Blog In Audio:
Greetings,
As leaders we should inspire those we lead to seek to know God to the fullest in their lives. This includes teaching them to seek to understand God’s words to them. In understanding God’s words, we must seek to understand the language of God. We live in a day where many seek to define the words of others by their own definitions of those words. The truth is, we all have our own personal dictionaries to define what we believe to be the meaning of the words of others in our world. This is especially true when we create societies where there are no absolutes.
In the mid 1980s, I had a vision where I was standing in my city in a place where there is often a gathering of young people. Above me I could see a principality and he had three large chains extending from the ground to three sides of his body. The chains were each stretched tightly as the principality stretched them to his place of standing in the air. He was shouting out belligerently. He declared, “There is no God!” “There are no absolutes!” Then I heard someone say, “Pull him down”, and some began to focus on him and try to pull him from his place of standing. Then I heard God say. “I don’t want him down. I want him out of here!” I turned with my side to the principality and I lifted my hands and began to worship God. I saw thousands of young people stand with me and they raised their hands in worship to God just as I was. Jesus began to come down in bodily form in the midst of the people. As He did, I could hear the breaking of the chains holding the principality. The presence of Jesus was dispossessing the ability for the principality to be held to the ground. God was revealing to me that the way to destroy the power of the enemy was to fill the place of its standing with an expression of the body of Christ.
There are many revelations that I have received from this vision, but one thing I want to address today is that of absolutes. There are absolutes in God, but those absolutes are defined by His understanding and not ours. We cannot shape God in our likeness and image and expect to see Him for who He truly is. We must see Jesus as precious. When we see Him as precious we know we cannot live without Him! It is only then that we can allow Him to shape our hearts and minds to be as God purposes them to be in life. We are blessed to have a personal relationship with God as our Father through our adoption as sons and daughters of God by His grace found through Jesus the only begotten of the Father. We know God through the mystery of our fellowship with Holy Spirit and God as Holy Spirit is our true teacher that transforms our hearts and minds to be increasingly conformed in our image and thinking. We also have the Scriptures that have been given to us by God for our learning.
Romans 15:4 For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that we through the patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.
The Scriptures are not our teacher. The Holy Spirit is. The religious Pharisees of Jesus’ day searched the Scriptures thinking that in them they could find salvation, but Jesus told them the Scriptures testify of Him (Jn. 5:39). The Scriptures are a witness to the voice of God, but Holy Spirit is the voice of God to our hearts. The Scriptures in their entirety are a witness to the voice of God. The Scripture is filled with statements of truth and truly stated statements that when they are put together create an infallible witness to the true voice of God by His Holy Spirit revealing principals, patterns, and values of God that are absolute in our lives. We must learn some keys in allowing the Holy Spirit to teach us the language of God. All of creation is a witness to the true character, nature, way, power, and authority of God. The language of Scripture is rooted in the language of creation. This is not the language of man’s creation or the ways of the world. It is the language of God in His creation. Man’s creation reveals man’s sin and consequences found in creation because of man’s sin reveal the weakness of man. God’s creation reveals the goodness of God and the overcoming power of His grace. The life-giving, redemptive, and healing nature of creation reveals God in His love and power. Another witness to Scripture is Scripture itself. We do not interpret Scripture by the cultures or ways of our world. We allow the language of God to be found in the language of God. Phrases in Scripture can be found in Scripture. Last week I addressed strengthening weak hands, weak knees, and finding straight paths for our feet. These phrases are found in Scripture to give us a foundation for understanding what they mean in our lives today. We must pay attention to God’s words and we must define God’s words through His generational communication to mankind. I will be giving further keys to understanding God’s words in the next blogs, but we as leaders must lead to help others understand God’s words to their hearts. The Holy Spirit teaches us by transforming our hearts and minds to agree with and become a testimony of the principals, patterns, and values of God found in the witness of His written word.
Food For Thought,
Ted J. Hanson
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