SALIENT POINTS ON THE HOLY SPIRIT – HIS PERSON AND MINISTRY

SALIENT POINTS ON THE HOLY SPIRIT – HIS PERSON AND MINISTRY

The Holy Spirit has been highlighted recently – in church camps, in the considerations of the TRINITY, in sermons and bible studies. There has also been disproportionate emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit and also some negative and harmful claims on the power of the Spirit in the lives of certain believers.

In the light of all these, I find it helpful to highlight certain important salient points taught in Scripture on the Spirit and His ministry. Of course, it will take many books to study on this subject but perhaps the focus on some important points may go a long way to enable us believers and the church to be on the right track. Hence the following:

The Spirit’s great work is to reveal God to mankind. In this the whole Trinity is involved – “the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world” (1 John 414). At the heart of the gospel lies the revelation that God is love, that he longs to bring us sinful men and women back into a living personal relationship with himself in spite of our sin and his righteousness, and that he has therefore intervened in our history by coming personally into this world as our redeemer.

The Spirit is involved in creation of the physical universe (Ps. 33:6; Ps. 104:30)) and he came upon the servants of God in the OT context to enable them to carry out God’s word and work. In the spiritual realm his work is to regenerate sinful men and women, to bring about the new birth (John 3:5-6) – he is the author and giver of eternal life (Rom. 8:11).

The Spirit’s work is to reveal the true nature of Christ and to bring men and women to worship him through faith and obedience. He inspired the writers of Scripture to write the testimony he revealed to them in Scripture and he also illuminates the Scriptures as they are read and understood. He, as the third Person of the Trinity brings understanding and conviction to our minds and hearts, granting us repentance towards God and the gift of new life through faith in the Lord Jesus. It is he who works in each of us Christians to restore the defaced image of God in us, through the process we call sanctification. We become more like the Lord Jesus in our character and behaviour, only by the Spirit’s power.
Because he constitutes the church, the company of true believers who are therefore Christ’s body on earth, he also rules in that new community, cultivating his fruit, dispersing his gifts and energising his witness.
Without the Spirit’s ministry there would be no Bible, no gospel, no new birth, no progress in holiness, no unity among believers.

What Scripture says, God, the Holy Spirit,says, and whatever God says will happen. That is why we can have such confidence in the written word of God. It is the great gift of the Holy Spirit, to the church and to the world.
So we have the indwelling Spirit to interpret and apply the word to all the changing scenes and situations in our lives.

The Holy Spirit is Christ’s representative, making him real and precious to us. He reveals Jesus as the Word of truth, and so strengthens his people in their knowledge, love and obedience. He comes alongside to help us to apply the truth to our own situations and particular needs, as we reverently ask him to work in our minds, hearts and wills. And his activity is always Word-centred, because his work is always Christ-honouring.

The great offensive weapon God has given us in our fight against the world, the flesh and the devil is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (Eph. 6:1). This means that if we are to win the spiritual battle, to grow in holiness and effective Christian living, we must know and use our BIbles. The Spirit has provided the sword. He trains us in its use. He gives us the strength to wield it. We are right to recognise that we are totally dependent upon the Holy Spirit, but the logical deduction is that we must therefore give ourselves to being diligent students of Scripture,and sadly that has become a comparatively rare priority among Christians today. We prefer an ‘instant hotline’ from heaven. Who wants to study a book, if there is an intuitive awareness of God’s will open to us? But to fail to study the Bible would be to ignore the greatest resource that God has given us. The teaching of the Bible is the plumb-line by which all claims to divine guidance, all new ideas, all intuitions must be tested. Its single, divine authorship means that Scripture has an inner harmony, without any contradictions.

We have already noted the Spirit’s role as the creator and sustainer of life, but he is especially at work in the world, in a wider sense, in the lives of individual men and women. His mission is always to be the executive of the divine will within the world. In God’s great plan, there is the desire of the loving heart of God to draw out for himself a people who will be his own,and with whom he will dwell for ever (Rev. 7:9). So the Spirit’s great work is to bring sinners to the Saviour and then to mature Christians in their faith, forming in them the likeness of Christ, the renewed image of God, so as to prepare them for heaven.
The sin of unbelief lies at the root of all our other sins. It is because we do not believe God’s Word that we disobey it. It is because we do not believe that God has our best interests at heart that we will not allow him truly to be God nn our lives. To be convicted of our unbelieving state by the Holy Spirit is the beginning of the gift of faith.

The Spirit produces his fruit in Christ-like character and enables us to mature as Christian disciples. He is our ability in prayer (Rom. 1:26), our guide and strength (Gal. 516,25) in the issues of life. He is the divine enabling by which we have everything we need to live a godly life in this world (2 Peter13). His is the power which shields us from the world, the flesh and the devil, keeps us persevering in faith and obedience and who eventually will secure our safe arrival in our Father’s heavenly home (1 Peter 1:3,5).

One final aspect of his work: his rule within the church. Much of what has been said would perhaps appear excessively individualistic to the apostolic generation of believers. It is the tendency of our culture to be overly self-centered and to stress individual fulfilment at the price of corporate fellowship. But the Spirit,who indwells each Christian, also unites us all as members of the one body of Christ on earth. It is he who imprats the gifts of God’s grace to the churah, for the common good of all (1 Cor. 12:4-7). In his sovereignty he decides which gifts shall be given to which individuals, but always with the aim of building up the whole (1 Cor. 12:11). Yet underneath this God-given diversity of gifts and talents lies the foundational unity, which is the product of each member’s individual dependence upon the Spirit’s enabling.
The Spirit is also the enabling power behind the witness of the church in the world. He himself is the ability given to Christ’s believing people, for the completion of the great commission to world evangelisation (Acts 1:8)

MEDITATIONS ON EPHESIANS 1:3-14

VS 3 – “Praise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus.” When I was a young Christian, this verse caused me to wonder what is the ‘every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus’.
Reading on from verse 3 to verse 14, I had a glimpse of what this entails, and even today, I marvel at the extent, scope, and richness of this ‘every blessing’ in Christ Jesus.

First, we see the focus on the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Father is the source of every blessing we receive and enjoy. It is the Father who has chosen us; it is He who predestined us… to be His sons and daughters; He is the one who freely gave us His grace and made known to us His will and purpose in Christ; He did all these according to His pleasure and will, and He is the one who has poured out His love and grace upon us in His Son. The heavenly Father loves us even before the creation of the world; He loves us from the beginning and His love is demonstrated by sending His Son to die for us. Christ’s dying for us, even when we were yet sinners, is the supreme demonstration of God’s love for us in His Son! Most of us believers do not think much about the Father; we perhaps just referred to HIm in our opening prayer and that is just about it. Do we truly appreciate his sovereignty in choosing us; do we marvel as to why He loves such undeserving people like us; do we question why He elected us in his predestination, even before the creation of the world? Do we ever pause and thank Him profusely for His wondrous love and grace to wretched sinners like us??

The sphere within which the blessing is given and received is the Lord Jesus Christ; the phrase “in Christ” or “in Him” occurs no less than eleven times in the epistle to the Ephesians. In Adam, we belong to the old humanity, but ‘in Christ’, we belong to the new redeemed humanity; ‘in Him’, God has chosen us in eternity; bestowed on us His abundant grace,redeemed us and forgave us; and also ‘in Him’,God presented His plan to unite all things, in heaven and on earth, under the lordship of His Son. ‘In Him’ we are adopted to be God’s children, members of the royal heavenly family with Christ as our elder brother. Surely this is mind-boggling – God has chosen wretched undeserving sinners in His Son, forgiven us, united us with Christ, made us His children, given us an eternal inheritance!

We are told that the blessing God gave us is spiritual, not material as seen in the Old Testament; manifested in God’s law written on our hearts by the Holy Spirit in the new covenant. Paul qualified the term spiritual with the clause “in the heavenly realms”, indicating the unseen world of spiritual reality; it is the sphere in which the ‘principalities and powers’ operate and in which Christ reigns supreme and those who are his also reign with him The activity of the Holy Spirit is evident throughout the bestowing of God’s grace and life to His people.The Holy Spirit is described as God’s seal on the believers, a mark of ownership and authenticity; God puts His Holy Spirit within His people to mark them as His own. The Spirit is also God’s guarantee of bringing His people safely to their final destination and inheritance: now He is giving us a foretaste of what awaits us in the future, the Spirit being a down payment or a deposit of the future endowment that is in store for all the believers.

Verse 14 states that the Holy Spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance in this precious sense: that by enabling us to see the glory of Christ glorified, and to live in fellowship with him as our Mediator and with his Father as our Father, the Spirit introduces us to the inmost essence of the life of heaven. At the heart of our thoughts about heaven is the actual relationship with the Father and the Son that is perfected there. It is of this that the Spirit’s present ministry to us is the first instalment. By means of the ministry to us of the indwelling Spirit, heaven begins for us here and now, as through Christ and in Christ we share in his resurrection life.
“You have died,” writes Paul to believers, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). This ‘life” is eternal life, heaven’s life, which never starts anywhere else but here.

Ponder over these: do we realise the importance of understanding and appreciating the Trinity – that without it, we cannot see the extent, scope and richness of what God (Father, Son, and Spirit) has blessed us with?! As we visualise the eternal purpose of God to recreate a new humanity with Christ as its head, and as we see the wondrous salvation plan of God unfolded, our hearts are filled with gratitude, praise and worship of the Triune God.

THE NATURE OF THE SPIRIT’S MINISTRY

The Spirit is a sovereign person with his own will, which is also the will of the Father and the Son.
He operates in and through our thinking (he convinces us of God’s truth), our decision-making (he leads us to will the will of God), and our affections (he draws forth from us love and hate, hope and fear, joy and sorrow, and other felling-laden dispositions, all responding to the realities of the gospel).
His blessings on the BIble we read, and on the Christian
instruction we receive, persuades us of the truth of Christianity. The nature and power of the Spirit’s ministry springs forth straight from the Scriptures; but we need to read the Scriptures not just as scholars but as Christians, conscious of the darkness of our own minds and praying for light – this leads to a personal experience of the Spirit’s inner witness to the authenticity of Scriptures as God’s Word, and of the Spirit’s power to use it as a source of instruction, hope, and strength.
Those who do not in humility and self-distrust allow the BIble to teach them its message about God and grace will never have their false notions of God corrected, nor see the light of saving truth, but will walk in darkness forever; only those who become pupils of Scripture will find the true Gpd and eternal life.
Holy Scripture, which is Law and Light, in the very precise sense that it bestows life through the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit writes it in our hearts – the Spirit implants the Word in our hearts.
Once the Word has been implanted and taken root, and through the Spirit it has become the means of life to our hearts, and the implanted Word changes us in ways of which we are not at first conscious, in due course, however, we become aware that we are different from the way we were.

The Spirit shows us how God’s promises and demands bear on our lives. His new creative action at the center of our personal being so changes and energises us that we do in fact obey the truth. The persuasion at conscious level is powerful. The heart-changing action that produces Christian commitment is almighty. First to last, however, the power exercised is personal. The Holy Spirit is a living person, not a mere force.

WARNINGS TO TAKE HEED TO

As we consider 1 Corinthians, we noted that the church in Corinth had many spiritual gifts. But the church was in a bad state because of divisions based on ‘loyalty’ to different leaders; there was immorality, pride, and even arrogance and unteachability towards Paul and his co-workers, as well as disunity with brethren against brethren even to a point of going before the Gentile courts to solve their differences.
Even though they wanted and had the charismata of the Spirit, yet they ‘rejected’, and were without, the character (transformed by the Spirit). Paul called them ‘carnal’, worldly, mere infants in Christ.

This is true even in the context of the church today. Many Christians want the power of the Holy Spirit for works of service, but they do not walk in Christlikeness.
It was in the context of the problems in the church of Corinth, Paul appealed to them not to behave in the unseemly manner but to realise that they had not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God.
And in the closing of chapter 9, and in chapter 10, Paul sounded the grim warnings not to make the same mistakes as the Israelites of old.

We spent much time in a previous sharing on ‘The Holy Spirit and holy living’. In chapters 9 and 10 of 1 Corinthians, the warnings were sounded clearly and with much urgency:

Paul, in chapter 9, warned of the need for self-discipline. He illustrated this with a reference of the discipline and training of an athlete in the games common in the times of the rule of the Romans.
The athletes trained earnestly with much discipline to win a crown; but their crown is a perishable one – Christians are called to gain an everlasting crown – hence the need for discipline, not complacency or laziness – and Paul used himself as an example with the awareness that he himself, an apostle, could also be disqualified for the prize if he lived and served God aimlessly, and without the seriousness of self-discipline and diligence, and without being a positive example to those he preached,

In chapter 10, Paul warned the believers not to fail God like the Israelites of old.
Note that their ancestors (and also ours as we are also children of Abraham by faith) were all under the cloud and they passed through the red sea; they were baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the wilderness (vv1-5).

That means that those who died in the wilderness did not enter the promised land, the land of ‘milk’ and ‘honey’, even though they were among those who were delivered from Egypt in the ‘Exodus’; and they were also among those given all the ‘privileges’ (vv.1-5) stated above.
Paul made it clear that these things that happened to them occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. Do not be idolates, as some of them were; we should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did; and in one day God caused twenty-three thousand of them to die. We should not test Christ, as some of them did – and were killed by snakes; we should not grumble and complain, as some of them did before the Lord, and were killed by the destroying angel.

THESE THINGS HAPPENED TO THEM AS EXAMPLES AND WERE WRITTEN DOWN AS WARNINGS FOR US, ON WHOM THE CULMINATION OF THE AGE HAS COME.
So, obviously, they were written for us believers today. So Paul continued, “If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you do not fall.”
Therefore, he continued, “Flee from idolatry….You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. Are you trying to arouse the Lord’s jealousy?” vv.11-14;18-22)
Remember, we are Christ’s body; we are the temple of God; we are the bride of Christ (hence the Lord’s jealousy when His bride goes astray and commits spiritual adultery). We noted that the Holy Spirit is holy and He dwells within us – some ninety odd times the Holy Spirit is described as holy in the New Testament. If we defile the temple of God and destroy the Lord’s body (recall what happened to those who did that in the OT and in Leviticus specifically), there would be serious consequences. God will destroy those who destroy the body of Christ!

Dear brethren – we have been looking at the third Person of the Trinity – the Holy Spirit of God. Let us not grieve the Spirit by our manner of living; let us not forget that He is holy and has nothing to do with unholiness and habitual sin (spiritual idolatry and worship of other ‘gods’; immorality; works of the flesh ). He is with us to mould us into the image of Christ; let us submit to Him and take heed to His warnings, guidance, and teachings, which are in line with Scriptures. Do not take Him for granted and do not allow worldliness, the evil one and his minions to deceive us, lest we be among those who died in the wilderness and did not enter God’s promised land!

THE WORD OF GOD IS CLEAR AND COMPLETE

The teaching of the written Scriptures is the Word which God spoke and speaks to his church, and is finally authoritative for faith and life; to learn the mind of God, one must consult his written Word (his written Revelation to us).What Scripture says, God says; it contains all that the church needs to know in this world for its guidance in the way of salvation and service, and it contains the principles for its own interpretation within itself.
The Holy Spirit caused the Scripture to be written and he has given it to the church to cause believers to recognise it as the divine Word that it is, and to enable them to interpret it rightly and understand its meaning. He, the Holy Spirit, who is the Author is also its Witness and Expositor. Christians must therefore seek to be helped and taught by the Spirit when they study Scripture, and must regard all their understanding of it, no less than the book itself, as the gift of God. The Spirit must be acknowledged as the infallible Interpreter of God’s infallible Word.

However, the church collectively, and the Christian individually, can and does err, and the inerrant Scripture must ever be allowed to speak and correct them.
The deep concern is that the church and Christians have not been as effective as they should be in the preaching, teaching, studying, and communication of God’s Word over the years, and the reasons are significant and deep-seated.
I take the liberty to share my limited understanding of what has affected and contributed to this problem.

The first of this is a paradigm shift of three themes – God, man, and religion – over the years. ‘Paradigm’ refers to an overall frame of reference, or a controlling point of view. The liberal Protestant way has been to keep in step with secular philosophy and adjust Christian belief accordingly, so that it has operated as something acceptable to the current community.

GOD
Biblical faith in God in the era of the Reformation sees God as one who rules, judges, and saves, the source, sustainer and end of all things; these thoughts fill people’s minds in a vivid, clear, compelling way. However, over the centuries, the concept of God as the mighty mechanic who, having made the world, now sits back and watches it go without involving himself in it in any way, became well established. Subsequently, philosophers silenced God by denying any possibility of him communicating with us in words, and this led to thinkers equating God with their own feelings and fancies, thus absorbing him into themselves. Hence it is no wonder that the concept of God ‘degenerated’ to one of a God who is personal but limited in power, so that he cannot always do what he wants to do or prevent what he would like to prevent. He is prepared to overlook the sins of people who are not in the social sense vicious; he makes no claim, and is infinitely kind and tolerant and seeks to show benevolence to everyone like Santa Claus.
The second concept is of God as an immanent cosmic principle rather than a sovereign person, an animating and energizine aspect of the universe rather than its Maker and its Lord – this concept is found in the New Age movement.
Neither concept corresponds at all closely to the God of Scripture; each is a misconceived paradigm, needing correction.
The God in whom biblical Christians believe is not a product of human speculation and guesswork, but a self-announcing, self-defining deity who takes the initiative to tell mankind who and what he is. In the Bible, God shows us four fundamental facts about himself:
a. God is plural – He is essentially one in three – Father, Son and Holy Spirit united in a oneness of being that finds expression in an eternal fellowship of love. Jesus, the incarnate Son, reveals by his words and life a relationship between himself and the Father, between the Father and the Spirit, and between the Spirit and himself, in which each seeks honour and glory for the other (see John 14-16). This is the true nature of love, and the ultimate, eternal truth about God’s being. God is the only creator, the only Lord, the only guide of history, the only source of hope for the future, but he is, and always was, triune. The Father above us, the Son beside us and the Spirit within us are not one person playing three roles but one God whose nature it is to be three persons in the fullest sense of the word.
b. God is powerful. In God is the reality of a self-sustaining,self-determining, infinite life that has neither beginning nor end. All created things are limited one way or another, and sooner or later run out of steam, or decay, but not God! Created beings only continue to exist as he, their creator, actively upholds them in being, but we do not sustain God; God sustains himself.
c. God is perfect, in the moral sense of that word. He is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to many, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished. This is moral majesty, the perfection of a God committed in covenant love, and whone ‘name is Jealous’ (Exod. 34:14) – that is, who, like any lo er, presses an exclusive claim on the affection and loyalty of the people he loves and blesses.
d. God is praiseworthy. His works of creation, providence and grace have displayed his glory. Giving God glory for what we see of his glory will be the life of heaven, and we should be practising for it here on earth.
Should a human being makes a requirement of worship, it would be dishonourable and vicious – that we grant; but the Creator is not a human being, and his requirement of us that we focus on him, honour and love him, and show our appreciation of his love for us by praise and adoration is ennobling to our nature. God has so made us that glorifying him is the way of supreme fulfilment for our humanness; giving glory and worship to our Lover – God – brings supreme joy, delight, happiness and inner contentment, our doubts and hesitations about the divine demand for glory-giving melt away.

MAN
The human individual’s true dignity derives from being made as God’s image, steward and partner (Gen. 1:26-28). Older theology construed the statement that God made man in his own image statically, as if the image consisted in abstract rationality and conscious selfhood as such. But the statement should be understood dynamically, as telling us that God made man upright, so that he images God more or less according to how far he uses his natural endowment for obedience, love and righteousness, and how far he does not. It is in this perspective that explains how Scripture can affirm both the continuance of the image relationship after the fall (Gen. 9:6; 1 Co. 11:7; James 3:9) and its restoration in Christ by new creation (Eph. 4:23; Col. 3:10).
A further element in human dignity is that as God is eternal and everlasting, so each human being has been created for eternity,and the choices and commitments made in this life have unending significance, since they determine what sort of experience the eternity that follows our leaving this world will be.
Each human individual’s life has become a tragedy – a story of goodness wasted, potential squandered, and value lost. Each of us has fallen from the image of God, and all that is natural to us now is what Scripture calls sin – egocentricity (always looking after number one), pride (always seeking to be on top, in the know and in control), sensuality, exploitation, indifference to evil, carelessness about truth, and a lifelong quest for whatever forms of self-indulgence appeal to us most. We are unable to shake free of sin by our own resources, for we are by nature slaves of sin. This, the inescapable bad news with which the gospel starts, but be affirmed against all ideas of the natural goodness and perfectibility of man.
Restoration by grace to life in God’s image is the glory – the only true and lasting glory of sinful human beings. To the self-seeking eye of the natural man, the path of faith, love, and obedience, of repentance, conversion, self-denial and cross-bearing does not look like glory, but the way of life is in truth to die to self in order to live to God. One loses to gain, one gives up in order to receive, one repudiates and negates the life of self-serving in order to experience new life with Christ in Christ, his resurrection life lived out in and through our own being. To fulfil this pattern is a life’s task; laying hold of God’s salvation, which in itself costs nothing, costs everything. Yet those who take this road are rich beyond all telling, for God himself is their shield and their great reward.

RELIGION
The secular assumption is that religion would be seen as a hobby; if practised at all, it will be a venture in self-fulfilment, a quest of a crutch of transcendent help and support. Presentations of Christianity as a recovery of self-esteem or a discovery of health and wealth appear to endorse this. But Scripture conceives religion as the living of a life of God-esteem and self-abasement, and of faith in Jesus Christ that blossoms into a love-affair of doxology and devotion, and insists that without such religion life is inescapably maimed. The secular paradigm must be repudiated; the biblical paradigm must be affirmed.

Preachers and teachers who pander to these secular paradigms and try to fit their message into the frame that the modern mind-set provides cannot but be unfaithful to God at a deep level,and put their labour into a bag with holes. Fragments of truth and wisdom will no doubt get across, but overall the story of their ministry will be one of qualified failure due to the distortions involved in their frame of reference.
In preaching and teaching each gospel truth we should regularly call attention to the difference between God’s viewpoint about himself and ourselves and the contrasting mind-set of our culture on the same subject. The pastoral and evangelistic preaching and teaching of evangelicals desperately need this emphasis on the proper paradigms in these confused and confusing days. Otherwise, the church will wilt, instead of grow, under the preaching and teaching of those who do not realise the emphasis on the proper and correct paradigms given by God through the Scripture and the Spirit. Words matter; and if words convey the wrong and distorted meanings, then we cannot expect the hearers to know the relevance of what is taught and preached.

WHAT IS THE STATE OF OUR SOULS?

As a general medical practitioner, besides seeing various ones consulting about their illnesses, I have many individuals also, who are not ill, but are concerned about the state of their health, and desire a medical examination including blood tests and all that is necessary.

As I ponder over this as a Christian, I wonder how many are concerned about the state of their souls. As a doctor, I have the privilege to interact with people from all walks of life, and also the opportunity to interact with them over various areas of life.
I see many individuals very absorbed in the pursuit of business, pleasure, careers, money, or self-indulgence of some kind or another; and among them are also those who claim to be Christians, even Christian leaders.
Death, and judgment, and eternity, and heaven, and hell, and a world to come are never calmly looked at and considered. They live on as if they were never going to die, or rise again, or stand at the bar of God, or receive an eternal sentence. They simply never think about God, unless frightened for a few minutes by sickness, death in their families, or an accident; they hold on to their way as if there is nothing worth thinking about except this world and what it can offer.

It is perhaps needful for all to do some self-examination:
For those who claim to be Christians, are we satisfied with formal religion?

Many such ones make much ado about the outward form of Christianity, while the inward and spiritual part is totally neglected. They are careful to attend all the services of their place of worship, and regularly participate in all the church ordinances. They are ready to contend with anyone who does not agree with them regarding church matters; yet all the time there is no heart in their religion.
Anyone who knows them intimately can see with half an eye that their affections are set on things below, and not on things above; and that they are trying to make up for the lack of inward Christianity by an excessive quantity of outward show. And this formal religion truly does them no real good.
If we really love life, do not be content with the husk, and shell, and scaffolding of religion. Remember the words of the Lord Jesus:
‘These people draw near to me with their mouth, and honour me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men’ (Matt. 15:8-9).

Have we received forgiveness?

The forgiveness of sins has been purchased for us by the eternal Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ. He has purchased it for us by coming into the world to be our Saviour,and by living, dying and rising again as our Substitute, on our behalf. He has bought it for us at the price of his own most precious blood by suffering in our place on the cross, and making satisfaction to God for our sins. But this forgiveness, great and full, and glorious as it is, does not become the property of every man and woman as a matter of course. It is not a privilege that every member of a church possesses, merely because they are a member of a church. It is something that each individual must receive for himself by his own personal faith.
It is only faith that is required; and faith is nothing more than the humble, heartfelt trust of the soul that desires to be saved. Jesus is able and willing to save; but man must come to Jesus and believe. All who believe are at once justified and forgiven; but without believing there is no forgiveness at all. Many churchgoers know that there is no forgiveness of sin except in Jesus Christ. They can tell you that there is no Saviour for sinners, no Redeemer, no Mediator, except the one who was born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried. But here they stop, and get no further! They never come to the point of actually laying hold of Christ by faith, and becoming one with Christ and Christ in them.

Do you know anything of conversion to God?

Without conversion there is no salvation (Matt.18:3; John 33; Rom. 8:9). Rich or poor, gentle or simple, we all need a complete change – a change that the Holy Spirit gives to us.
Sense of sin and deep hatred of it, faith in Christ and love to him, delight in holiness and longing after more of it, love for God’s people and distaste for the things of the world – these, these are the signs and evidences which always accompany conversion.
‘Unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven’ (Matt.18:3).

Do you know anything of practical Christian holiness?

It is as certain as anything in the Bible that without holiness ‘no one will see the Lord’ (Heb. 12:14). It is equally certain that it is the invariable fruit of saving faith, the real test of regeneration, the only sound evidence of indwelling grace, the certain consequence of vital union with Christ.
Holiness is not absolute perfection and freedom from all faults.
Absolute perfection is for heaven, and not for earth, where we have a weak body, a wicked world, and a busy devil continually near our souls. Nor is real Christian holiness ever attained, or maintained without a constant fight and struggle.
Genuine scriptural holiness will make a man do his duty at home, and adorn his doctrine in the little trials of daily life. It will make a man humble, kind, gentle, unselfish, good-tempered, considerate of others, loving, meek and forgiving.

Do you know anything of the means of grace?

The means of grace – five principal things:
-The reading of the Bible
-Private prayer
-Public worship
-The taking of the Lord’s Supper
-The rest of the Lord’s day
These are means God has graciously appointed in order to convey grace to man’s heart by the Holy Spirit, or keep up the spiritual life after it has begun. The state of a man’s soul will always depend greatly on the manner and spirit in which he uses means of grace.

Do you live in habitual communion with Christ?
Union with Christ is one thing and communion with Christ is another . There can be no communion with the Lord Jesus without union with him first, but unhappily, there may be union with Christ and afterwards little or no communion at all.
Union is the common privilege of all who feel their sins, and truly repent and come to Christ by faith, and are accepted, forgiven and justified in him. Too many believers, it may be feared, never get beyond this stage! Partly from ignorance, partly from laziness, partly from the fear of man, partly from secret love of the world, partly from some unmortified besetting sin, they are content with a little faith, and a little hope, and a little peace, and a little measure of holiness. And they live their lives in this condition, doubting, weak, hesitant, and bearing fruit nly ‘thirty-fold to the very end of their days.
Communion with Christ is the privilege of those who are continually striving to grow in grace, and faith, and knowledge, and conformity to the mind of Christ in all things: ‘forgetting those things which are behind’, and ‘not counting themselves to have apprehended’, but pressing ‘toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus’ (Philiippians 3:13-14).
Union is the bud but communion is the flower, union is the baby, but communion is the strong man. He who has union with Christ does well, but he who enjoys communion with him does far better.
The grand secret God, and drawing out of him every hour the supply that every hour requires. Communion like this is the secret of the abiding ‘joy and peace in believing’, which eminent saints possessed. Communion like this is the secret of the splendid victories that such men won over sin, the world and the fear of death.
The majority of believers seem content with the barest elementary knowledge of justification by faith, and half a dozen other doctrines, and go doubting, limping, groaning alone the way to heaven, experiencing little of the sense of victory or of joy.

It is about time for us to evaluate the state of our souls. Let us not assume that all is well with our souls. Let us approach God prayerfully and, like the psalmist of old, cry out, “Search me O Lord and know my soul; try me and know my thoughts.. and see if there be any wicked way in me” (Psalm 139).

ASPECTS OF ‘HOLINESS’

In a previous sharing, “What is the state of our souls?”, ‘holiness’ was mentioned as one area to evaluate. This is a ‘huge’ subject; but it is so very important that we need to return to it again and again, not just to understand it, but to work it out in our behaviour and life as God’s children, with God’s help.

What needs to be stated: God’s purpose in our creation, as in our new creation, is that we should be holy.
Therefore, moral casualness and unconcern as to whether or not we please God is in itself supremely evil. No expressions of creativity, heroism, or nice-guy behaviour can cancel God’s displeasure at being disregarded in this way.

God searches our hearts as well as weighs our actions. Guilt for sin extends to deficiencies in our motives and purposes, as well as in our actions and performances. It can be said that God focuses more attention on the heart – the thinking, reacting, desiring, decision-making core and center of our being – than he does on the deeds done, for it is by what goes on in our hearts that we are most truly known to him.

Holiness is learned as commitments are made, habits are formed, and battles are fought against a real opponent (Satan, in this case), who with great cunning plays constantly on our weak spots.
In as much as the path of hoiness is a form of spiritual warfare against sin and Satan, so it is an educational process that God has planned and programmed in order to refine, purge, enlarge, animate, toughen, and mature us in Him. By means of it He brings us progressively into the moral and spiritual shape in which he wants to see us.
We must be clear that whatever further reasons there may be why God exposes us to the joys and sorrows, fulfillments and frustrations, delights and disappointment, happiness and hurts, that make up the emotional reality of our lives, all these experiences are part of his curriculum for us in the school of holiness, which is his spiritual gymnasium for our reshaping and rebuilding in the moral likeness of Jesus Christ.
In the school of holiness, different ones make different rates of progress; why is it so? The factor that makes the difference is neither one’s intelligence quotient, nor the number of books one has read nor the conferences, camps, and seminars one has attended, but the quality of the fellowship with Christ that one maintains through life’s vicissitudes, the ‘ups’ and ‘downs’.

ASPECTS OF HOLINESS
Holiness has to do with my heart; it begins with the heart. Holiness starts inside a person, with a right purpose that seeks to express itself in a right performance. It is a matter, not just of the motions that I go through but of the motives that prompt me to go through them.
A holy person’s motivating aim, passion, desire, longing, aspiration, goal, and drive is to please God, both by what one does and by what one avoids doing; i.e. one practices good works and cuts out evil ones. Good works begin with praise, worship, and honoring and exalting God as the temper of one’s whole working life. Evil works start with neglect of these things, and coolness with regard to them.

Holiness has to do with my Humanness
Our Lord Jesus Christ is both God for man and man for God, he is God’s incarnate Son fully divine and fully human. We know him as both the mediator of divine grace and the model of human godliness.
And what is human godliness, the godliness that is true holiness as seen in Jesus? It is simply human life lived as the Creator intended – in other words, it is perfect and ideal humanness, an existence in which the elements of the human person are completely united in a totally God-honouring and nature-fulfilling way. Since God made humanity for himself, godliness naturally fulfills human nature at the deepest level. As experience proves, no contentment can match the contentment of obeying God, however costly this may prove.
All unbelievers, still live under the power of that self-deifying, anti-God syndrome in our spiritual system which the Bible calls sin, living lives that are qualitatively subhuman. Sin in our minds says otherwise, but in this, sin is lying.
The 20th century will doubtless go down in history as the century of secular humanism. It began with the euphoric, sin-spawned confidence that human endeavour in science, education, the harnessing of nature, and the increase of wealth would generate human happiness to the point of achieving something like heaven on earth. It ends with none of these hopes realised, but with sickening memories of many great evils committed, and with hearts everywhere full of restless and gloomy unease regarding humanity’s future prospects and life’s present worth. And this is still ongoing.

The deepest word that can be spoken about sanctification is that it is a progress towards true humanity, Sanctification is essentially considered the restoration of humanity (as God intended) in men. The greatest saints of God have been characterised, not by haloes and an atmosphere of distant unapproachability, but by their humanity,
Indeed genuine holiness is genuine Christ-likeness, and genuine Christ-likeness is genuine humanness. Love in the service of God and others, humility and meekness under the divine hand, integrity of behaviour, expressing integration of character, wisdom and faithfulness, boldness with prayerfulness, sorrow at people’s sins, joy at the Father’s goodness, and single-mindedness in seeking to please the Father morning, noon, and night, were all qualities seen in Christ, the perfect man.
Christians are meant to become human as Jesus was human. We are called to imitate these character qualities, with the help of the Holy Spirit, so that the childish instability, inconsiderate self-seeking, pious play acting, and undiscerning pigheadedness that so frequently mar our professedly Christian lives are left behind.

Holiness has to do with my Relationships
The Lord willing, we shall deal with this in the next sharing

ASPECTS OF HOLINESS (B)

Holiness has to do with my Relationships

It has been thought that a state of isolation and solitude, permanently detached from ordinary human involvement, is a help, or perhaps even a necessity, for the practice of holiness. It is true that holy living calls for regular times of aloneness with God. But the idea here is that one gains freedom to move ahead with God by cutting oneself off from the communal life of family and church and society, and that does not seem to be true at all.
A Christian lady who was a popular speaker on holiness and also a writer some years back received some publicity from her son-in-law who wrote that many thought her a ‘sage and a saint,’ but he himself came gradually to think of her as one of the wickedest people he had ever known. Why? “Her treatment of her husband, whom she despised, was humiliating in the highest degree. She never spoke to him or of him except in a tone that made her contempt obvious. It cannot be denied that he was a silly old man, but he did not deserve what she gave him, and no one capable of mercy could have given it.” The son-in-law was not a Christian, but there is nothing unChristian about this bit of reasoning.
For love to be replaced by resentful contempt between husband and wife, or for that matter between parent and child, or colleague and colleague is a negation of holiness, whatever stuff one may display in books or relay from pulpits and platforms. We need to remember this..
Some Christians are unwilling to show any kind of empathetic feelings, and to give up their love of the limelight and the desire to control others; all these things induce a hardness of heart that from God’s standpoint ruins their relationships.
The essential problem is “a self that has not learned to die.” But a true surrender to Christ shrinks our inflated ego to its proper size in relation to him and our fellows, and imparts reality to our lives.
What we need to realise is that we grow up into Christ by growing down into lowliness (humility). Christians, we might say, grow greater by getting smaller. Pride blows us up like balloons, but grace punctures our conceit and lets the hot, proud air out of our system. The result is that we shrink, and end up seeing ourselves as less – less nice, less able, less wise, less good, less strong, less steady, less committed, less wiser, less of a piece – than ever we thought we were. We stop kidding ourselves that we are persons of great importance to the world and to God; we settle for being insignificant and dispensable.
We then start trying to be trustful, obedient, dependent, patient, and willing in our relationship to God. We give up our dreams of being greatly admired for doing wonderfully well. We begin teaching ourselves unemotionally and matter-of-factly to recognise that we are not likely ever to appear, or actually to be, much of a success by the world’s standards. We bow to events that rub our noses in the reality of our own weaknesses, and we look to God for strength quietly to cope. Christians are called to a life of habitual repentance, as a discipline integral to healthy holy living. The life of holiness is one of downward growth all the time.

Holiness is a matter of patient, persistent uprightness; of taking God’s side against sin in our own lives and in the lives of others; of worshiping God in the Spirit as one serves him in this world, and of single-minded, wholehearted, free and glad concentration on the business of pleasing God. It is the distinctive form and flavour of a life set apart for God that is now being inwardly renewed by his power.
Holiness is thus the demonstration of faith working by love. It is wholly supernatural in the sense of being God’s gracious achievement within us, and wholly natural in the sense of being our own true humanness, lost through sin, misconceived through ignorance, and through listening too hard to current culture – but now in process of restoration through the redirecting and reintegrating energy of new creation in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

As I study 1 Corinthian again, especially 1:17-2:5, I notice once more the central theme of “power through weakness”. One may wonder what ‘power through weakness’ has to do with ‘presumption’ and ‘bitterness’ in Christian service. Also, recently, there has been emphasis on the ‘Holy Spirit’ in Christian life and service, and oftentimes, when we mention the Holy Spirit, we associate this with power in service rather than weakness. How then do we tie up all these together?

First of all, being divinely empowered in service has nothing to do with performing spectacularly or, by human standards, successfully; rather, it has everything to do, however, with knowing and feeling that one is weak (surprisingly ‘opposite’ to what many Christian workers seek). In this sense, we grow stronger only by growing weaker.
God-given strength is a matter of being enabled by Christ himself, through the Spirit, to keep on keeping God, personal service of God, and personal action for God.
One keeps on however weak one feels; one keeps on even in situations when what is being asked for seems to be beyond one, and one does so in the confidence that this is how God means it to be. For at the point where the insufficiency of natural strength is faced, felt, and admitted, does divine empowering begin. Divine strength is perfected in conscious human weakness.

This is well demonstrated in Paul and his ministry in 1 Corinthians. Paul knew that it is power through weakness in the Gospel itself. In his approach in sharing the gospel, he ‘renounced’ popular rhetoric, and human wisdom in his presentation; in place of human philosophy and human rhetoric, Paul put the cross, for the cross is both the wisdom of God and the power of God.
Paul knew that human beings cannot reach God by themselves. He was careful not to be presumptuous and to depend on his ability to share the gospel, lest his message and his preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that the faith of the recipients might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
The Corinthians loved both human wisdom and utterance (rhetoric); but Paul rejected both. In place of human wisdom and philosophy, Paul resolved to know nothing while he was with them except Jesus Christ and him crucified; in place of human rhetoric, he came to them in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. In consequence he relied on a demonstration of the Spirit’s power.
Today, weakness is not the most obvious characteristic of Christian workers; no, Seminary homiletics classes aim to inculcate self-confidence in nervous students. Paul was not afraid to admit that he was afraid. He looked elsewhere for his enabling. In his human weakness he relied on the power of God, on a demonstration of the Spirit’s power. For the Holy Spirit takes the evangelist’s words, spoken in human weakness, and carries them home with power to the mind, heart, conscience and will of the hearers, in such a way that they see and believe.
However, this does not mean we suppress our God-given personality, to pretend we feel weak when we do not, or to cultivate a fake frailty. Nor is it an exhortation to renounce arguments, to forsake persuasion and to bring out evidence.
The power in every power encounter is in the cross of Christ (for content) and in the Holy Spirit (for communication), irrespective of the weakness of the Christian worker! To think that it depends on us and our ability to argue and on our human wisdom is to be presumptuous in Christian service (whether in preaching, teaching, evangelising, counselling, and so on).

As Christian workers, servants of God, we must not presume that our faithful, sacrificial service gains us special favour with the Lord, or somehow puts him under obligation to us (recall Luke 17:7).
We should also not presume that faithful, sacrificial service implies that we will not sin or fail the Lord. 1 Corinthians 10:12 warns us to be careful and not to be overconfident lest we fail spiritually.
We should not presume upon God’s patience and mercy. Just because we serve faithfully and sacrificially does not protect us against God’s judgment. In fact, God would expect more from those who are close to him; such ones should be more conscious of the need to reverence God’s holiness; they should be more alert to the danger of holding the Lord in contempt by their words, actions, and attitudes.

The man Moses was an outstanding servant of God; he was described as the meekest of men; he endured much to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt in the Exodus and he was one who was so close to God that the Lord spoke to him, face to face, as it were. He had to endure the constant grumblings and complaints of his people; even Aaron and Miriam challenged him and questioned his authority. Time and again, Mose stood between the Lord and his people and pleaded to God for mercy for the Israelites when the people failed miserably.
But in Numbers 20:1-20, God was angry with Moses – he was told he broke faith with the Lord God in the presence of the Israelites at the waters of Meribah and did not uphold God’s holiness among the people. Moses was instructed to speak to the rock and it will pour out its water for the people and their livestock. But Moses took the staff and struck the rock twice while saying, ‘Listen your rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock’.
Moses speaks when he should have been silent; and he speaks in his own name and strikes the rock twice in his own strength.
And why did Moses do that? In all probability, Moses’ patience was tested to the limit by the people – they had complained and grumbled again and again; they had even talked of stoning him and Aaron, and this despite him interceding for them many times.
Moses’ words were an expression of the revulsion he felt against the people as well as the bitterness that filled his soul at that point of time after experiencing the rebellion of the people for many years following the Exodus from Egypt. In his bitterness and anger, Moses did not act according to God’s instructions and in fact acted and spoke such that for Israel, the gushing water was no longer a special miraculous act of God on the people’s behalf, but it took place because of the words and actions of Moses and Aaron. Moses’ failure was a failure to sanctify God and did not give credit to God and His glory before the people.
Even for a man like Moses, bitterness, anger and negative reaction to the people he served before God can become his undoing, especially if the bitterness caused him to fail to honour God and sanctify Him in his service. Bitterness, anger and negative reactions toward God’s people in service, leading to failure to hearken to God’s instructions and ways in outworking do not prevent us from God’s judgment. It is important for stewards to be found faithful. Unfaithfulness in our service to God is not to be taken lightly; and bitterness can cause much damage in the lives of God’s servants. Oftentime, anger, bitterness arise because we are offended and somehow we believe that the effectiveness of the ministry and service depend on us rather than on God’s power and enabling. There is the unconscious desire to claim part of the glory in the success of the ministry when in fact, the glory all belongs to God. Paul expressed to the Corinthians that he planted, Apollos wanted, but it is God who gives the increase and the growth. Hence all glory belongs to Him.

THE FOCUS OF THE SPIRIT’S WORK

“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26)
“When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father – the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father – he will testify about me. And you also must testify, for you have been with me from the beginning” (John 15:26)
“But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own, he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” (John 16:13-15)

In the various passages above, the Lord Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit. Note first of all that the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son; he is the Spirit of truth from the Father; he would testify of Christ; he would glorify Christ; he would guide the apostles into all the truth and remind them of everything he receives from the Son.
First of all, we must note the presence of the Trinity – the Triune God is all involved in the plan of salvation and in the work of the Gospel! The Father, the Son, the Spirit – they are all in unison and harmony; the Father sent the Son; the Son (together with the Father) sent the Spirit, and the three communicate all of the truth they hold in unity. The Son reveals the Father; the Spirit reveals the Son. The Son glorifies the Father; the Spirit glorifies the Son and together, they carry out the eternal plan of salvation.
But note also that the Lord Jesus in John 15:26 told the apostles that the Spirit of truth from the Father will testify about him, and the apostles also must testify, for they have been with him from the beginning.
The Christians today, and the church, receive the truth and testimony from the Apostles; and our task is to testify about Christ and the gospel in dependence on the Spirit of truth from the Father. We are not among the original Apostles, but we are those who receive from them what they received from the Triune God and we are to obey the commission to testify what they have passed on to us (through the Scriptures and the teaching and testimony of the Holy Spirit, revealed to us, through them, from the Father and the Son).

Sometimes, we Christians wish that we can go back to the first century Israel so that we could have seen Jesus and heard his voice, as though somehow that would make us stronger Christians. The truth which explodes such nostalgic sentimentalism is that by his Spirit living within us, Jesus is with us everywhere, every day. Whatever Jesus plans for his followers they can be sure that “it is for our good” (John 16:7).
Jesus promises that that the Spirit will guide his disciples into all truth, including what is yet to come, and he will bring glory to the Lord Jesus, by making what is his, known to followers.
The major part of the fulfilment of this promise lay in the Spirit’s inspiration of the apostles as they wrote the New Testament Scriptures. But it also has a continuing, subsidiary fulfilment in the work of the Spirit teaching every generation of believers the truth, always more deeply and fully as we respond in faith and obedience. He does not reveal new truth, but leads us into the whole truth which is already set forth in Jesus. After all, there could be no fuller revelation of God’s truth than in the Lord Jesus Christ. He is God’s final word to mankind, “full of grace and truth”.
“In Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge…..in Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fulness in Christ, who is the Head over every power and authority (Col. 23,9-10). If Jesus is the Truth, obviously there can be no further truth beyond him. Just as he is the way into which the disciples must be led by the Holy Spirit, so he is the truth which we must be guided (John 14:6).

One of the greatest tragedies of the past 30 or 40 years among Christians has been the pursuit and development of an un-Biblical dichotomy between facts and feelings, and so between the Word and the Spirit. The mistake is to emphasise one at the expense of the other, even to the extreme of virtually ignoring the other altogether. To imagine that the Word of God, doctrine, truth and the illumination of the mind are somewhat antithetical to the Spirit, experience, love and the softening of the heart is a profound error.
We are not “just minds” or “just hearts”. We are whole persons, made in the image of the God who thinks and speaks,who loves and acts, and who has made us with minds to understand his self-revelation in the words of Scripture, hearts to accept his truth and enthrone the Lord Jesus at the control-centre of the personality; and wills to put into action what we have come to understand and embrace in the gospel.
The great concern of the Holy Spirit is to glorify Jesus, because his glory is the glory of the Father too. Just as the Son spoke the words the Father gave him, so the Holy Spirit takes the things of the Lord Jesus (his words, his character, his saving work) and reveals them ever more deeply and fully to his disciples, the living church.
These disciples, empowered by the Spirit, then go back into the hostile world, which does not know God, and otherwise would bever want to know him, to testify of Christ, and through that testimony to see the powerful Spirit at work, convicting other rebels of sin, righteousness and judgment. The Spirit came to guide Christ’s followers into all truth, to show them God’s great eternal plans and what is yet to be. In this way, he glorifies Jesus, and the church glorifies Jesus too. Then the Son, the Spirit and the church together glorify the Father, before a lost and dying world. Anything that glorifies men cannot therefore be the work of God. Anything that brings glory to the Spirit, rather than the Son and the Father, is not the Spirit’s work! He is given to reveal Christ in all his glory as the Truth, to exalt him and to lead us all to fall at his feet and crown him king. That loving, joyful submission is the authentic Biblical proof that the Holy Spirit really is at work in us!!!

OUR RESPONSE TO GOD AND HIS SALVATION PLAN

In our study of Luke 9, we looked at verses 1-9, and we noted Jesus sending out the Twelve (those who later are known as the Apostles) to proclaim the kingdom of God, with His power and authority, from village to village.
Vs 5 states: “If people do not welcome you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them.” This symbolises that the town people have cut themselves off from the true Israel, the kingdom of God – Jesus the long awaited Messiah has come to inaugurate a new age, a new era, the kingdom of God, with Him as the head, to be led subsequently by the 12 Apostles.
Israel of old has waited so long for the coming of the Messiah; yet when He came, they rejected Him,
John the Apostle wrote: The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name,he gave the right to become children ofGod – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” (John 1:9-13)

John who wrote the above was one of the 12 Apostles. Note that the 12 Apostles was first mentioned in Luke 6:12-16 when Jesus, after a prolonged period of prayer on the mountainside, chose twelve of His disciples and designated them apostles. John was also among the 12 sent out by the Lord Jesus in Luke 9 he saw firsthand the rejection of Jesus by the Jews in the various villages.
Note the number 12: – 12 apostles (as contrasted with the 12 tribes of Israel), 12 basketful of remainder of bread after feeding of the five thousand; 12 gates in the new Jerusalem in Revelation 21 (vs 12) with 12 angels at the gates, and on the 12 gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel; the wall of the new Jerusalem had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (vs 14). In the new Jerusalem, the bride of the Lamb is the presence of those who belong to the holy city – they are those who believe and follow the Lamb from the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles of the new covenant.
This is in line with Romans 9:8 – “In other words, it is not the natural children who are God’s children, but it is the children of the promise who are regarded as Abraham’s offspring,”
Also Galatians 3:26-29: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed. and heirs to the promise”.

Paul in another passage wrote that the true spiritual Israel comprises of those who are true children of Abraham by faith, not those of natural descent. In Luke 9, Jesus came to His own, and He gave them the first priority to respond to Him and to receive Him through the proclamation of the 12, but there were many of Israel who rejected Him as the Messiah and the Son of God. The coming of the Messiah will be accompanied by signs, miracles, healing, and Jesus demonstrated these and testified to John the Baptist in prison that indeed He was the coming Messiah. When He sent the 12 in Luke 9, He gave them authority and power to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal; yet there were still those who rejected and they incurred the judgment of God.
An observation: those who were sent were the 12 apostles, not just ordinary followers of Christ. They had been with Jesus from the beginning and they were chosen and designated Apostles. In that light, there is no more apostle of this calibre and role – the 12 were leading the people of the new creation and covenant, just as the 12 tribes were the foundation of the nation of Israel in the old covenant. We cannot expect the servants of God today to have the same authority and power as the 12 apostles (who were also directly or indirectly responsible for the writing of the New Testament. No doubt, today, we have the Spirit of God dwelling in us and God can enable us to accomplish much to glorify Him, but certainly, we do not have the same stature authority, power, and calling as the 12 (note also that all the apostles, except John who was exiled to Patmos, died as martyrs for the Lord as they headed the church and spread the gospel, beginning in Jerusalem, spreading to Samaria, Asia and the rest of the known world.

And so, at this juncture, let us conclude with John 3:16, 18
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life…Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son”.

THE RECOVERING OF OLD AND UNCHANGING TRUTHS

FOUNDATIONS FOR SPIRITUALITY

Theology means talking and thinking about God, and his creatures and creation, in the light of God’s own self disclosure and revelation in history and Scripture (we cannot really know God without his self-disclosures). Ethics means considering practically and determining what types of action and qualities of character please God (it is not just keeping the rules and the laws without the inward reality); and spirituality means looking into the pursuing, achieving, and cultivating of communion with God, which includes public worship, private devotions and the results of these in actual Christian life individually, and corporately.
Ethics and spirituality should be viewed as aspects of theology and be controlled by the truths of theology; theology however should always have an eye to the ethical and devotional implications of its theses and studies, since God’s truth is given to be practised (Be doers of the Word and not just hearers only).

Unfortunately, it does not always work out this way. Because theology is commonly anchored and taught in universities and similar academic settings, where the advancement of learning rather than the direction of life is the goal, some theologians never see ethics and spirituality as their business, and limit their interest to abstract and formal truth in a way that ultimately trivializes theology itself; while some teachers of spiritual life, not seeing themselves as theologians or theology as basic to their task, let their wisdom appear as comments from experience for those who care rather as elucidation of the summons to commune with God that the gospel issues to every Christian. This disjunction and difference between theology, ethics and spirituality at the conceptual level and the consequent distribution of their study and concepts to the three different groups (namely theology, ethics and spirituality) have brought GREAT WEAKNESS INTO THE CHURCHES. Hence the need to recover the wholesome old and unchanging truths!!

An evangelical is one who honours and proclaims the Christ of the Scriptures, who is Jesus of Nazareth, God incarnate, humankind’s crucified and risen Saviour and reigning Lord, Son of the Father and way to the Father, focus of Christian faith, hope, love, worship and service.
Christ is not just the potent memory kept alive in the church, of a good man long gone, as he is for so many Enlightenment thinkers; rather, he is the one slain Lamb of God now alive from the dead, the Master and Friend of each believer for time and eternity, the divine Redeemer who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is to be adored for ever and ever.
The heart of the matter is devotional and doxological commitment to the Christ of the Scriptures (not just any christ in the mind of many unbelievers and even religious exponents).

Conscious acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as one’s Saviour, of his Father as one’s own Father through the grace of adoption, and of the Holy Spirit as Sustainer of this twofold fellowship, is of the essence of true evangelical spirituality, and this trinitarian framework sets it apart from anything else that is called spirituality anywhere in the church or in the world.

Pastors, teachers, leaders need insight into spirituality in order to teach and advise for the furthering of spiritual health and the overcoming of sin and folly in their many forms. Excellence in spiritual direction has been rare on both sides of the Reformational divide, and this seems to reflect the fact that studies of the dynamics of spiritual life have too often been crudely, simplistically, and carelessly done – a state of things that had to change, and has perhaps started to change already. More competence in spirituality is being currently called for than is currently available.

A competent understanding of the spiritual life is needed today to vindicate the faith in the face of secular scepticism and post-Christian humanism which question and query that a life of faith, hope, love and worship, of fighting sin, struggling to pray, and denying oneself is not only true fulfilment in this world but is the hallmark of true historic Christianity and spirituality.

READING AND UNDERSTANDING SCRIPTURE

God does not profess to answer all questions we like to know in Scripture; he reveals and tells us as much as he sees we need to know for our life of faith as Christians. That means he leaves some questions and problems unanswered and unsolved respectively; and this is to teach us to humbly trust him for who he is, and to remain unwavering in resting in his reliability and perfection.
We should not abandon faith in anything God has taught us merely because we cannot solve all the problems which it raises.It is not for us to stop believing because we lack understanding, or to postpone believing till we can get understanding, but to believe in order that we may understand.

Christians believe that the BIble is the Word of God given in human words in history. Because it is God’s word, it is incumbent on us to know what it means and to obey. And because God’s eternal word was given in human words in history, those words were themselves conditioned by the culture, background and speech patterns of the author; that is, God’s eternal word was spoken in historically particulament moments.
Because the Bible, inspired by God the Holy Spirit himself, also breathes real humanity, we must learn to interpret it. Because its human authors spoke their own language, out of their own culture and in their own history, we must go back to them and listen to what they meant within their own historical contexts if we are going to hear the word of the living God – both to them and to us. And precisely because God spoke his eternal word to them within their own particular history, we can take great confidence that he will speak again and again out of that context into lives all over the globe.
But first, for our valid interpretation of Scripture, there ought to be a historical investigation known as exegesis, which means the determination of the originally intended meaning of a text. The task of interpretation is nothing less than to bridge the historical – and therefore cultural – gap between them and us. We thereby determine what and how God spoke to them and how that same word speaks to us as an eternal word.

It is because our own histories, and cultures, are so different from those of the writers of sacred Scripture that we must engage in the interpretative process called hermeneutics, which refers to the whole task of interpretation including exegesis and the correlation and application of exegesis to theological thinking and Christian life. Hermeneutics ought to be the kind of interpretation that views Scripture as divine revelation which is therefore the basis for Christian theology, life, and behaviour. And because the Holy Spirit is both the author of Scripture and also the one who illuminates Scripture to the believer, divine help is needed for the proper reading and understanding of Scripture. And because the human heart and sin remain the same throughout generations of mankind, the application in areas that concern the inner being of man remains relevant and applicable throughout years of human history.

IMPORTANT CONCLUSIONS ON THE PRIMACY OF SCRIPTURE

We have looked at THEOLOGY, SCRIPTURE, AND THE HOLY SPIRIT in some details. At this juncture, it may be helpful to state the conclusions that are significant from the considerations thus far.

GOD HAS SPOKEN THROUGH HIS WRITTEN WORD
The entire Bible must be considered as a whole through unitary exegesis when addressing revelation and inspiration; the Bible offers a clear, unified, and pure revelation of God, and his redemptive work. The Bible’s authors assert that God character guarantees the Bible’s complete truthfulness and comprehensive usefulness;
ONE’S VIEW OF THE BIBLE IS CRUCIAL FOR ONE’S CHRISTIAN GROWTH AND MATURITY.
Jesus submitted himself fully to the authority of Scripture, and his apostles teach readers to do the same in their writings. The primary way Jesus teaches his followers today is by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, his written Word. Anything short of unconditional submission to Scripture, therefore, is a kind of impenitence; any view that subjects the written Word of God to the opinions and pronouncements of men involves unbelief and disloyalty towards Christ. The authority of the Bible exceeds that of tradition and other forms of human authority (and note that many false teachings and distorted views of the Bible over the years have to do with not submitting to the authority of the Bible).
However, adopting the Bible’s full authority does not close one’s mind. Rather, it opens it to the things God teaches and guards one against transitory theological trends. The Bible is God’s Word that must be heard and obeyed (thus Bible study and teachings are not just a matter of sharing one’s opinion or discussing interesting contributions by those who even question the Word of God based on their apparent intellectual ability and logic – and these may include theologians and liberals who insist that the Bible and the gospel must be taught and declared in an understandable way to modern hearers).

GOD HAS SPOKEN THROUGH THE HOLY SPIRIT’S INTERNAL WITNESS
“Through the HOly Spirit every Christian experiences Scripture speaking authoritatively as from God” (John Calvin). Our entire Christian ministry ought to be based on acceptance of the truthfulness and usefulness of the Bible as the Holy Spirit leads us into the experience of the BIble challenging our thought and will with God’s authority, and of our own inward inability to deny its divinity as it does so.
Hence reverence for God (including the third person of the Trinity) means reverence for Scripture, and serving God means obeying Scripture, No greater insult could be offered to the Creator than to neglect his written word; and conversely, there could be no truer act of homage to him than to prize and pore over it, and then to live out and out ists teaching.

The above are strong and definite conclusions for the individual believer and the evangelical church. Past failures and deviations from the truths have been due to this vague understanding and application of these conclusions. And the future of the church would depend on God’s people clinging closely to these conclusions and understanding; Christian growth and maturity; Christian ministry and testimony; – all these hinge on clinging to these truth and outworking.