Uncommon wisdom from Christ, the heart of God. To read the entire, just click on the link. (4 or 5 studies).
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The True Purpose of Christ’s Ministers ….. Ephesians 4:11-24
Being an apostle isn’t receiving a gift. It’s being a gift….to the church.
Christ did not call me to build a big organization, a big group of people…..only Christ can do that…… He called me to equip the saints!
No man can see the power of this equipping. Only the spirit of Christ.
Telling people how they ought to live their lives does not equip them.
Too many Christians are all about what’s right and what’s wrong. We need to be about what is Christ and what is the world.
Trying to be right is eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only Christ is right.
You’ve arrived when you’re on the journey in Christ.
The more the spirit of Christ works within you, the more powerful will your relationships be with other members of the body of Christ.
The spirit of antichrist says that you need some other person between you and Christ….to interpret his will for your life. But that is what Satan wants….to keep you from Christ. Don’t let that happen. A true minister of Christ leads you into Christ.
If he’s a true minister of Christ….he’s helping you serve Christ, follow Christ. He’s definitely not asking you to follow him.
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What judges a man is not Jesus, or God, but rather that man’s response to Jesus, the Son of God.
Jesus says that he came to save….to throw out a life raft. The condemnation (judgment), then, does not come from Jesus, from God….but rather from the refusal to accept the salvation offered.
A lot of people seem to think that Jesus came to throw the life raft, and then if the drowning person refuses to get in, Jesus pushes the man under the water. And that’s the judgmental lifestyle they live.
Hey you Christians out there……people are already drowning bad enough as it is….they don’t need you to push them under to hasten their demise. Throw them the life raft of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and invite them in by God’s love. When they respond with the desire to accept the help, allow them to climb in! Make it easy, not difficult!
There is nowhere in the word of God that Christians are urged, or commanded, to judge others. In fact, quite the contrary.
In reality, those condemnatory types of judgments put us in prison……for the moment we judge another, we become unable to love that other.
So, now Jesus says that he does judge…..though he emphasizes that he never judges a person.
In I Corinthians 2, the need for an investigative-type of judgment is stated.
The judgment that God desires for us is to discern, or judge, truth from error.
God desires for us to take the truths revealed in His Word and to take the time to decide the ramifications of those truths. To “put into a box” the realities of those truths, so that we cannot be talked out of those truths. For instance, if Jesus Christ paid for all the sins of the world, then, I judge, that includes me, and moreover, I may never ever try to pay for a single sin of mine by my own efforts. Once we consign these types of things to fixed, judged, places….they are a lot easier to deal with as they occur in the future.
But to judge one another, to consign another person to a fixed place worthy of punishment……even Jesus Christ Himself didn’t do that.
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What was The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?
Do you have a strong moral code of right and wrong, and do you endeavor to live by that code? How many of you, by your endeavoring to keep that code, have come into close relationship with God? How many of you feel a strong need to judge yourself and the actions of others? This code and the strong need to judge is nothing more than a result of eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
You may ask, “Why did God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden in the first place?” He didn’t.
In order to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam & Eve had to consciously walk out of the life of God which was in them, and into the lying promise of the deceiver, the god of darkness and death.
Instead of freely enjoying the presence and experience of God, they became “like god” in that they chose to determine what was good and what was evil themselves. Instead of merely enjoying the experience of God, life became about they themselves knowing, in their minds, what was right and what was wrong, thus lifting themselves up to the top of the moral heap……in their own minds!
Of course, instead of making them like God, they lost the presence and experience of God and without this life, they died. Instead of becoming like God, they became lost in their vanity ….. they became fools!
In the garden, before eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam & Eve did not know good and evil, they just knew God. All things were of God.
The works of the devil, partaken of first by Adam and Eve, are to walk by a personal sense of moral right and wrong, which will never bring us into the presence of God.
Not living by a sense of what we ought to do, what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, but living by faith (trust) in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Jesus has suffered the consequence of right and wrong (no wonder it was religious leaders, who had a very strong sense of right and wrong, who had him put to death), so that we can be delivered into this new creation where all things are once again of God.
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Who put the Tree in the Garden?
Many people think that God put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden so that man would have a choice. The believe that God created evil, so that He could rescue man from it. Why, that is so warped!
Gen 1:31a And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good……
Not just good….very good.
But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not good.
So eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil brought evil into the world. A means to seek to destroy what God had created. It was against God.
It cannot be of God……unless you think God contradicts Himself. In that case, we may as well throw the whole Bible out.
If the true God put this tree in the garden…..He is at cross purposes with Himself. That cannot be.
By our having to know and live by what we think are right and wrong, good and evil, we are “fed” vanity, lies and darkness. Eating of this toxic substance is what kills us.
Satan promised that eating of this tree would add something they didn’t have. Instead, it took away everything of value.
Self-promotion (vanity) thus entered the world, with the resulting awareness of lack.
It did not exist before eating of the fruit of the knowing of good and evil.
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