. His divine power had been transfused into her. With lovingkindness Jesus said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be well from your affliction.”
This woman is a picture of all of us, showing that we too are afflicted with a disease that will eventually issue in death—the inward disease of sin. How much suffering and damage this sickness has caused us! Try as we might, we cannot get rid of it. Nothing can cure us—no moral philosophy, self-help program, or good works. Instead, our frail and limited life is leaking away. One day it will run out completely. We need the healing of Jesus and His life to save us.
Jesus is the very God who became an approachable and even touchable man to be our Savior. He not only came near to us, but as a sinless man, He died on the cross for our sins. The Bible tells us in 1 Peter 2:24 that He “Himself bore up our sins in His body on the tree, in order that we, having died to sins, might live to righteousness; by whose bruise you were healed.” His redeeming death heals us of our affliction. Not only so, He resurrected. Today the Lord Jesus is waiting for us to touch Him in order to receive His redemption and His unlimited, death-conquering life.
Being content merely to hear about Jesus or to be among the crowd around Him will not save us. If we come to Him in faith and touch Him by believing in what He has done for us, He will heal us and impart His eternal life into us. We will have peace.
You can touch Him in faith right now. Just pray this simple prayer:
“Lord Jesus, I need You. I am a sinner. I believe in all You did for me on the cross. Thank you for dying for me so I could be healed. Save me now. I receive You as my Savior and my life. Amen.”
Why do we act like the people we’re around? To some extent, we realize this happens. We spend a lot of time with a certain friend and suddenly people are commenting on our similar mannerisms, speech, reactions, etc. Even our tastes and preferences may drift together.
The reason this happens is simple: we’re mirrors.
A mirror is made to reflect whatever it’s facing. As long as the mirror isn’t covered by anything, it reflects the object in front of it. It doesn’t try to or even want to; it just does. Whatever the object does, the mirror reflects. This ability to reflect is because of what the mirror is, its being. No amount of determination or strength will make it better or worse at its job. A mirror reflects what’s before it simply because of what it is.
Human beings are similar. We reflect what we see. And for Christians, this has a very particular application.
In 2 Corinthians 3:18 we’re given a powerful secret to the Christian life:
“But we all with unveiled face, beholding and reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit.”
This verse likens us to mirrors that, when unveiled or uncovered, behold and reflect the glory of the Lord. Notice the verse doesn’t say, “But we all with much determination, endeavoring with all our strength to be Christ-like…” It says we simply behold Jesus and reflect Him, like a mirror.
Like mirrors, we’re always reflecting something. Maybe we’re occupied with our favorite television show, a good book, or even a social cause, and we spend our time beholding, or looking at, all things related to it. So when we’re with others, we talk about it. It’s automatic because it’s what’s in us; it’s what we beheld, so now we reflect it.
Beholding is simply a matter of where our heart is engaged and what it’s interested in. Striving, struggling, or working aren’t involved. An easy way to find out what we’re beholding is to ask ourselves, where is my heart engaged?
So how do we behold the Lord? According to 2 Corinthians 3:16,
“Whenever their heart turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.”
We behold the Lord by turning our heart to Him. This is the secret. If our hearts are beholding something other than Christ Himself, we’ll inevitably reflect that thing. We may want very much to be Christ-like, but we can even end up beholding “being Christ-like” instead of Christ Himself.
Beholding and reflecting isn’t imitation. Imitation is when we change our behavior to match our own concept of what it is to be Christ-like. This takes much effort and eventually falls short, because no one can ever imitate perfectly.
But when we behold, no effort is involved. We simply turn our hearts to the Lord, and because of what we are—mirrors—we automatically reflect Him, that is, He Himself shines from our transformed inward being through our outward behavior. This is because we’re changed inwardly by the addition of the Christ whom we behold. So what others then see isn’t a person trying to be like Christ, but Christ Himself reflected in our living.
Sometimes we’re not able to behold Christ because our hearts are veiled. If a mirror is covered with a cloth, it will only reflect the cloth. In 2 Corinthians 3, we see that the Israelites’ love for the law became a cloth, a veil, over their hearts. Things that seem positive such as philosophy, religious concepts, cultural traditions, even our own ideas about the Lord, can all veil us. When our hearts turn toward those things instead of toward Christ, the Person living within us, our heart is veiled, and we can’t behold and reflect Him.
If we feel our heart is covered, even a little bit, we can pray for the Lord to make us willing to turn away from whatever veils our heart, even seemingly innocuous things like our idea of what it means to be a good Christian. Then, turning our hearts to the Lord, we can behold Him.
Every day, especially every morning, we can begin with the excellent practice of praying, “Lord Jesus, I turn my heart to You. Have mercy on me and show me anything that veils me and prevents me from beholding You today. Lord, I turn my heart to behold You. I love You, Lord Jesus.”
The more we spend time to behold the Christ who lives in our spirit, the more we’re infused with Him. Christ increases in us, a gradual transformation of our being takes place, and we reflect Him. Our friends and family may sense a change in us, even if they’re not able to pinpoint the source. We ourselves may not even realize we’ve changed, because the change is not the result of self-improvement or our own effort. Praise the Lord, He’s made it so simple! As mirrors, we don’t have to do that much; we simply turn our hearts to behold the Lord, and we reflect Him.
When we first repented to God and received Jesus Christ as our Savior, we were forgiven of all our sins. What peace flooded our hearts! And God’s Word assures us that our salvation is for all eternity and can never be undone.
But although we’re saved, we know from our personal experience we’re not immune to sin. We still sin after salvation, despite our good intentions and efforts to avoid failure. What should we do when we sin after being saved? The Word of God tells us that we should confess our sins to the Lord.
Confessing to God the sins that we commit after we’re saved is absolutely critical for our life as a Christian. In this podcast, we’ll cover why we need to confess our sins, what it means to confess, how to confess, and the results of confessing.
First, we need to confess because sin breaks our fellowship with the Lord.
Our God is a God of love, but He is also holy and righteous. God cannot tolerate sin, so the sins we commit create a barrier between Him and us and interrupt our fellowship with Him.
Even in our human relationships, we can see how this can be. Let’s say you offend your friend by saying something hurtful, and you never apologize. You both feel a rift between you, but until you clear the air by apologizing, you simply can’t be at ease in each other’s presence.
This is even more true in our relationship with the Lord. When we commit a sin, our conscience lets us know we’ve offended the Lord. The ease and sweetness of our relationship is broken. We’ve trespassed against Him, and that sin is now a barrier between us, disrupting our fellowship with the Lord.
So the reason we need to confess our sins to the Lord is because, though our salvation is unchangeable, our sins break our fellowship with the Lord.
Next, to confess means to admit or to acknowledge our sin.
How do we know we’ve sinned? As 1 John 1:5 tells us, “God is light.” So when God shines on us, He exposes our sins and failures, and we become conscious of them. The resulting sense of guilt in our conscience is uncompromising and can’t be quelled by any reasoning or excuse on our side. Instead of explaining our sin away or covering it up, we should acknowledge what God says is sin and ask for His forgiveness.
Psalm 32:5 gives us a good example of this. The psalmist said, “I acknowledged my sin to You, and I did not cover my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to Jehovah. Then You forgave the iniquity of my sin.”
So we see confessing our sins to God means acknowledging our sins and not trying to cover them up. It means to admit our sins and failures to the Lord. Our attitude and prayer is to agree with God’s judgment of our sin and say, “Yes, Lord, that is sin.”
Once we realize we’ve sinned and offended the Lord, we need to confess. But how?
We confess our sins in prayer to God Himself. Whether it’s a small transgression or a serious sin, when the Lord makes our sin known to us through our conscience, we must immediately admit our sin to Him in prayer and ask for His forgiveness.
You don’t need go to a certain place, tell a particular person, or wait for a special time to confess your sins. Wherever you are, by praying to the Lord, and as soon as you are conscious of your sin, you can confess your sins directly to Him. Since the Lord is with you, right in your spirit, you can pray to Him at any time to confess your sins.
For example, let’s say your workplace has a stock of notepads and pens. Since they’re just the kind of notepads and pens you like, you help yourself to a few for personal use at home. In the morning, as you turn your heart to the Lord to spend time with Him, He shines on you and convicts your conscience that you’ve taken something that doesn’t belong to you. At this point, you could reason with that feeling by telling yourself, “The office has plenty of these things and will never miss them.” Or, you can go along with the feeling of conviction and guilt in your conscience and agree with the Lord that what you did was wrong.
When you decide to go along with the Lord, you can immediately pray to Him, “Yes, Lord, You’re right, I sinned. I confess taking these things to You. I’m sorry, forgive me, Lord. Lord, thank You for shedding Your precious blood to take away my sin.”
Notice that such a simple prayer doesn’t include a promise to do better. That isn’t required for confession. What is required is acknowledging your sin to the Lord and declaring your faith in His work on the cross.
Of course in this example, after you confess to the Lord, you should also return the items to your workplace and not keep them.
The sin in this example might seem small, even insignificant, but in principle all sin, whether big or small, must be confessed, since any sin interrupts our fellowship with God.
In 1 John 1:9, a verse written to Christians, we see the result of confessing our sins:
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
If we confess, the result is that we are forgiven and cleansed.
Note 2 on this verse in the New Testament Recovery Version explains what it means for God to be faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins:
“God is faithful in His word (v. 10) and righteous in the blood of Jesus His Son (v. 7). His word is the word of the truth of His gospel (Eph. 1:13), which tells us that He will forgive us our sins because of Christ (Acts 10:43); and the blood of Christ has fulfilled His righteous requirements that He might forgive us our sins (Matt. 26:28). If we confess our sins, He, according to His word and based on the redemption through the blood of Jesus, forgives us because He must be faithful in His word and righteous in the blood of Jesus; otherwise, He would be unfaithful and unrighteous. Our confession is needed for His forgiveness. Such forgiveness of God, which is for the restoration of our fellowship with Him, is conditional; it depends on our confession.”
By confessing our sins we receive forgiveness—a forgiveness solidly based on God’s righteousness.
Furthermore, note 3 on the same verse explains what “cleanse us from all unrighteousness” means:
“To forgive us is to release us from the offense of our sins, whereas to cleanse us is to wash us from the stain of our unrighteousness.”
By confessing our sins, we’re forgiven, cleansed, and our fellowship with the Lord is fully restored because the obstacle of our sin is removed. Praise the Lord!
We discussed previously how we were created by God for His own purpose and plan but became fallen, sinful, and unable to live in a way that fulfills God’s plan. The consequences of the fall of mankind are tragic, and we see the effect both in our own lives and everywhere we look today.
But God can never be defeated! And though frustrated, God’s plan cannot be derailed. In His wisdom, God took three tremendous steps to carry out His original plan of imparting His eternal life into us so we could share His life and express Him.
First, God became a man named Jesus Christ.
Two verses in John tell us the first step God took.
John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Then John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”
When we put these two verses together, we see something remarkable. The Word—who is God—became flesh. God became a man! This first step of God becoming a man is known as incarnation.
Consider how amazing that first step was. The infinite, eternal God of the universe became a man of flesh and blood—Jesus Christ. He lived a real human life, limited by time and space, and knew all the sufferings of human life. Yet He was the only man in all history who was without sin. He lived on earth not for a day, a week, or a year, but for thirty-three and a half years. During that time, He fully expressed God in all His living. We can see His wonderful humanity, the way He lived, and the words of grace and truth He spoke when we read the four Gospels.
Through incarnation, Christ put on a physical body of flesh and blood, making it possible for Him to die for us. His perfect, unblemished life qualified Him to take our place on the cross.
Second, Jesus Christ died on the cross to redeem us.
Jesus Christ came to die for our sins. The first time John the Baptist saw Christ, he declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” As the Lamb of God, Christ was sacrificed for us on the cross. This second step was Christ’s crucifixion.
Because Jesus Christ took the step of being crucified, Ephesians 1:7 tells us what is available to sinful mankind now: “In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of offenses, according to the riches of His grace.”
And Ephesians 2:13 tells us more of what we have because Christ was crucified for us: “But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have become near in the blood of Christ.”
We sinful human beings can be redeemed, forgiven, and brought back to God, all because of Christ’s crucifixion.
Third, Christ rose from the dead.
Christ’s death accomplished a wonderful redemption for mankind. But His redeeming death isn’t the end of the story. Jesus Christ rose from the dead and defeated death itself! This third step is resurrection.
The resurrection of Jesus is an accomplished fact, but it’s not just a fact, something for us to appreciate objectively. In 1 Corinthians 15:45 we read this extraordinary word:
“So also it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living soul’; the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.”
This is tremendously important. As flesh and blood, Christ could never enter into us to be life to us. He could redeem us through His death, but He could only impart life to us through this step, His resurrection.
Because of this third step of resurrection, the Christ who was crucified for us is now the life-giving Spirit. As the Spirit, He is able to come into our human spirit with His divine life and we are reborn of the life-giving Spirit. We become children of God with the life of God!
Christ as the life-giving Spirit is available anytime, anywhere, to anyone who would repent, believe in Him, and open to receive Him. When we receive Him, we receive the eternal life as God had originally intended. As this life grows in us, spreading from our spirit into our soul, we express God to everyone around us.
The fall of man was calamitous. But God’s plan of salvation was carried out by these three tremendous steps—incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. God in Christ accomplished our redemption to forgive us our sins and bring us back to Himself. God redeemed us so that He could achieve His goal of entering our spirit to live in us, be with us, and be expressed out of us.
Have you been forgiven of your sins and received the life of God? If you haven’t, you can pray a simple prayer like this one:
“Lord Jesus, I turn to You and open my heart to You. Thank You for dying on the cross for my sins. Thank You for resurrecting from the dead. Thank You, Lord, for being the life-giving Spirit. Lord Jesus, I believe in You and I receive You into my spirit right now. Thank You, Lord, for coming to live in me!”
As human beings we, of course, have a physical heart. But we’re all aware that we also have something within us we recognize as an intangible heart.
But what exactly is this intangible heart? We’ve heard the word heart used since we were young, in everyday language, in literature, in music, and in other contexts. And most of us probably have a general definition of the heart, thinking of it as something inside us that feels emotions like love, affection, compassion, or sorrow.
The definition of the heart in the Bible isn’t given in one verse; it’s spread throughout many verses and can be easy to miss. Since the Bible refers to the heart hundreds of times, it must be significant to God and to us. So what does the Word of God say about our heart? And what is its importance to God and to us?
If you search online for heart you’ll find details on the physical heart, with photos and diagrams explaining its function and the way it works. You’ll also find a lot of information on caring for it so you can live longer. A poor diet, lack of exercise, and other factors can have dire consequences.
But what about the condition of our intangible heart? If neglecting our physical heart affects our life negatively, then surely neglecting our nonphysical heart is also detrimental. But how can we care for our heart if we don’t know what it is?
So let’s discuss what our heart is, not according to our common understanding, but according to the Bible. This will help us to properly care for our heart in our life with the Lord.
In previous podcasts, we’ve discussed how God created man as a three-part being with a spirit, a soul, and a body. Our heart isn’t a fourth, separate part of our being. Instead, as the verses we’re about to read will demonstrate, our “heart” in the Bible is a composition of all the components of our soul—our mind, emotion, and will—plus the most important part of our spirit—our conscience.
Matthew 9:4 says, “And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, Why are you thinking evil things in your hearts?”
Thinking is something of the mind, but the Lord Jesus asked the scribes why they were thinking in their hearts. This shows that our mind is part of our heart.
Acts 11:23 says, “Who, when he arrived and saw the grace of God, rejoiced and encouraged them all to remain with the Lord with purpose of heart.”
To purpose means to decide strongly to do something, to use our will, so this verse shows that our will is part of our heart.
Next, John 16:22 says, “Therefore you also now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and no one takes your joy away from you.”
We rejoice with our emotions, and here we see that our heart rejoices. As we might expect, this shows us that our emotion is part of our heart.
Last, Hebrews 10:22 says, “Let us come forward to the Holy of Holies with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.”
As this verse shows, our conscience is part of our heart. This is further confirmed by the phrase “if our heart blames us” in 1 John 3:20. Since our conscience is what blames or condemns us when we’re wrong, this verse makes it abundantly clear that our conscience is part of our heart.
So according to the Bible, our heart is not simply something we feel emotion with. Because it’s composed of our mind, our will, our emotion, and our conscience, it does much more; our heart also thinks, decides, and senses right from wrong.
To understand what the function of our heart is, we first need to realize that God’s desire is to have a warm, loving, and affectionate relationship with us in which we and He share the same life—His divine life. For this, God created us with a heart.
The Lord tells us in Mark 12:30, “You shall love the Lord your God from your whole heart.” So as we might expect, our intangible heart is our loving organ. If we didn’t have our heart, we couldn’t sense love, know love, or love in return.
Additionally, though, our heart has another important role. Two excerpts from The Economy of God by Witness Lee help explain:
“Our relationship with the Lord is always begun and maintained by the heart. Of course, to contact the Lord is a matter of the spirit, but this must be initiated and maintained by the heart, for our heart is the gateway of our whole being.” (p. 75)
Our heart is the gateway, the portal, of our entire being. So whether we open or close the doors of our heart determines what we let into our inner being. Witness Lee continues:
“In other words, the heart becomes both the entrance and the exit of our being. Whatever enters into us must enter through the heart. Whatever comes out from us must proceed through the heart.” (p. 75)
We can see that our heart functions as both the loving organ and the gateway of our being if we recall our salvation experience. When we heard the gospel of how the Lord Jesus died on the cross for our sins, our hearts were touched. We sensed the depth and the sweetness of His love for us and responded to His love. We couldn’t help but love Him in return for all He did for us. So we opened the doors of our heart to believe in Him and we received Him. We received Him into our spirit and were born again of the Spirit in our spirit, but it was our heart that first had to open to let Him in.
We were created by God in such a marvelous way with a spirit to contact, receive, and contain Him as life, and with a heart to love Him! He wants to be our life and He wants us to love Him, even with our whole heart. This is the relationship the Lord wants to have with us—in life and in love.
As the first excerpt from The Economy of God pointed out, our relationship with the Lord is both begun by our heart and maintained by our heart. This is why the condition of our heart is very important. In fact, many problems in our Christian life are really “heart problems.”
In future podcasts, we’ll get into some particulars on properly caring for our heart in order to maintain our relationship with the Lord in the best way.
This is the last podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
In the foregoing podcasts in this series, we’ve seen that God gave us two precious gifts—His Word and His Spirit—and that these two are actually one.
It is a glorious fact that God has become accessible and communicable to us as the Spirit embodied in the Word, but this fact remains objective to us if we do not exercise our spirit to contact the Spirit in the Word. In this podcast, we’ll take a look at how we can receive the Spirit in the Word through the exercise of our human spirit.
It’s best for believers to have two times each day to read the Bible—one to meditate on and pray over the Word to receive spiritual nourishment, and one to study and understand the Scriptures. At all times, however, we must remember that the Word and the Spirit are one. We must continually endeavor not merely to touch the letter of the Bible, but to touch and receive the Spirit in the Word.
In Life Lessons, Witness Lee says: “In reading the Bible, after we have understood the meaning of the text by our understanding and have apprehended the truth of the text with our wisdom, we should use our spirit by prayer to receive the truths in the Scripture into the deepest part of our being, that is, our spirit. In other words, after we understand the text and receive the truth therein, we still must exercise our spirit to turn what we have understood and realized into prayer that it may be assimilated in our spirit, becoming our life supply and the basis of our spiritual experience.”
In the Life-study of Philippians, he writes: “The Word becoming the Spirit in our experience can be illustrated by the lighting of a match. The head of a match is a ball made of phosphorus. When we strike a match in a proper way, the phosphorus bursts into flame. Is the flame different from the phosphorus? No, it is simply the explosion of the phosphorus. In like manner, the Spirit is the ‘explosion’ of the Word. When we experience this explosion, we are ‘burned’ by the ‘fire.’ This burning is faith.”
How can we exercise our spirit to receive the Spirit in the Word? Here are five ways that we can practice:
First, according to the Bible, we need to pray in order to receive the Word of God. By exercising our spirit through prayer, we touch and receive the Spirit in the Bible.
Ephesians 6:17-18 says, “And receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit and watching unto this in all perseverance and petition concerning all the saints.”
In his book, Enjoying Christ as the Word and the Spirit through Prayer, Witness Lee says, “The way to transfer Christ as the Word into the Spirit is to open our heart, open our spirit, and exercise our spirit to pray.”
Second, we can be filled in spirit by speaking and singing the Word. God is a flowing and filling God, and by getting into the Bible daily, we can enjoy this flow.
Ephesians 5:17-19 says, “Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissoluteness, but be filled in spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and psalming with your heart to the Lord.”
Third, the apostle Paul charged the Colossian believers to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly. The way to let the Lord’s word dwell in us richly is by teaching, admonishing, and singing.
In Colossians 3:16, he wrote, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to God.”
Fourth, we need to keep and obey the Word. The truth can become a part of us only by our reading and experiencing it. As we dig into the truth in the Word, we are both unveiled to see it and equipped to keep it.
In John 14:23 Jesus said, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make an abode with him.”
And 1 John 2:5 tells us, “Whoever keeps His word, truly in this one the love of God has been perfected. In this we know that we are in Him.”
So, to receive the Spirit in the Word, we need to pray and petition with it; speak and sing it; teach and admonish it; and keep and obey it. And, finally, we also need to exercise our spirit to mix the Word with faith. This can be as simple as saying, “Amen,” to God’s Word, even when we don’t understand it.
Hebrews 4:2 says, “For indeed we have had the good news announced to us, even as they also; but the word heard did not profit them, not being mixed together with faith in those who heard.”
We hope you’ve enjoyed this special series on reading the Bible. As we put these five ways to exercise our spirit to receive the Spirit in the Word of God into practice, we’ll turn God’s Word into our daily life supply.
This is the sixth podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
In our previous podcast, we pointed out that it is helpful to have two separate periods of time for reading the Bible. We should have time to meditate on the Word, praying and praising as we read and receiving spiritual food; it’s best to have this time in the morning. The other time of reading the Bible can be at any time of day and is for understanding and learning more about God’s Word.
In this podcast, we’ll talk more about this second time—our time for studying the Bible.
We must exercise our mind to study and understand the Bible. However, even when we study the Word, we must realize that the Word and the Spirit are one. To understand only the letter of the Bible is not our goal; rather, each time we read we must endeavor to touch and receive the Spirit in the Word.
For us to ascertain the facts in the Bible requires our prayerful reading and study. Hence, when we read the Bible, our spirit should be the dominant part of our being. There is no need for us to extensively prepare ourselves or make a long production out of reading the Word. Sometimes a short prayer asking the Lord to wash us with His blood so that we can freely come to Him in His Word to receive Him is sufficient to usher us into genuine contact with Him through the Word.
We should read the Bible with understanding and wisdom. Understanding has to do with apprehending the words of the Bible with our mind. This is a critical prerequisite to receiving revelation from the Word. The amount of speaking and revelation we can receive from the Lord is proportionate to the diligence we apply to our comprehension of the letter of the Bible. Getting acquainted with the facts in the Bible is like accruing capital for our future experiences of the divine life. In Life Lessons, Witness Lee observes,
“In reading the Bible, we must first use the understanding of our mind to comprehend its text, which was written in human language, and to know its meaning.”
Lee’s book The Full Knowledge of the Word of God lists some practical guidelines for understanding the Bible:
First, understand the Word of God literally.
Second, go beyond the letter, historical events, and persons and things to explore and to receive the revelation of life.
Next, take care of the context.
Fourth, expound God’s Word with God’s Word.
Fifth, learn from the saints of the past.
And sixth, pray-read the Word to eat, drink, and breathe in the spirit and life in the Word.
Reading the Bible with wisdom involves apprehending the truth in the Bible with our spirit. This wisdom is not our natural wisdom but the wisdom we obtain through prayer. It’s deeper and higher than the understanding in our mind.
In The Triune God’s Revelation and His Move, Witness Lee says, “We cannot receive the divine revelation through such fanciful imaginations. Instead, we receive it by the spirit of wisdom and revelation, spoken of in Ephesians 1:17. The spirit here is the mingled spirit, the divine Spirit mingled with the human spirit. Thank God that today in the universe there is not only the divine Spirit or only the human spirit but also the mingled spirit. God and man can be mingled together as one spirit (1 Cor. 6:17). Basically, the way to receive revelation is by the mingled spirit, that is, by the divine Spirit indwelling the human spirit. This mingled spirit is called the spirit of wisdom. This is for our understanding. If we have a revelation, we need the wisdom to interpret and understand it.”
Our reading of the Bible should be comprehensive and thorough; thus, we must be consistent in our reading. We need a schedule.
In Messages for Building Up New Believers, Watchman Nee says, “Every Christian should have a definite plan of studying the Bible. If you can set aside half an hour a day, develop a plan to study the Bible for half an hour a day. If you can afford an hour each day, develop a plan that includes an hour of study. Whatever time you can afford, make a plan that will fit your schedule. The worst way to read is by ‘inspiration,’ that is, casual, unplanned reading that begins at whatever page one feels, at times reading voraciously for ten days and at other times not reading anything for ten days. This is the wrong way. We should not adopt this ‘inspirational’ method. Everyone should have a definite plan of reading. In reading the Bible, we need to be restricted and disciplined.”
To understand the text, we must also be able to properly interpret the types, shadows, and figures in the Bible. Additionally, we should learn to use reference tools that define words and explain grammatical structures, and we should have some knowledge of the Bible’s original languages, Greek and Hebrew.
It is a glorious fact that God has become accessible and communicable to us as the Spirit embodied in the Word, but this fact remains objective to us if we do not exercise our spirit to contact the Spirit in the Word. Join us next time for the final installment in this special series on reading the Bible as we discuss five ways we can exercise our spirit to receive the Spirit in the Word.
This is the fifth podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
Last time, we began to look at how to read the Bible. God has given us two precious gifts—the Word and the Spirit; actually, these two things are one. Thus, we need to read the Bible not by any particular method, but by prayer, exercising our human spirit to touch the divine Spirit in the Word. As we come to the Word in prayer, we should love the Lord who is the Word and who spoke the Word. Then we can use our mind to grasp the facts, meanings, interpretations, and significances of the Word. As we do so, we should be ready to heed the Spirit’s speaking and obey the truths in the Bible. Ideally, we ought to read in this way a fixed amount of God’s Word each day.
In this podcast, we’ll go on to consider ourselves—the readers of God’s Word.
We may not realize that we ourselves affect what we perceive when we read the Word. To understand what the Bible is really saying, our inner being—our thoughts and especially our spirit—must be right. Listen to these observations by Watchman Nee on the subject of the reader of the Word.
In The Breaking of the Outer Man and the Release of the Spirit, he spoke concerning the reader’s thoughts:
“There are at least two things that we should do when we come to the Bible. First, our thoughts must be identified with the thoughts of the Bible. Second, our spirit must be identified with the spirit of the Bible. We have to think like the writers of the Bible. Men like Paul and John had certain thoughts behind them when they wrote the various portions of the Word. We have to get into the same thoughts. We have to begin from where they began, and develop our thoughts along the same line they developed. We have to reason the same way they reasoned, and consider the same teachings they considered. In other words, our thoughts are like a cog, and their thoughts are also like a cog. The two cogs have to interlock with one another. Our thoughts have to enter Paul’s and John’s thoughts. As our thoughts enter the Bible’s thoughts and our mentality becomes one with the mentality behind God’s inspiration, we will understand what the Bible says.”
Concerning the reader’s spirit, he added:
“It is important in our study of the Word to have our thoughts enter into the thoughts of the writers of the Bible and to have our thoughts enter into the thoughts of the Holy Spirit. However, this is only the initial step. Without this step, we cannot study the Bible at all. But even when we have made this step, we may not be reading the Bible correctly. The Bible is not made up just of thought. The most important thing about the Bible is that God’s Spirit is released through this book. Peter, John, Matthew, Mark, and every writer of the Bible had the same experience: As they were writing the Bible under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they wrote according to a certain train of thought, but at the same time, their spirits were released along with the release of the Holy Spirit. The world can never understand that behind the words of the Scriptures there is the Spirit. When the Spirit is released, the prophets come alive, as it were, and speak to us once again. If we hear a prophet speaking today, we have to realize that his speaking contains not only words and thoughts but something else. This something is mysterious, even though within us we are clear that this ‘something’ is the Spirit. The Bible contains not only thoughts but the release of the Spirit. Therefore, the basic and most crucial requirement of all in reading the Bible is to be able to release one’s spirit to touch the spirit of the Bible. We have to strike the spirit of the Bible with our own spirit before we can understand the Bible.”
We should have two separate periods of time for reading the Bible. One time should be in the morning, during which we should meditate on the Word, praising and praying as we read. The goal of this period of reading is to receive spiritual food and to strengthen our spirit. The other time of reading the Word can be at any time of day and is for understanding and learning more about God’s Word. It’s best to have two Bibles, one for each time. The Bible for the first time should have no notes so we can be freshly inspired by the Word and gain new insight, but the second Bible can be annotated with our markings and notes as we study the Bible in a detailed way.
God’s people in the past have benefited from having these two kinds of times in the Word. In 1841, George Müller described his experience of meditating on the Word:
“I began therefore to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning, early in the morning. The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon his precious word, was, to begin to meditate on the word of God, searching as it were into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer. When thus I have been for a while making confession, or intercession, or supplication, or have given thanks, I go on to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others, as the word may lead to it, but still continually keeping before me that food for my own soul is the object of my meditation. The result of this is, that there is always a good deal of confession, thanksgiving, supplication, or intercession mingled with my meditation, and that my inner man almost invariably is even sensibly nourished and strengthened, and that by breakfast time, with rare exceptions, I am in a peaceful if not happy state of heart…
“And yet now, since God has taught me this point, it is as plain to me as anything, that the first thing the child of God has to do morning by morning is, to obtain food for his inner man. As the outward man is not fit for work for any length of time except we take food, and as this is one of the first things we do in the morning, so it should be with the inner man. We should take food for that, as every one must allow. Now what is the food for the inner man? Not prayer, but the word of God; and here again, not the simple reading of the word of God, so that it only passes through our minds, just as water runs through a pipe, but considering what we read, pondering over it, and applying it to our hearts…”
Be sure to listen to the next episode in this special series on reading the Bible, when we’ll talk more about studying the Bible.
This is the fourth podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
We’ve received two precious gifts from God—His Word and His Spirit. The Word reveals God to us so that we can know Him, and the Spirit transmits God to us so that we can possess Him. The Spirit without the Word is intangible, while the Word without the Spirit is mere letter. God’s Word makes the intangible Spirit substantial to us, and God’s Spirit makes the Word of God living to us. The Bible makes known to us the things of the Spirit, and the Spirit makes real to us the things in the Bible. The Word of God and the Spirit of God are one.
Second Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed,” clearly indicating that God’s Word is His Spirit exhaled. Thus, the logical way for us to take in God’s Word is to breathe in the Spirit who is incorporated in the breathed-out Word. Since the Word is embodied in the Spirit and the Spirit is received through the Word, the most basic and important thing in our reading of the Bible is to exercise our regenerated spirit to contact the Spirit in the Word.
In his book, How to Study the Word, Watchman Nee says:
“John 6 says that the Lord’s words are spirit. The basic principle is the same: Since the Lord’s words are spirit, we have to read them in spirit. In other words, we can only touch spiritual things with the spirit.
“The Bible is not only a book with words or letters printed on pages of paper. The very nature of the Bible is spirit. For this reason, everyone who reads this book must approach it with his spirit; it must be read with the spirit.”
Ephesians 6:17-18 tells us to “Receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit and watching unto this in all perseverance and petition concerning all the saints.” Note 1 on verse 18 in the New Testament Recovery Version says, “This indicates that we need to receive the word of God by means of all prayer and petition. We need to pray to receive the word of God.”
The way to read the Bible is not by a particular method, but with prayer. By prayer we exercise our spirit. When we pray properly, we exercise our spirit, we are in spirit, and we touch the divine Spirit. Since the same Spirit who dwells in us is also contained in the Scriptures, whenever we read the Word with a prayerful spirit, we enjoy the riches, receive the enlightenment, and appropriate the power in the living Word of God. In this way, the Bible will cease to be merely a book of history, ethics, doctrines, or prophecies to us and become rather a source of spiritual supply.
Both the Word and the Spirit are Christ Himself. In John chapter 1, He is the eternal Word, in Revelation 19:13 He is called the Word of God, and according to 1 Corinthians 15:45, in resurrection He became a life-giving Spirit. Christ is therefore the reality of the Word and the Person of the Spirit. Each time we open the Bible we must be conscious that we are approaching Him; we are not only reading His Word, but also communing with Him as the Word.
In John 5:39-40, the Lord Jesus reproved the Jews for searching the Scriptures without coming to Him that they might have life. His message was clear: reading the Bible without coming to the Lord Himself can be an empty pursuit. The knowledge of the Word alone, however precious, should never replace our receiving of Christ as life in the Word.
Although we should read the Word of God primarily for the nourishment of our being and not the gratification of our intellect, we must apply our renewed mental faculty—a mind under the rule of the Spirit—to understand the Scriptures. Throughout the centuries, the divine truths in the Bible, like hidden treasures, were seen only by those who toiled in the study of the Word book by book, passage by passage, verse by verse, and even word by word. As each stood on the shoulders of previous expositors of the Scriptures, with a spirit of wisdom and revelation, they saw something further and interpreted the mysteries of God, Christ, the Spirit, life, the believers, the church, the kingdom, and the New Jerusalem.
Following their example, we as believers should read the Word regularly and thoroughly with understanding so that our Savior God’s desire for us to come to the full knowledge of the truth can be fulfilled. We ought to first familiarize ourselves with the Bible by reading it and learning its contents fully in their breadth and depth.
Thus, for us to reap the most benefit from our Bible reading, we must adhere to the following five points:
First, we must exercise our spirit in prayer when we come to the Word in order to receive the Spirit.
Second, we should love the Lord Himself who is the Word and who spoke the Word.
Third, we need to use our mind to grasp the facts, meanings, interpretations, and significances of the Word.
Fourth, we should be ready to heed the Spirit’s speaking and obey the truths in the Word.
And finally, we ought to read a fixed amount consistently on a daily basis.
Be sure to listen to the next episode in this special series on reading the Bible when we investigate how we ourselves—the readers of the Bible—affect what we perceive when we read God’s Word.
This is the third podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
In the first episode, we discussed some of the benefits of reading the Bible and looked at what the Word of God is. In the second episode, we presented five of the functions of the Bible in our experience. First, the Bible is part of our initial experience of God, making us wise unto salvation. Next, the Bible is our food. The Bible also gives us light. Fourth, the Bible waters and refreshes us. And last, the Bible enables us to have God’s instant speaking.
In this podcast we’ll consider some of the results of reading the Bible.
To live the Christian life we need to read the Bible. We cannot survive without the provisions in the Word. Moreover, through reading the Word, all of our spiritual problems—our real problems—are solved. The Bible is the answer to our questions. How do I enjoy the Lord? How do I escape the world? How do I live the proper life? So many questions about our daily life and experiences as a Christian are cleared up just by reading the Word every day. We may not receive outward, instant answers to these questions, but inwardly, over time, we receive more and more of God as the Answer. Simply by reading in a proper way, the Bible supplies us to live both a normal Christian life and human life. We experience these marvelous consequences by getting into the Word daily. Let’s take a closer look at a few of the results of reading the Bible.
First, when we read the Bible, we are filled in spirit.
At times we may feel spiritually empty and dry, unsure of how to satisfy the discontent within. But according to the Word, we can be those who are filled in spirit. By reading the Bible we are filled in spirit, satisfied to the point of overflowing.
Ephesians 5:18-19 says, “And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissoluteness, but be filled in spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and psalming with your heart to the Lord.”
And Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to God.”
What a joyful condition is expressed in these verses! Our being filled in spirit, speaking the truth, singing with grace in our hearts—all are results of our getting into the Word.
Second, when we read the Bible we are infused with faith.
Hebrews 11:1 tells us that faith is the substantiation of things not seen. As physical beings, we may doubt the unseen spiritual things and even the existence of God. However, when we read the Bible, we are infused with faith as our believing element.
Romans 10:17 says, “So faith comes out of hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”
And in Galatians 3:2 Paul writes, “This only I wish to learn from you, Did you receive the Spirit out of the works of law or out of the hearing of faith?”
If we are discouraged by doubts and feelings of unbelief, we should turn to the Word. The more we read, the more we believe.
Third, when we read the Bible we are nourished and supplied.
First Timothy 4:6 says, “If you lay these things before the brothers, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus, being nourished with the words of the faith and of the good teaching which you have closely followed.”
Matthew 4:4 tells us that man lives “on every word that proceeds out through the mouth of God.”
The Bible is the food that sustains our spiritual life. When we eat a hearty spiritual meal by getting into the Word, we are nourished and supplied with the riches of Christ as our food and life supply. We then have the strength to continue our Christian life.
In the Life-study of John, Witness Lee says, “When we contact the Word in spirit, we are actually contacting the Lord Himself as the living bread. When we receive the Word in spirit, we are receiving Christ Himself as the abundant supply of life. Now, day by day, we are participating in this wonderful, resurrected Christ as our food, life, and life-supply.”
Fourth, when we read the Bible we are cleansed and washed.
Ephesians 5:26 says, “That He might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of the water in the word.”
According to this verse, in the Word is water that washes us. This washing is not the washing of the blood of Jesus, which cleanses our sins, but the washing of the water of life that washes away the blemishes of our old man. Through reading the Word, our old nature is cleansed and purified, and we are made new. We need to stay in this washing process by consistently reading the Word.
The fifth result of our reading the Bible is that we partake of the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world.
Second Peter 1:4 says, “Through which He has granted to us precious and exceedingly great promises that through these you might become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption which is in the world by lust.”
The divine life contained in the Word includes as a virtue the energy and strength that enable us to escape the corruption in the world. By escaping the corruption in the world, we can partake of the divine nature of God and thus enjoy all the riches of what the Triune God is.
Note 5 on this verse in the New Testament Recovery Version says, “Having escaped the corruption of lust in the world and having thus removed the barriers to the growth of the divine life in us, we are freed to become partakers of the divine nature and to enjoy its riches to the fullest extent in its development by the virtue of God unto His glory.”
Sixth, by reading the Bible our spirit and soul are divided.
Hebrews 4:12 tells us that “the word of God is living and operative and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit and of joints and marrow, and able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Our spirit is deep within our soul. At times it may be difficult to discern between the two because of the doubts and wonderings in our mind. The Word has the power to divide our spirit from our soul, releasing our spirit so that we may enter into the full enjoyment of God, and strengthening our capacity to discern our spirit from our fallen thoughts, intentions, and emotions.
Finally, when we read the Bible, the enemy is defeated and slain.
Ephesians 6:17-18 says, “And receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit and watching unto this in all perseverance and petition concerning all the saints.”
In Matthew 4 Satan tempted the Lord Jesus in the wilderness. The Lord, a sinless and perfect man, defeated Satan by quoting the Bible to him. The Word is a sword, a weapon, with which we can defeat the enemy’s attacks and temptations. As with any weapon, we need to know how to use the Bible and practice using it by daily, prayerful reading and study so we may be fully equipped in all situations.
Note 4 on Ephesians 6:17 in the New Testament Recovery Version says, “The sword, the Spirit, and the word are one. When the constant word in the Bible becomes the instant word, that word is the Spirit as the sword that kills the enemy.”
This is the second podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
In our previous podcast we highlighted some of the benefits of reading the Bible and covered five points concerning what the Bible is. First, the Word is God Himself. Second, all Scripture is God-breathed. Next, the Bible is the complete revelation of God to man. Fourth, the content of the Bible is truth and life. And fifth, the Word of God is life.
Now we’ll go on to consider some of the functions of the Bible in our experience.
Having seen more of what the Bible is, we can realize that it is unique among all books in that we can experience it. The Bible is a book of divine revelation, truth, and life. What other book is filled with divine life—life that we can obtain and enjoy? By God’s mercy, we have a tangible book that opens the way to all spiritual experience. By reading the Bible in a habitual and proper way, we can enter into the depths of its reality. Let’s take a look at some of the functions of the Bible in our experience.
First, the Bible is part of our initial experience of God. The Bible testifies concerning the Lord Jesus, makes us wise unto salvation, and causes us to be regenerated:
John 5:39 says, “It is these [the Scriptures] that testify concerning Me [Christ].”
Second Timothy 3:15 says, “The sacred writings, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through the faith which is in Christ Jesus.”
And in his first epistle, chapter 1 verse 23, Peter writes: “Having been regenerated not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible, through the living and abiding word of God.”
Some people have come to believe in the Lord Jesus simply by reading John 14:6, which says, “I am the way and the reality and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me.” This kind of salvation experience attests to the power of the Bible as the embodiment of God to make a person “wise unto salvation” and to regenerate a person with the divine life it contains.
Second, the Bible is our food.
First Peter 2:2 says, “As newborn babes, long for the guileless milk of the word in order that by it you may grow unto salvation.”
And in Matthew 4:4 the Lord Jesus said, “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out through the mouth of God.”
We must read the Bible because our spiritual life depends upon it. As with all life, if our spiritual life does not receive nourishment, it will weaken and wither. The Bible is our spiritual food. It is both our spiritual milk and bread of life. We must daily nourish our spiritual life by reading the Word.
In Truth Lessons, Witness Lee writes, “Just as our physical life needs nourishment, so also our spiritual life needs nourishment. The nourishment of our spiritual life can only be supplied by the word of the Bible. In order to be living and strong before God, we cannot depend on bread alone, but on every word, that is, the word of the Bible, that proceeds out through the mouth of God. We must take the word of God as food and eat it (Jer. 15:16), even regarding the word of the Bible as more important than our food. (Job 23:12b).”
Many verses speak of God’s Word being our food and the experience of those who have taken in the Word as their sustenance:
Verses such as Jeremiah 15:16: “Your words were found and I ate them, / And Your word became to me / The gladness and joy of my heart.” And Job 23:12: “I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my apportioned food.”
When we eat physical food, it becomes a part of us metabolically, through our metabolism. Similarly, our taking in the Bible as food produces a change in our inward constitution. The more we eat God’s Word, the more we are filled and constituted with Him.
In the Life-study of Second Timothy, Witness Lee says, “Just as the food we eat and digest nourishes us from within, metabolically changing and transforming us, so the Word of God transforms us by inwardly teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing us.”
Note 1 on Jeremiah 15:16 in the Holy Bible Recovery Version says, “According to the entire revelation in the Holy Bible, God’s words are good for us to eat, and we need to eat them (Psa. 119:103; Matt. 4:4; Heb. 5:12-14; 1 Pet. 2:2-3). God’s word is the divine supply as food to nourish us. Through the word as our food, God dispenses His riches into our inner being to nourish us that we may be constituted with His element. This is a crucial aspect of God’s economy. When we eat God’s words, His word becomes our heart’s gladness and joy.”
If we don’t eat physical food, we will grow weaker and eventually die. Similarly, when we neglect the Word, we feel spiritually weak, dry, and dead. But this unhealthy situation can be reversed when we return to His Word and take in the proper nourishment. When we eat the Word, we are revived, supplied, and strengthened spiritually.
The third item of the functions of the Bible in our experience is that the Bible gives us light. Psalm 119:105 says, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Verse 130 goes on to say, “The opening of Your words gives light.” Thus, as footnote 1 on verse 130 in the Recovery Version explains, our reading of the Word produces a result:
“When God’s word is opened, or unfolded, to us, it gives us light, shining inwardly over our heart and our spirit to impart wisdom and revelation to us.”
Note 3 on John 17:17 adds, “When God’s word says, ‘God is light,’ it carries God as light in it.”
Many times we have the experience that when we spend time in the Word, we receive the shining of God as light in our being, making us clear and full of light and revelation.
Fourth, the Bible waters and refreshes us. Deuteronomy 32:2 says, “Let my teaching drop like the rain; / Let my speech distill like the dew, / Like raindrops upon tender grass, / And like abundant showers upon herbage.”
When we live apart from the Lord and His Word, or when the dust of the old and common things settles on us as we go about our daily activities at work or in school, we feel dry and stale. But because the Word is living and new, when we read it we are watered, refreshed, and invigorated.
Note 2 on Isaiah 55:11 in the Holy Bible Recovery Version says, “God has sent forth His word to water His people.”
Fifth, the Bible enables us to have God’s instant speaking. Without God’s written word, it would be difficult for us to have His instant word, His instant speaking to us. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word.” Here the Greek word for “Word” is logos, which denotes the constant word, the eternal and unchanging word of God. In John 6:63 the Lord Jesus said, “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” Here, the Greek word for “words” is rhema, which denotes the instant and present spoken word. The constant word, logos, is necessary in order for us to have the instant word, rhema. The logos is outside of us, and when we receive it into our being it becomes rhema within us, which is spirit and life.
Often we experience the word that we previously read moving within us as the Spirit, speaking to us, teaching us, reproving us, and correcting us. This speaking is the instant word of the indwelling Christ, the rhema word, which issues from our receiving the logos word. Colossians 3:16 tells us that we need to let the logos word of God dwell in us richly. If we do, we’ll have the Lord’s instant speaking to us, and we’ll have the promise from the Lord Jesus in John 15:7: “My words”—rhema words—“abide in you.” The more we have God’s instant speaking, the more we enjoy His presence, see His revelation, and have His leading.
In a message titled, “Reading the Bible,” Watchman Nee writes, “God’s speaking to man today is based upon what He has already spoken in the past. God rarely speaks things which He has not already spoken in the Bible…If a person does not know what God has spoken in the past, it is difficult for him to receive His revelation in the present because he lacks the basis for God’s speaking. Moreover, if God wants to speak something to others through us, He will also do it on the basis of what He has spoken in the past. If we do not know what God has said in the past, He cannot speak through us to others, and we are useless in the eyes of God. This is why we need to let the word of God dwell in us richly. By letting His word dwell in us richly, we know His past ways and hear His present speaking.”
Be sure to listen to the next podcast in this special series on reading the Bible, when we’ll be talking about some of the results that come from reading the Bible.
This is the first podcast in a special series on reading the Bible. These podcasts include helpful excerpts from books by Watchman Nee and Witness Lee that provide insight about reading the Bible.
The Bible is the foundation of Western civilization—morally, politically, literarily. Even the secular world recognizes the Bible as the most influential book in the world. It is the highest in its record of the origin of mankind, human history, and prophecies and in its wisdom, profoundness, ethics, and morality.
While these qualities are compelling enough reasons to read the Bible, they cannot compare with the amazing fact that God Himself is embodied and expressed in His Word. But God does not want His words to remain confined in a book, and He tells us so in the Word:
John 15:7 says, “If you abide in Me and My words abide in you.”
And Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.”
God’s destination is our inward being, and He gets there through His Word. By reading the Bible with our spirit, we can touch God and allow Him to enter into us.
Hebrews 4:12 tells us that “the word of God is living and operative” within us. When we read the Bible in a consistent and prayerful way, the Bible becomes a subjective and practical part of our daily living. It reveals God’s person and fills us with life, truth, and light. Our spiritual life depends on the nourishment we receive from the supply of life in the Word. By contacting the Lord through our reading of the Bible, we are washed, filled in spirit, and infused with faith. Furthermore, as we receive more of the Word, the Lord Himself increases within us, and we mature to become full-grown, fully-equipped men of God.
Now we’ll take a look at what the Bible is.
First, the Word is God.
John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
This verse indicates that God and the Word are not separate, but one. Christ is the living Word of God, as indicated by John 1:14, and the Bible is the written Word of God. Although Christ is not physically with us, He is the Spirit, embodied and expressed in the written Word of God.
In his book The Full Knowledge of the Word of God, Witness Lee says, “Ultimately the word in the Bible is God Himself. It is the embodiment of God Himself. This does not mean that we consider the words in black and white as the living God. What we mean is that the words in black and white contain God Himself.”
In a series of messages titled The Conclusion of the New Testament, he adds: “God is mysterious. He needs the Word to express Him. Christ, as the Word, defines, explains, and expresses Him. Therefore, Christ as the Word, is the definition, explanation, and expression of God. This Word is actually God Himself, not God hidden, concealed, and mysterious, but God defined, explained, and expressed.”
Second, as 2 Timothy 3:16 tells us, the Scripture is God-breathed.
God’s Word, the Scripture, is the breathing out of God. When we touch the breath of God in the Bible, we touch the very essence and substance of the Bible, which is nothing less than the Spirit. In John 6:63 the Lord Jesus said that “it is the Spirit who gives life” and that the words He has spoken are “spirit and are life.” The Word of God is spirit, or breath. When we receive His Word with our spirit, we get God into us.
In another passage in The Full Knowledge of the Word of God, Witness Lee says, “God’s Word is God’s breathing out (2 Tim. 3:16). The Bible is God’s breathing out; that is, it is the breath breathed out by God. The Bible is God’s breathing. To God it is a matter of breathing out; to us it is a matter of breathing in. Through God’s breathing out and our breathing in, God’s word enters into us and becomes our life and life supply. Therefore, when we read the Bible, we must understand that the Bible is not merely black and white words on paper, but it is the breathing out of God. It is full of spiritual breath.”
In the series Truth Lessons he adds, “As Christians, our greatest joy, or shall we say, our greatest blessing, is to be able to contact God and taste Him daily through the word of His breath.”
Third, the Bible is the complete revelation of God to man.
We must read the Bible to know God’s revelation to man. In addition to revealing God’s Person to us, the Bible also reveals God’s plan to accomplish His heart’s desire. God’s heart’s desire can be seen in His economy, which is His plan to dispense Himself as life into us so that we can become His expression. The center of this plan is Christ, and the goal of this plan is the church. The Old Testament contains types, shadows, and figures that show us God’s economy. All these types, shadows, and figures are fulfilled and realized in the New Testament.
When we read the Bible, more of God’s economy is revealed to us, and this revelation becomes a controlling vision that guides our entire Christian life. Reading the Bible brings us into God’s economy.
Note 1 on Genesis 1:1 in the Holy Bible Recovery Version says, “The Bible, composed of two testaments, the Old Testament and the New Testament, is the complete written divine revelation of God to man. The major revelation in the entire Bible is the unique divine economy of the unique Triune God (Eph. 1:10; 3:9; 1 Tim. 1:4b). The centrality and universality of this divine economy is the all-inclusive and unsearchably rich Christ as the embodiment and expression of the Triune God (Col. 2:9; 1:15-19; John 1:18). The goal of the divine economy is the church as the Body, the fullness, the expression, of Christ (Eph. 1:22b-23; 3:8-11), which will consummate in the New Jerusalem as the union, mingling, and incorporation of the processed and consummated Triune God and His redeemed, regenerated, transformed, and glorified tripartite people. The accomplishing of the divine economy is revealed in the Bible progressively in many steps, beginning with God’s creation in Gen. 1—2 and consummating with the new Jerusalem in Rev. 21—22.”
The fourth item of what the Bible is concerns its content; the content of the Bible is truth and life. John 17:17 says, “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.”
By reading the Bible, we come to know the truth. The Lord Jesus said that God’s word is truth. Truth brings us the knowledge of all the realities in the universe, particularly the reality of Christ and the church, and reveals God in His Person and economy. This is God’s desire for us.
In 1 Timothy 2:3-4 we read, “Our Savior God, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth.” God desires for us to know the truth, but as the phrase “come to the full knowledge of the truth” implies, fully knowing the truth is a progressive matter. The Bible always has more to speak to us concerning the truth. Therefore, we must regularly read the Word so that we can be filled more and more with truth and revelation.
In his book Life Lessons, Witness Lee writes, “The content of the Bible is both extensive and inclusive; the two main aspects of this content are truth and life. Truth brings us revelation and knowledge of all the realities in the universe, such as the reality of God, the reality of man, the reality of the universe, the reality of the things of the present age, the coming age, and the eternal age, and in particular, the reality of the Christ appointed by God and the church chosen by Him.”
Fifth, the Word of God is life.
When we read the Word with our spirit, we get life. In John 6:63 Jesus said, “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”
Life is God Himself coming to be our life. As we read the Bible, which is the embodiment of God, He comes into us as life. The more this divine life grows within us, the more we become His expression. Hence, we need to read the Bible so that we may continually receive God as life into us that we may express Him to fulfill His heart’s desire.
In the Life-study of Matthew, Witness Lee says, “The Bible is a book of life. This life is nothing less than the living Person of Christ.”
In Life Lessons he writes, “Life is God coming to be our life that we may be regenerated, grow, be transformed, and be conformed into the image of Christ, who expresses God, that we may become the expression of God.”
Tune in to the next podcast in this special series on reading the Bible to hear about some of the functions of the Bible in our experience.
Lusts—we all have them and we’re all susceptible to them. We can never be safe from them while we’re in these earthly bodies. This is because in the fall of the entire human race, the pure physical body God created for us became the sinful flesh, full of lusts.
We believers are not exempt from this fact. Certainly, when we believed in Jesus Christ, we were forgiven of our sins and saved eternally. We became God’s children, born again with His divine life. But though our spirit was regenerated, our body was not. The sinful lusts in our flesh remain.
That believers still have the lusts of the flesh is proved by many verses in the New Testament, but in this podcast we’ll focus on 2 Timothy 2:22. Here Paul was not speaking to an unbeliever. He gave this word to a young man named Timothy, his brother in the Lord and co-worker in serving the Lord:
“But flee youthful lusts, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.”
If the lusts of the flesh were no longer a problem to Timothy because he was a saved, spiritual person, why would Paul have given him this strong word? And what does this verse mean for us believers today?
Paul’s word to Timothy concerning lusts applies to all of us believers. Although Paul said “youthful” lusts because he was speaking to Timothy, a young man, that doesn’t mean we can ignore this word if we’re older. Whether young or old, we have a corrupted body of sinful lusts that are incited by the world. As Satan’s system, the world has only one aim: to draw us away from God and damage us by feeding our lusts. This evil world system is clearly defined in 1 John 2:16:
“Because all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the vainglory of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.”
Today the world is increasingly persistent with its endless stream of sinful and unclean temptations. And modern technology makes it so easy to gratify our lust by just a quick tap on our phone or a click on our computer. With diverse attractions that cater to our lusts, the world is ever present, tempting us twenty-four hours a day. What should we do?
We should flee! To flee means to escape, to turn away from. It doesn’t mean to struggle with, but to run away from. The Bible does not say to resist lusts or to overcome lusts with a strong faith; no, Paul uses the verb “flee,” a definite and active word, when it comes to how to handle lusts, and Romans 13:14 says, “Make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts.” We can’t afford to be passive or complacent about lusts. Perhaps more than ever before in human history, we have to flee, to run away from, lusts.
Giving in to or indulging in the lusts of our flesh brings damage to us. God created us as vessels to contain and express Him, but Satan wants to damage our vessels—spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically—through the lusts in our flesh. In 1 Thessalonians 4:4-5 Paul spoke this word to the Thessalonian believers:
“That each one of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in the passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God.”
Clearly, no believer is immune to the passion of lust. No matter how much we love the Lord Jesus, no matter how long we’ve been saved or how many experiences of Christ we’ve had, Paul’s word of wisdom to flee is for every believer, since lusts are a constant peril to us all. The way to not be damaged and defiled by lusts but to possess our vessel in sanctification and honor is to flee!
However, Paul didn’t stop at “flee youthful lusts”; he went on to say, “Pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace.” To flee in an aimless, directionless way is difficult. But Paul told us not only to flee from something, but also to pursue toward something.
To pursue means to seek, search out, follow, or run after—another definite, active word.
On one hand, we are to flee something terrible: youthful lusts; on the other, we are to pursue something wonderful: Christ as our real righteousness, faith, love, and peace. While we flee, we also pursue Christ as all these virtues for our living.
Note 2 on this verse in the Recovery Version explains these virtues in our experience:
“Righteousness is toward oneself, faith is toward God, and love is toward others; peace is the issue of these three virtues.”
So when we pursue Christ, the virtues of righteousness, faith, and love can become ours. We experience Christ being our righteousness in our relationship with others, so that we can be right with them. We experience Christ as our living faith in our relationship with God for us to believe in Him. And we experience Christ as our unlimited love with which we can love everyone. As we experience Christ as all these virtues, instead of struggling with lusts, we have Christ as our real peace within.
Fleeing lusts and pursuing Christ shouldn’t be occasional events with us; instead, we should have a daily life of fleeing and pursuing. As we consider our own daily lives in the light of 2 Timothy 2:22, we might stop and ask ourselves, “If I’m not fleeing and pursuing, what am I doing?” Let us daily flee lusts and pursue Christ!
How can we have such a daily life of fleeing lusts and pursuing Christ? All alone, it’s impossible. But Paul wasn’t merely speaking theory or doctrine to us, so in the second half of the verse he gave us the practical way to flee and pursue: “with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.”
To flee and pursue is with those, meaning, with other believers who are also actively fleeing lusts and pursuing Christ, calling upon Him with a pure heart. Besides having a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus, we all need to find some spiritual companions with whom we can pray, read the Bible, call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, consecrate ourselves, and fellowship about growing in the Lord and experiencing Christ every day.
By ourselves, we’re no match for Satan, his world system, and our fallen flesh. But being “with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart” enables us to flee the lusts of the flesh and escape the enticements of the world. And even more, by being “with those” we’re strengthened and encouraged to actively and positively pursue Christ and all He wants to be to us.
As we heed the word to be with others who run after the Lord, we also need to heed the warning in 1 Corinthians 15:33: “Do not be deceived: Evil companionships corrupt good morals.”
The kind of people we’re with influences us. That’s just how it works. So we must be wise and not become companions of people who draw us away from God; instead, we can choose to be with fellow believers who are running away from the damaging lusts of the flesh and running after the Lord Jesus.
We do have our fallen flesh with its lusts, and profuse temptations and unashamed immorality are present wherever we turn. But we can be believers who have a daily life of fleeing lusts and pursuing Christ with other believers. As vessels God created for Himself, we can be filled with Christ as our righteousness, faith, love, and peace. Then we can be vessels unto honor, sanctified, and useful to our beloved Master, as mentioned in 2 Timothy 2:21.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
Many of us have heard these words of the Lord Jesus from Matthew 5:8. But what did He mean? Did He mean that a person who is pure in heart would physically see God, or have a mystical vision of God? What does having a pure heart have to do with seeing God? And isn’t God unapproachable and therefore unseeable?
How do we see God?
We have the answer in 2 Corinthians 4:4 and 6. Verse 4 says: “In whom the god of this age has blinded the thoughts of the unbelievers that the illumination of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, might not shine on them.”
And verse 6 says: “Because the God who said, Out of darkness light shall shine, is the One who shined in our hearts to illuminate the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”
These verses point out that Christ is the very image of God, and that we can see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The very God became a man, our Lord Jesus Christ, and now in Christ, we can see God.
But since the Lord is no longer physically on earth, how and where can we see Him? Second Corinthians 4:6 tells us that our seeing the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is in our hearts. In our hearts, inwardly and subjectively, we see and know God today.
Once we realize that this inward seeing and knowing of God is in our hearts, we can begin to realize the importance of the Lord’s word about being pure in heart in Matthew 5:8. The condition of our heart determines whether or not we see God in our fellowship with Him.
The definition of pure in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “Unmixed with any other matter.”
When something is pure it is unmixed. For instance, when something is described as being pure gold, that means it is nothing but gold; it has a single ingredient with nothing added. So what is a pure heart? Two notes from the Recovery Version are helpful here:
Note 3 on 1 Timothy 1:5 says: “A pure heart is a single heart without mixture, a heart that seeks only the Lord and takes the Lord as the unique goal.”
Note 1 on Matthew 5:8 says: “To be pure in heart is to be single in purpose, to have the single goal of accomplishing God’s will for God’s glory (1 Cor. 10:31).”
When we’re pure in heart we seek the Lord only, take Him as our only goal, and have the accomplishing of God’s will for God’s glory as our only purpose.
The Lord’s Word to us is not “blessed are the clean in heart” but “blessed are the pure in heart.” Our heart may be clean, not dirty with sin, but it may not be pure, unmixed, and single toward the Lord. Anything, not just something sinful, can cause our hearts to be impure, or mixed, toward the Lord.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we seek many things besides the Lord Himself, we have other goals besides the Lord, and we aren’t single or absolute when it comes to God’s will being accomplished.
We may still aim at the Lord, but at the same time, we aim at other things. But even physically, it’s hard for our eyes to focus on two objects at the same time. We end up seeing neither object clearly. In the same way, when we focus on things we’re seeking or aiming at and not on Christ only, it’s hard for us to see God in our fellowship with the Lord.
For instance, things in the world such as wealth, success, material objects, and entertainment can attract our hearts. And when we seek them, our heart is impure toward the Lord. Often we don’t even realize our heart has become divided until we notice how dry and unhappy we’ve become, and how far away the Lord seems.
Perhaps the goal of obtaining a certain kind of degree or career claims more of our heart, and we’re no longer undivided in our loving and seeking of the Lord Jesus. Maybe we even ask the Lord to help us obtain our goal, not realizing we’ve lost sight of accomplishing His will. And although having such a goal perhaps isn’t sinful, when it becomes our main goal in life, it distracts us from seeking the Lord Himself as our goal.
Even seemingly spiritual things can make our heart impure. For example, studying the Word to know many things in the Bible may become the goal in our heart, rather than knowing the Lord Himself. Or we may pursue good conduct, or take good works as our goal—even in service to God—rather than the Lord only.
Because we’re fallen, we’re all susceptible to having a mixed heart. That’s why it’s so important for us to have daily time with the Lord. As we spend time in the Lord’s presence, He is faithful to enlighten us concerning any sins we need to confess to Him. But in addition to confessing our sins to Him and experiencing His forgiveness and washing, we can pray for our hearts to be made not just clean, but pure, so that we seek Him only. We can allow Him to show us anything that distracts us from Him by praying like this:
“Lord, save me from having a mixed heart. Purify my heart. Show me anything in my heart, good or bad, that has become my goal or aim besides Your dear Person. Show me anything that competes with You for the focus of my heart. Lord, make my heart pure toward You and Your will. I love You, Lord.”
As the Lord purifies our hearts, we will experience one of the greatest blessings—we will see more of who He is and know Him in a deeper way. What a joy it is to see God!
A professor at a world-renowned American university regularly inquired at the beginning of his course, “If you could ask God one question, what would it be?” Students routinely answered that they’d ask for money or material things. But on one occasion a student responded, “I’d ask God, What’s the purpose of my life?” This was right after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.
In the wake of cataclysmic events such as 9/11, horrific campus violence, huge earthquakes, killer hurricanes, devastating tsunamis, and unprecedented economic collapse, questions about life that lie deep down in us make their way to the surface.
Eventually the trauma subsides, and life, as it must, goes on. We’re occupied with the usual college pursuits of studies, sports, a busy social life, and a plethora of campus activities. But in moments of quiet reflection, if we’re honest with ourselves, the big question haunts us—What is the meaning of my life?
Students are attending college in an era of unprecedented social liberation, technological innovation, and instant access to information. The Internet and social media seem to make the world a smaller, more connected place. And yet true global peace eludes mankind as hostilities increase on nearly every continent. Continued economic upheaval, war, injustices, environmental dangers, and societal violence plague the modern world and make us wonder what it’s all about.
The student who wanted to ask God about the purpose of his life isn’t alone in his perplexity. Where is the answer? America’s institutions of higher learning are known for advocating atheism, moral relativism, and a mind-boggling array of world philosophies. This atmosphere encourages students to search into everything but the Bible, which is routinely scorned as being outdated or fictional. Those who read it and believe its words are thought to be superstitious, ignorant, or intellectually weak.
Yet it is the Bible that answers the ultimate question of life. It unlocks the mysteries of God, the universe, and our existence. The Bible shows us that God created us in a particular way—as vessels to contain Him and to express Him. Just as a glove is made in the shape of a hand with the sole purpose of containing the hand, we were made in the image of God with the sole purpose of containing and expressing Him. No wonder engaging in humanitarian work, adopting noble causes, or immersing ourselves in entertainment fails to fill the deep void in us. We weren’t created for these things. Instead of being fulfilled, we feel aimless, meaningless, and futile. Until God becomes our content, we are empty and purposeless.
For God to be our content, He became a man, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was God Himself who lived a perfect, sinless life on this earth. He gave up His life for us by being crucified to redeem us and to wash us of all our sins. Not only so, He was raised from the dead, and in resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit. As the life-giving Spirit, He is everywhere and available to everyone, like the air. He will enter anyone who believes in Him. When He comes into us, He fills us with Himself as the unique content that we as vessels were created for. He and we are a perfect match. Our inner emptiness is filled. We become people whose lives are meaningful and purposeful, containing God and expressing God. This is the meaning of human life.
Finding the meaning of our life begins with receiving the Lord Jesus. He is with you as you read this, desiring to come into you. You can receive Him by opening to Him in prayer right now:
“Lord Jesus, thank You for making me as a vessel to contain You. Thank You for dying for me. Lord, forgive me of all my sins. I believe in You and I receive You. Lord Jesus, come into me. Thank You for filling me with Yourself. Amen.”
When we believed in Jesus Christ, we were forgiven by God and delivered from eternal judgment. Not only so, we were also born again, regenerated with the life of God in our spirit. We thank the Lord for these wonderful realities! What tremendous mercy God had on us!
But let’s take a moment to ask, Why? Why did God save us? Why did He regenerate us? Going back even further, why did God create us to begin with?
Our general view of God may be that He is kind, loving, and full of compassion; that as Almighty God, He has everything He needs and lacks nothing; that He is a benevolent Being, whose main role is to care for the needs of His creatures, namely us human beings. God wants to keep me safe, help me get good grades, arrange for me a great job, find me the perfect spouse, solve my problems—the list goes on.
When this is our view of God, our prayers naturally revolve around ourselves. We ask Him for things that meet our needs or fulfill our wants. And when it comes to knowing God’s will, we usually pray, “God, what is Your will for me?” Somehow, we always end up at the center.
But does God have a greater goal in mind than my personal welfare? Does He have a desire for Himself? A will that’s greater than His will for where I should work or who I should marry? Does He want something in particular?
God is indeed a loving and kind Being. And while it’s true that He is God Almighty who lacks nothing, in another sense He does have a need, because He has a desire deep in His heart that hasn’t yet been fulfilled. And because He has this desire, God has a way, a plan, to gain what He longs for.
We can somewhat realize God has a particular desire just by observing our own lives. Each of us wants joy and satisfaction. But why is that? We weren’t taught to be that way. Actually, our desire for joy and satisfaction is a reflection of God’s desire for joy and satisfaction—because we were made in the image of God.
The same is true of our goals, which stem from our desires. Most of us, from the time we’re young and as we grow to adulthood, begin to form plans to fulfill our wants and desires. We have goals—some big, some small, some short-term, some long-term. And because of these, we don’t usually live in a purposeless or aimless way. Our goals arise from something we want that will make us happy, and so we plan our lives accordingly.
We as human beings make plans to fulfill our desires and take steps to achieve our aims. So what about the God in whose image we were made? Surely His desires are even deeper, and His plans correspondingly greater!
The Bible tells us clearly that God has a desire and a plan to fulfill that desire. Ephesians 1:9 shows us God has a desire: “Making known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Himself.”
The words “will,” “good pleasure,” and “purposed” clue us in to the fact that God has a particular desire, a good pleasure that will make Him happy and satisfy His heart. Because of this God planned and purposed to obtain that desire.
Revelation 4:11 says, “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive the glory and the honor and the power, for You have created all things, and because of Your will they were, and were created.”
Note 2 in the New Testament Recovery Version on this verse says: “God is a God of purpose, having a will of His own pleasure. He created all things for His will that He might accomplish and fulfill His purpose.”
The purposeful God didn’t create the universe haphazardly or on a whim. No, He had a desire, a good pleasure, and so He created all things according to His will, according to a plan to fulfill that desire. The millions of items of God’s creation, including we ourselves, were created purposely for God’s will so that He could obtain what would bring Him joy!
We’ve discussed in previous podcasts how God wants to have an intimate, subjective, and loving relationship with human beings by coming to live in them and being their life so that they can become His expression. This is why He formed and shaped us in such a specific way, with a spirit enabling us to receive and contain Him and a soul for us to express Him.
But a single individual alone cannot possibly express all that God is. God’s intention is that the human beings who receive Him personally would together become a living entity, full of His life, to express Him to the entire universe.
This living entity is the church. Ephesians 1:22-23 says, “The church, which is His Body, the fullness of the one who fills all in all.”
Note 3 on verse 23 explains: “Christ, who is the infinite God without any limitation, is so great that He fills all things in all things. Such a great Christ needs the church to be His fullness for His complete expression.”
No wonder God longs to have the church; through it He can be expressed! And His blueprint, His plan, for gaining the church includes each one of us.
It may seem strange to hear that the church is God’s heart’s desire. If our understanding is that the church is a physical building or a religious organization, to say that the church is the desire of God surely doesn’t make sense. This is why we need to put aside what we usually think of when we read or hear the word “church,” and instead see what the church really is as it is revealed in God’s Word.
In future podcasts we’ll delve further into the matter of the church, helping us to appreciate it as God’s goal and see how we were saved for that goal.
For now, we can consider the verses in this podcast before the Lord and pray to see that God has a desire, a will, and that this desire is the church. We can pray, “Lord, open my eyes and give me revelation to see Your heart’s desire. Show me what the church is according to Your Word.”
By the step of transmission, God’s breath, from its intangible reality, was received and recorded as written text, readable and knowable by mankind. The next step, Bible translation, involved the process of freeing the written manuscripts from the confines of their ancient tongues and rendering them into modern languages.
The capstone of receiving and translating the Bible is understanding the intended meaning of its contents. The Bible may be translated into our language but for us to understand what we’re reading, we need the proper interpretation.
God’s Word is food to us (Matt. 4:4), yet for it to nourish us we need the Word to be opened to us, bringing us into proper understanding. Therefore, in Psalm 119:16 and 130, the Psalmist delighted not only in the Lord’s word (Psa. 119:16) but also in the “opening of [the] words,” which “gives light, / Imparting understanding to the simple” (verse 130). Proper spiritual interpretation opens the Word so that we can perceive its proper meaning.
Hermeneutics is the study of the methods or principles of interpretation. It has historically involved precise attention to the grammar and logic of the Bible, as well as to the Bible’s psychological and historical contexts. The goal of hermeneutics is to develop an interpretational key, a governing principle that stands apart from any individual passage, to present the central message of the Bible.
It is necessary to interpret the Bible guided by a hermeneutic key, particularly in rendering challenging passages, resolving apparent discrepancies, and assembling the central message of the Bible developed through various passages. Throughout history, interpreters of the Bible have developed different hermeneutic keys, touching on various aspects of God’s interactions with and activities related to man.
The highest and best hermeneutic should ultimately reveal not only what God does but also who God is according to His intrinsic being.
A major deficiency of written text is its inability to convey the tone or sense of dialogue as fully and clearly as an animate speaker could. For this reason, in the Old Testament time when the Scriptures were read aloud to God’s people, Nehemiah 8:8 tells us that the reading was accompanied by “interpreting and giving the sense, so that they understood the reading.”
Written translation by itself is in one sense an elementary form of interpretation; however, with translation alone, it’s as if we were left with only a transcript of a discussion, without a clear sense of the speaker’s tone, inflection, pacing, volume, even gestures and movements. Such paraverbal and nonverbal elements are regarded by studies of communications as accounting for 90 percent of what is understood and perceived. Thus, we can begin to understand the difficulty; we need not only an accurate translation, but also a proper interpretation to fully grasp the sense of a passage of Scripture.
The hermeneutic study of Scripture involves establishing a solid and “complex set of rules for finding and expressing the true sense of the inspired writers.” Such study can be neither light nor cursory, and while formalizing and standardizing a basis for interpretation cannot eliminate discrepancies among different interpretations, it can expose a host of illogical, irrelevant, or otherwise improper interpretations.
Having an external framework for evaluating passages in a work as complex and as rich as the Bible, which contains the writings of over 40 authors in an array of literary genres, allows us to see a central thought or theme in the Scriptures as a context for assembling the intended meaning of the Word.
The aim of hermeneutic study is to capture the sincere and full sense of each passage of the Bible. Word studies, lexicons, and commentaries are tools used to study several facets of the Scriptures:
First, the language of the text—requiring a knowledge of the original languages of the sacred texts and their grammar and logic;
Second, the context of the text—the relation of a particular passage to its surrounding verses and the overall context of its book;
Third, the psychology of the writer and the historical context;
And fourth, the items of truth discussed by the particular passage, for example, justification, sanctification, salvation, etc., according to their full definition and development throughout the Scriptures.
Then, based on these textual elements, hermeneutics will tend to expound a passage along particular lines of meaning: (1) literal, (2) moral, (3) allegorical, or (4) anagogical (that is, prophetic).
Parallelism, interpreting the Scriptures by means of the Scriptures based on the belief in the unity of Scripture, is another prevailing hermeneutic principle.
All of these approaches to interpretation suggest a viewpoint that underlies the text of the Scriptures, stands apart from individual passages, and unifies the message of the Bible. The body of these principles supplies the hermeneutic key by which one interprets and understands the Bible.
Through 2,000 years of church history, we can see a spectrum of interpretations that guided the understanding and teaching of prominent Bible teachers. Several interpretational keys have advanced our understanding of the Scriptures:
One such interpretational key is the distinction between the Law and the Gospel: Martin Luther, long heralded as the “father of the Reformation,” applied this distinction as the governing principle in his understanding and teaching of the entire Bible. In fact, Luther summarized the entire Old Testament as being the law, representing God’s demands upon man and exposing man’s inability to fulfill these demands, and the New Testament as the gospel, being a book full of the glad tidings of God’s promises through Christ, particularly to justify man by faith. Luther stated that “[t]here is no book in the Bible in which both are not found. God has always placed side by side both law and promise.“ Luther encouraged others to read the Bible based on this principle: “Therefore, hold to this distinction, and no matter what books you have before you, be they of the Old or of the New Testament, read them with a discrimination [of law and gospel].”
Reformed theology, grounded in the teachings of John Calvin, interprets the Bible based on two covenants—the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. While there are passages that seem to support Calvin’s covenant theology, this particular interpretation needs a proper balancing and an understanding of the richness of the divine truth.
Another interpretational key is sanctification. John Wesley’s interpretation of the Bible introduced the teaching of the eradication of sin through both instantaneous and gradual sanctification. Thus, man is both justified by faith and sanctified by faith.
John Nelson Darby, a leader of the Plymouth Brethren, greatly advanced the understanding of dispensations whereby God deals with man in different ways in different ages according to His purpose in that particular age. The Brethren understood the cutting straight of the word referred to in 2 Timothy 2:15 to be the dividing of the Bible into its various dispensations: innocence, conscience, human government, promise, law, grace, and kingdom.
All of these interpretational keys have Scriptural basis, and for the most part they advanced our understanding of the Bible. But the simultaneous existence of multiple valid interpretational guides—not to mention many conflicting ones as well—suggests that logical soundness and a basis in Scripture alone can’t render a hermeneutic key as fully satisfactory. An interpretation of Scripture, while generally applied to the entire text, may be 100 percent correct, but in scope it may pertain to only part of the revelation in the Bible.
For example, some interpretations of the Bible may account for God as the Righteous Judge, as the Creator, or as our Heavenly Father, but do not offer an explanation for God’s being triune.
This leads us to search for an ultimate interpretational key to the Scripture, one that not only agrees with other sound interpretational keys and is entirely supported by the text of the Scripture, but that also encompasses the full revelation of the Bible.
What then is the “master key,” the ultimate interpretational key to the Scripture that unlocks its full meaning to us?
As stated previously, the highest and best hermeneutic should reveal not only what God does, but also who God is according to His intrinsic being. The Bible reveals that God in His intrinsic being is the Triune God—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
From Genesis to Revelation, the master key to unlocking the Bible’s meaning is the divine economy of the Triune God.
Simply stated, God’s economy is God’s plan and way to impart Himself into mankind in order to gain His expression.
The words “God’s economy” are from 1 Timothy 1:4. The word “economy,” translated from the original Greek word oikonomia, means an arrangement or administration, primarily within a household. God has His economy, His arrangement, and this economy encompasses everything God does and everything He is.
God’s speaking has passed through the incredible journey of transmission and translation. Not only so, but by the step of interpretation, especially with the discovery of the master key of God’s economy, mankind can understand the Bible’s intended meaning.
The economy of God is the master key that opens our understanding and allows us to see the central revelation of the entire Bible. We can see that throughout the Bible the Triune God—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—dispenses Himself into man. By this dispensing, God attains His purpose of having His expression through man for eternity.
The matter of God’s economy is full, deep, and rich, and it cannot be covered adequately in this podcast. We encourage you to read The Economy of God by Witness Lee for a full explanation. You can order a free copy at biblesforamerica.org.
This is the second podcast in a special, three-part series on the history of the Bible. Where did the Bible come from? How did it come to be in English and so many other languages? Knowing the history of this most precious Book will increase our appreciation of the written Word of God and its availability to us today, and will motivate us to treasure the Bible and read it regularly.
In this podcast we’ll consider the translation of the Bible. How did the Bible survive and spread throughout all of human history?
It is no small matter that today we can read the Bible in a language we understand. Although the Word of God had been completely transmitted and recorded for hundreds of years, for a long time almost no one was able to read it.
First Timothy 2:3-4 says, “Our Savior God, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth.”
For all men to receive salvation and come to the full knowledge of the truth, they must be able to apprehend the salvation revealed in the Bible and understand the truth God desires them to come to the full knowledge of. And since different people speak different languages, it was necessary for the Bible to be translated into various languages in order to make it accessible to all. The goal of translation is to provide all men with a translation of the Holy Word in their own language.
Beginning in the late Middle Ages, the endeavor to translate the Bible from its original languages into languages people could understand was fraught with opposition and undertaken at great sacrifice. As translators first began to translate the Bible into vernacular (or, common) languages, such as German, French, and English, fierce resistance arose from the Roman Catholic Church. Since much of what the Roman Catholic Church taught and practiced was not mentioned in the Bible or was even forbidden in the Bible, to allow the common people access to the pure Word of God would damage the system of the clergy with all of the benefits to those who were in its ranks. The Catholic Church, working directly with secular (or, non-religious) sovereigns and nations, slaughtered thousands of believers who disagreed with its doctrines and practices. Thus, for anyone to translate the Bible into the vernacular languages of the day was to risk one’s life.
Nevertheless, such adversity and opposition did not deter those who sought to make God’s Word available to all. The words of Martin Luther are apt testimony of the resolve of those who risked their lives for the Word of God: “The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still.” Today, as the beneficiaries of their labor and sacrifice, we do well to treasure, read, and assimilate the fruit of all their labor.
Although faithful men labored and risked their lives so the Bible could be made available to all, literacy among the common people also needed to increase.
Prior to the fourteenth century, literacy was rare and often limited to the clergy. But with the new culture of the Italian Renaissance, literacy began to be promoted as a social endeavor rather than a skill limited to the clergy. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the clergy’s monopoly on literacy was being decisively overthrown. The ability to read and write was highly esteemed and regarded as being immensely important, and more and more people became literate. Reading developed into a matter of personal enrichment. As a result, the demand for books soared. One scholar noted that “the rise in literacy created a virtually insatiable appetite for reading material,” yet the supply of books lagged far behind.
In order to spread vernacular translations of the Bible so that people could read them, a technology that could produce copies of the Bible in large numbers was needed. Before the invention of the printing press, book production was labor intensive, costly, highly inefficient, and time consuming. Trained scribes painstakingly copied text and illustrations by hand. Because of the rise in literacy and the corresponding high demand for books, entrepreneurs began to search for a way to improve the process of book making and to reduce the cost. Johannes Gutenberg was the first to achieve a breakthrough with a new technology: movable metal type. Having completed his monumental invention, the first modern printing press, Gutenberg proceeded to print a book—the Book. In 1456, Gutenberg produced the first Bible that was printed by moveable type.
It is impossible to quantify the effect the printing press has had upon humanity. One historian relates, “Now copies of books could be reproduced more rapidly, more cheaply, and with a higher degree of accuracy than had ever been possible previously.” Of particular importance is the profound effect printing had on the journey of the Bible. Without the printing press, the translated Bible would not have been as widely available to the common man. Gutenberg’s invention made the goal of those who labored to translate the Bible into vernacular languages achievable.
William Tyndale, to whom we owe the first printed English Bible, was greatly used by the Lord to make His Word accessible and understandable to ordinary men. For many centuries, governments and religious entities severely limited the layperson’s access to the Bible by confining it to languages requiring scholarly study. Tyndale was driven by the belief that “the root cause of much confusion in people’s minds [in Biblical matters] was ignorance of the Scripture. If this ignorance could be corrected, the eyes of all would be opened and the truth made clearly known.”
Armed with such a conviction, Tyndale devoted his life to properly translating and widely distributing the Bible in the language of the common man. Despite the repeated confiscation and destruction of his work and the constant threat to his life, he remained faithful to his service in the face of immense opposition, even until his death as a martyr.
An inspired and prolific translator, William Tyndale faithfully rendered the original Greek text into the first complete printed New Testament in English, the 1526 Worms New Testament. Two copies still exist today. He was the first to translate anything from Hebrew, a language virtually unknown in England at the time, into English when he published the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) in 1530.
Although Tyndale spent much of his life working amid relentless persecution from the king of England, ironically, the highly regarded King James Bible, published only 80 years after his own version was printed, borrowed from Tyndale’s work almost word for word.
William Tyndale’s effect on the English language is immeasurable, even to the extent that some claim, “Without Tyndale, no Shakespeare.” Tyndale’s masterful work demonstrates his greatly admired talent for balancing accuracy and clarity, the latter affording him great variety of expression. His unique ability as a translator was rooted in his technical skills of fluent and accurate Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, and four other languages, and from his complete understanding of the complex art of rhetoric. His unadorned poetic style in structuring the English translation can be seen in many widely recognized phrases, such as “let there be light” (Gen. 1:3); “my brother’s keeper” (Gen. 4:9); “the salt of the earth” (Matt. 5:13); “give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11; King James Version); “for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found” (Luke 15:32, King James Version); and “the powers that be” (Rom. 13:1, King James Version).
William Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire, England, circa 1494 (the exact date of his birth is unknown), into a prosperous, well-connected family. He studied at the University of Oxford, obtaining his bachelor of arts degree in 1512 and his master’s degree in 1515, which permitted him to read theology for the first time. He was appalled that this official study did not include studying the Scripture.
He later attended Cambridge University and may have gained his competency in Greek there. For a short period he was a tutor to a Gloucestershire family, where at the dinner table he engaged local church officials in lively discourse over what were often conflicting views of biblical truths. He was even summoned before the diocese on a charge of heresy, which was dropped. John Fox, in his Book of Martyrs, describes one debate during which Tyndale announced to a clergyman that he meant to translate the Bible into English so that even a farmer could know more of the Scriptures than the clergyman himself.
Since Tyndale could not translate the Word of God in England without episcopal license, he went to London where he appealed to the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, to support his work. His appeal was unsuccessful. It was difficult, if not impossible, to independently translate the Bible in England with King Henry VIII, a Catholic “Defender of the Faith,” on the throne. So Tyndale sailed for continental Europe and began translating the New Testament into English there in early 1524. By August 1525, the work was practically complete and prepared for printing in Cologne, Germany. The local government, alerted to the progress, forbade the printing, causing Tyndale to gather his work before it was seized and flee up the Rhine to Worms. The first complete printed New Testament in English appeared in February 1526, and copies began to reach England a month later.
For the first time, the whole New Testament, faithfully translated from the original Greek (rather than from the erroneous Catholic Latin version), could be read by anyone who could read English. This alarmed the English authorities, and Bishop Tunstall himself sent out a prohibition of the book, labeling it a “pestiferous and most pernicious poison.” He gathered all the copies he could find for public burnings and bought large quantities of the books in Europe before they reached England. Ironically, Tyndale used much of the money he received from these bulk orders to revise and print updated versions. Though the Church authorities tried to prevent the spread of Tyndale’s New Testament, they did not succeed. There is evidence that in many parts of England, groups of people met to read and hear the Word.
William Tyndale spent the next few years working freely in Antwerp. However, in the spring of 1535 a young Englishman befriended him and then treacherously betrayed him for money. Tyndale was kidnapped and imprisoned in the fortress of Vilvorde, just north of Brussels. He was tried for heresy before 17 commissioners and chose to defend himself, not by legal maneuvering, but from the Scriptures. He wrote his defense in a book entitled Sola fides justificat apud Deum, meaning “Faith alone justifies before God.”
Eventually Tyndale was condemned to death, and after 16 months in prison, he was “brought forth to the place of execution…tied to the stake, strangled by the hangman, and afterwards consumed with fire, at the town of Vilvorde, 1536; crying at the stake with a fervent zeal, and a loud voice, ‘Lord, open the king of England’s eyes!’”
Surely Tyndale would have rejoiced to know that his prayer was heard: within months of his martyrdom, a complete English Bible, two-thirds of it his own work and licensed by King Henry VIII himself, was circulating in Britain.
Be sure to listen to part 3 of this series on The History of the Bible to learn about Bible interpretation, or how we understand the Bible.
This is the first podcast in a special, three-part series on the history of the Bible. Where did the Bible come from? How did it come to be in English and so many other languages? Knowing the history of this most precious Book will increase our appreciation of the written Word of God and its availability to us today, and will motivate us to treasure the Bible and read it regularly.
The Bible is the greatest book in the universe. Much more than merely a Christian book of morals and stories, the Bible is the speaking of God to man. But how did the Word of our God, recorded so long ago, reach us in its written form? The Bible has taken an incredible journey—from God’s mouth to our hands. To grasp the magnitude and preciousness of this journey, we will look into the three major steps by which the Bible reached us: transmission, translation, and interpretation.
By the first step of the journey, transmission, God communicated His word to man by speaking to man; this speaking was recorded and preserved in written form.
By the second step, translation, the Bible was made available to all men in the languages common people could understand. Thousands willingly risked and even gave up their lives to translate the Word from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin so that all could read it.
Finally, by the step of interpretation, as the culmination of the first two steps, God used faithful men to extract the profound and hidden truths in the Bible through its proper interpretation.
These three steps of the Bible’s epic journey have brought forth the transmitted, properly translated, and properly interpreted Bible. Today the Bible is unlocked and more accessible than ever before.
Now we’ll take a look at where the Bible came from—its transmission to us.
Our God is a speaking God (Heb. 1:1-2). He has given us a great treasure—His speaking—recorded in physical form as the Holy Bible. By speaking, God has manifested Himself, thus revealing His very being and His purpose to humanity. Men recorded what God spoke, preserving God’s speaking for all mankind. The transmission of the Holy Bible is the process by which man obtained, preserved, and passed on God’s speaking through time.
To further understand the transmission of the Bible, we need to examine the source and essence of the Bible, and the means by which God conveyed His speaking to us.
Its source is found in 2 Timothy 3:16a: “All Scripture is God-breathed.” The Bible being the very breath of God proves that God Himself is the source of the Bible. God’s breathing is not only the source of the Bible but also the means by which God conveyed His word to man.
The essence of the Bible is spoken of in John 6:63b: “The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.” The very essence, the constituent, of the Word is also God as the Spirit. God is Spirit, hence, the Word is the embodiment of God as the Spirit; when you touch the Word, you touch God as the Spirit.
As a book, the Bible is unique; its source, essence, and means of conveyance to man set it apart from all works written by human authors.
Second Peter 1:21b says, “Men spoke from God while being borne by the Holy Spirit.”
God used certain men to record what He spoke to them. Although it was men who physically recorded the words of the Bible, man’s will, desire, and wish, with his thought and exposition, were not the source. The source of the Bible is God, by whose Holy Spirit men were borne to speak out God’s will, desire, and wish. Therefore, while the source of the Bible is God, man was the means by which God recorded and preserved His word. Mankind is also the intended recipient of God’s Word.
First Timothy 2:4 says that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the full knowledge of the truth,” so the Bible was written in languages understood and spoken by human beings. The Bible is one book. However, because of the tumultuous history of the Jews, the people to whom God entrusted the recording of the Bible, the Bible was written in three languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.
Hebrew was the original language of God’s chosen people, Israel. God caused the first Hebrew, Abraham, to leave Babylon and the Babylonian language, and to dwell in the land of Canaan where he acquired a new language, the language of Canaan, which eventually developed into Hebrew.
During the time that some of the Old Testament was being written, Israel fell into captivity in the lands of Aramaic-speaking people. Thus, a few portions in the Old Testament were recorded in Aramaic. At the time of the Lord Jesus, the Jews spoke Aramaic among themselves, and a few Aramaic words were recorded in the New Testament.
The majority of the New Testament, recorded during the Roman Empire, was originally written in Greek, a rich, concise, and expressive language. From a linguistic point of view, Greek was not only the best language for recording and conveying the richness of the Bible but also the lingua franca (or, universal language) of the Roman Empire, which at that time encompassed most of the known world. Because the New Testament was recorded in Greek, the revelation contained in the Scriptures was widely spread throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. The Bible’s being recorded and preserved in human languages shows that what God conveyed in the Bible was meant for mankind to understand and enjoy.
During the time the Bible was being written, writing materials were costly and difficult to obtain. In general, the most durable, cost-efficient, and accessible materials were used to record and reproduce the text of the Bible. In the ancient world, the media that met these requirements progressed from stone to clay tablets, to papyrus, leather, parchment, and, eventually, paper.
If the Bible had not been recorded upon suitable media that could be preserved and disseminated with relative ease, the revelation of the person and purpose of God would have been available and beneficial only to the people living at the time it was recorded. However, because God desires that all mankind have access to His Word, the Bible was recorded on the most suitable and durable materials available. Today, the revelation contained in the Bible continues to be accessible to everyone.
Eventually, the Bible was canonized. Canonization is man’s recognition that what was written down and recorded by God-inspired men was in fact God’s own speaking.
The word canon has two basic meanings in relation to the Scripture. First, it is the list of books accepted as being the Holy Scripture. Second, it denotes a rule or standard. The Bible is the rule or standard against which all Christian beliefs and practices are measured.
It is important to understand that regardless of whether or not mankind recognizes the Bible as the speaking of God, it is still, in fact, the speaking of God. The Bible neither requires nor benefits from man’s acknowledgement of it.
Historically, however, from man’s standpoint, the last part of the Bible’s transmission was its recognition by men as being the Word of God. The Bible’s canonization over time attests to its authenticity as God’s Word. One author describes the process of canonization by saying:
“There is no need to declare a tree by its name. It only needs to grow up gradually, to bloom, and to bear fruit; spontaneously men will recognize what kind of tree it is. In the same way, whether or not the books of the Bible were from God is best answered by the test of time. The values and authority of the books spontaneously manifest themselves.”
Listen to part 2 of The History of the Bible to learn about the translation of the Bible into English.
We human beings are complicated. Every one of us is unique, with different backgrounds and personalities. But with respect to how God created us, we’re actually all the same. The Bible tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 that we were all created with three basic parts: a spirit, a soul, and a body:
“And the God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
We can illustrate man’s three parts with a simple diagram. Picture three concentric circles; the outermost circle represents the body as the visible part of our being; in the middle, the second circle represents the soul as our inward part; and the central, smallest circle represents our spirit as our innermost, hidden part.
Let’s consider each of these three parts and their corresponding functions.
Our body through its five senses contacts the visible, touchable, tangible things of the material world. It’s the most outward and visible part of our being, and by it we exist and experience the things in the physical realm. But of course, we’re more than just a physical body.
Our soul, though unseen, is just as real as our body. By our soul, we experience things in the psychological realm. In fact, the Greek word for soul in the Bible is psuche, which is also the root word of psychology. Our soul is composed of our mind, which enables us to do things like think, reason, consider, remember, and wonder; our emotions, which enable us to have feelings like happiness, sorrow, anger, relief, and compassion; and our will, which enables us to choose and make decisions. Our mind, emotion, and will make up our soul, which is our personality, who we are within.
But we are even more than just a body with a soul within. We have a part that’s deeper than our soul—our spirit, which is the deepest and most hidden part of our being. By our spirit we can contact the spiritual realm. No other creature was created with this third part, the spirit, within. By our spirit God is real to us and we can contact Him, receive Him, contain Him, and fellowship with Him.
God created us with a spirit because He wants to know us, have a relationship with us, and even live in us.
Not only was our spirit made for God, but our spirit also has the ability to contact, receive, and worship God. As John 4:24 says, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truthfulness.”
John 3:6 tells us that we are born of the Spirit in our spirit. After we are born of God, we continue to contact and worship Him by our spirit.
God’s desire for us is that we human beings with all three parts would be vessels to contain and express Him. As we saw, God’s purpose is to come into our spirit to fill it with Himself. When we believe in Jesus Christ, He comes to live in us as our new life. He is in our spirit as the new Person in us so that He would be expressed through our entire being: spirit, soul, and body. This all begins when we receive Him into our spirit and are regenerated, or born again.
Before Christ came into us as the new life in our spirit, our soul was our leading part. We pretty much did everything by the thoughts and desires of our soul. We made decisions with our soul based on our own thoughts and considerations, our own feelings, and our own discernment. Whether we lived a good life or a bad life, a moral life or an immoral life, we lived a life in the soul.
But God’s desire is that once we’re saved, with a new life and with Christ as our new person living in us, our spirit would become the leading part of our being, not our soul. When we live by our spirit, our soul begins to express God’s life instead of our own.
Every day, even every moment, we have a choice. We can live by the old, independent life of our soul, or we can live by Christ as the new life and Person in our spirit. We can choose to allow our spirit to be our leading part, using our will to turn our mind to our spirit and to take in God’s living Word, allowing our emotions to be awakened and stirred to love God, and presenting our body to live a proper human life.
God’s intention in giving us three parts—a spirit, soul, and body—was that we would be vessels to contain Him and express Him. By choosing to live by our spirit, our third part, our soul and even our body will function together to fulfill God’s purpose.
In Philippians 4:6, we’re given a seemingly impossible command: “In nothing be anxious.”
Each of us has a long list of anxiety-inducing circumstances—relationship issues, financial woes, naughty children, pressure at work, no work, and so on. And in addition to our personal life, the world today seems to manufacture large-scale anxiety-inducing events—economic uncertainty, war, social upheaval—delivered to us on a conveyor belt of 24-hour news coverage. Is God’s command outdated or unreasonable, given so many difficulties?
God’s Word is unchanging, and its truth stands, uninfluenced by circumstances and changing times. So as believers, we have to take this command seriously. But how can we obey such a command? How is it possible not to be anxious in anything?
We need to look at what precedes this command and what follows it. One principle of studying the Bible is to never isolate a verse and interpret it on its own. Context is important. What precedes “In nothing be anxious” is Philippians 4:5, one of the most comforting assurances in the entire Bible: “The Lord is near.”
This fact applies to the Lord’s coming back, certainly, but it also applies to His presence with us today. He is near to us right now. In fact, He is as near as can be. He is within us, in our human spirit.
It’s impossible to be anxious in nothing under our own power. God knows this and has no expectation for us to carry out this command by ourselves. “The Lord is near” proves that with the Lord’s demand comes His supply to meet that demand.
Our tendency, however, is to focus on the demand rather than the supply. We read, “In nothing be anxious,” and we get anxious trying not to be anxious. Instead, we should focus on the supply afforded to us by the Lord to meet His demand, which is His very presence. On our own, we see the command as unreasonable, but when we recognize the Lord’s presence with us, it’s our anxiety that becomes unreasonable, since He is near and ready to help us. If we realize the Lord’s nearness, we’ll also realize there’s no need for us to be troubled.
So preceding the command, we have the word telling us that the Lord is near and ready to help us. But what about our list of burdens that cause us to be anxious? How do we transfer these cares to Him? We have to see that what follows the command in Philippians 4:6 is the way to carry out that command: “In nothing be anxious, but in everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”
This verse tells us that in everything—in every matter, every circumstance, every situation—we can pray and petition with thanksgiving, and let our requests be made known to God.
The notes in the Recovery Version are helpful in applying this verse:
The note on prayer reads: “Prayer is general, having worship and fellowship as its essence; petition is special, being for particular needs.”
And the note on thanksgiving says: “Both our prayer and our petition should be accompanied by our giving thanks to the Lord.”
The Lord is near, and by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, we can simply tell Him what we’re going through. We can let Him know our needs and specific requests and be saved from our cares. With the Lord nearby, there’s no need for us to carry our burdens by ourselves.
Watchman Nee, a Bible teacher and author, once used the illustration of three construction workers passing bricks up some stairs. One man passes bricks from the first level up to the next, and the second man passes them from his level up to the next. All goes smoothly as long as the bricks keep moving. But if the second man stops passing his bricks along, he’ll soon be crushed by the increasing weight of the load.
We’re often in this second man’s position. All day long we receive cares, troubles, and burdens. And when we hold on to them, we’re soon overwhelmed by the weight of anxiety. What should we do? As soon as we receive the cares and feel threatened under their weight, we must pass them on to a higher level. We can simply turn to the Lord in prayer at any time in the day to let Him know what we’re going through, and He’ll receive our burdens. What a wonderful provision! How thankful we should be!
We can obey the command in Philippians 4:6—“In nothing be anxious”—by fulfilling the conditions that follow—“In everything, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.”
The result of such prayer is that we enjoy the promise of peace presented in the next verse, Philippians 4:7: “And the peace of God, which surpasses every man’s understanding, will guard your hearts and your thoughts in Christ Jesus.”
The notes in the Recovery Version help us see how this peace becomes ours and how it guards us from anxiety:
The note on peace says: “The result of practicing fellowship with God in prayer is that we enjoy the peace of God. The peace of God is actually God as peace (v. 9) infused into us through our fellowship with Him by prayer, as the counterpoise to troubles and the antidote to anxiety (John 16:33).”
The note on guard tells us: “Or, mount guard over. The God of peace patrols before our hearts and thoughts in Christ, keeping us calm and tranquil.”
As we bring our concerns and burdens to God in prayer with petition, we enjoy fellowship with God. The result of such communing with God is that the peace of God is imparted into us, quieting all our anxiety. His peace even patrols over us, standing like a guard before our hearts and thoughts, keeping us from anything that might disturb our calm in Him.
The Lord’s command is clear: In nothing be anxious. And His word and promise are also clear: The Lord is near, and by making our requests known to God through prayer and petition, the peace of God will guard our hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus. Remembering His nearness, we can fellowship with the Lord in prayer, giving Him all our cares. When we do this, we fulfill His command spontaneously by enjoying His promised peace infused into us through our prayer.
When it comes to the Bible, we’re familiar with words like “read” and “study.” But we might not be accustomed to the word “eat.”
“Eating the Bible” may sound strange to us, yet God gave us His Word to be our spiritual food. So though we may read and study God’s Word, if we don’t eat it as food, we’ll be spiritually hungry and, as a result, weak in our Christian life.
In this podcast we’ll discuss the necessary and enjoyable practice of eating the Word of God.
Let’s say we haven’t eaten for a while; we’re really hungry and even faint from the lack of food. Suddenly, we catch a whiff of a delectable aroma floating by. It’s a pleasant scent, but we remain as hungry as ever. Smelling the aroma of food isn’t enough. We have to get to the food and eat it to be satisfied and strengthened.
Being inspired by something we read in the Bible is kind of like smelling a delectable aroma. It’s not that we get nothing at all; we just aren’t satisfied; nothing spiritually “sticks to our ribs.” To eat the Word of God, we have to go further and deeper.
Our nose is the right organ to use to smell the aroma of food, but we can’t eat food with our nose. And we certainly can’t eat food with our ears or our eyes. Our mouth is the right organ for eating food. We have to open our mouth, take the food in, chew it, swallow it, and even digest it. All of this may be very obvious, but we must realize that to “eat” the Word of God also requires us to use the right organ.
We may be used to exercising our mind to learn something or our emotion to feel something when we open the Bible. But neither our mind nor our emotion is the right organ for eating the Word of God.
The right organ for eating the Bible is our spirit, our deepest part. Our human spirit, which is deeper than our mind or emotion, is our “eating” organ.
By themselves, the words in the Bible are only black and white letters, and if we use only our mind to understand them, that’s all they’ll ever be to us—letters, even dead letters. The knowledge we acquire from them may even cause us to be proud, puffing us up.
But in the Word of God is the Spirit, and the Spirit gives life. So for the Bible to become the food that fills our inner hunger and enlivens us, we need to touch the Spirit in the Word of God. We do this by exercising, or using, our spirit.
Our human spirit was created by God to contain and contact God. It is uniquely qualified to contact the Spirit in the Word. So above all, above studying, memorizing, reading, or expounding, we must exercise our spirit to “eat” the Word of God.
How do we exercise, or use, our spirit? We exercise by prayer. Just as we exercise our feet by walking, we exercise our spirit by praying.
Exercising our spirit, our eating organ, by praying is the way we eat the Word of God. Ephesians 6:17-18 puts the Spirit, the Word, prayer, and our spirit together:
“And receive the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which Spirit is the word of God, by means of all prayer and petition, praying at every time in spirit.”
These verses make it clear that we are to receive the Spirit in the Word of God by means of all prayer, praying at every time in our spirit.
When we exercise our spirit by prayer to touch the Spirit in the Word, we go beyond the black and white letters of the Bible to touch the living Word that nourishes and supplies us for our Christian life. This is to eat the Word of God.
To eat the Word of God by exercising our spirit by prayer, it helps to pray aloud. It isn’t that God can’t hear silent prayers, but praying aloud helps us to exercise our spirit more strongly, focus on the Word, and be less distracted by thoughts in our mind.
Praying even before we open the Bible is also helpful. We can pray, “Lord, I come to You in Your Word. Lord, help me to exercise my spirit right now to take Your Word as food. Feed me, Lord, in Your Word.”
Then we open the Bible. Perhaps we’ve been reading through the New Testament and have arrived at John 1. As we read, we don’t need to be concerned about what we can and can’t understand. This is a time for eating, so we should just concentrate on exercising our spirit to take in the Word.
For example, as we read John chapter 1, we can read until we come to a verse we can somewhat understand and that gives us a delectable aroma, or inspiration. Since that verse “smells” so good, we stop and pray with that verse in a simple way. Let’s say we stop at verse 4:
“In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
We might pray, “Lord Jesus, in Him, in You, is life. And Lord, You’re in me! Oh, thank You, now that I have You, I have life. Lord, keep me enjoying You as life all day today. And praise You, Lord, You are the light of men. Oh Lord, You are my light. Shine, Lord, over all my heart. Don’t let me be in any darkness.”
Perhaps as we’re “eating” the Word about light, the Lord suddenly shines on a sin we were previously unaware of. We can pause and confess that sin right away, be cleansed, and continue our eating.
Then we can continue to read until a verse strikes our spirit again, stopping to pray spontaneously with what arises from our heart and our spirit. We don’t need to feel compelled to finish the chapter, or even the section. This time in the Word is for eating, not for reading a set amount. We can take our time to eat by reading and praying, praying and reading.
As we thank the Lord with His Word, praise Him with it, repeat it back to Him, and pray with it without any formula or set way, we enjoy spiritual food. We can be free from being formulaic or ritualistic, from praying the same prayers every time. In fact, we may pray with the same exact verse many times in our lives, and each time have it be different. This is because the Spirit is living, and when we pray not in a routine, habitual way, but with our spirit exercised, we contact the living Spirit in the Word.
We should read the Bible regularly, even daily, for our whole lives. We also should study the Word of God and seek to understand it. But in order to be nourished with the divine life of God and grow in that life, we also need to come to His Word to eat it by reading and praying with it.
When we take time to go beyond mentally touching the black and white letters of the Word, but instead exercise our spirit, our deepest part, to touch the life in the Word, we’re inwardly satisfied. By speaking to the Lord in a simple, genuine way with His Word, the Bible becomes spirit and life to us, enlivening us and satisfying our hunger.
The entire Bible is a living prayer book, a feast full of food to nourish us as we exercise our spirit to eat it. Thank the Lord for such a wonderful feast!
Athens, around A.D. 50—leading city of ancient Greece and center of one of the greatest cultures the world has ever known. Yet in this city famous for learning and philosophy stood an altar bearing the inscription, “TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.”
Within every human being persists a desire to worship something. But without knowing what we are to worship, we may worship the wrong object, construct an object to worship, or like the Athenians, simply conclude that we worship someone, even though we don’t know who it is we worship.
One day Paul, a man sent by God to speak the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, came to Athens. He spoke to the Athenians to tell them that God is a knowable God.
What Paul spoke in Athens two thousand years ago is just as relevant to us today. Paul said that God is the One who made the world and everything in it. As the Creator, He is also the Lord, the owner, of heaven and earth. This living God does not live in a temple made with human hands. Nor is He a being that is according to the thought or imagination of man. Instead, as the giver of life and breath to all things, God is the source of life. God is also the Creator of every nation dwelling on the face of the earth; thus, He is the source of all mankind.
Moreover, Paul said that God set a day when He will judge the entire world by a man designated by Him, Jesus Christ. This Jesus is the very God who came to be a man, a God-man. Jesus lived a sinless life. He then died on the cross to take away the sins of the world. But He did not remain in death—He was raised from the dead, and one day He will return to this earth.
Paul continued and said, “That they might seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, even though He is not far from each one of us.” God is the omnipresent Spirit, close to us. He is here even as you listen to this podcast, and if you seek, you will find Him. Finally, Paul said that God, having overlooked the times of ignorance, charges all men everywhere to repent. To repent is to turn. We must turn from our not knowing or our not acknowledging the true God. As we turn to Him, we must believe in the One who was raised from the dead, Jesus Christ, and simply call upon Him. He will forgive us of our sins and come to live in us, and we will truly know Him.
God does not want to be the Unknown God to you. You can know Him right now by turning to Him and praying this simple prayer:
“Lord Jesus, You are the real God, my Creator and my Redeemer! Thank You for coming to be known by me. Thank You for dying for my sins. I believe into You as the One who was raised from the dead. I receive You into me right now.”