1 Corinthians 2:1-16
Here I have a large glass jar. In the jar there are several different objects. Keys, a toy, a little book, some food… What do all of these things have in common? They are all in the jar! In the same way that these different objects are united by being in the same jar. Paul helps us today to understand that all kinds of people are united in Christ by being in the same Spirit. When Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians he was concerned about how all the Christians in that one city had become divided in to varying factions. He wrote to them about the importance of unity. Last week we talked about Paul’s first of four sources of unity that God has provided for the Christian Church, the gospel of the cross of Christ, and him crucified, as the one thing by which we all are saved.
Today’s message is about our unity in the Holy Spirit. There is only one Spirit of God and all Christians are united by being in the same Holy Spirit. The story of the gospel of Christ is something anyone can hear about. But there are two possible responses to that offer of forgiveness. Believe it or don’t believe it. The population of the world can be divided up into three categories. There are those who have not heard the gospel story. There are those who have heard it and don’t believe it. There are those who have heard it and do believe it. That third group of people, those who have heard the gospel and believe it are all united in one group called the Church, the body of Christ.
All those different people come from different lands and cultures. They come from different times and histories and from different families and backgrounds. But as believers in the gospel they are united together in the one Holy Spirit who is given to every believer as a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance. The apostle Paul ministered in Corinth, in the midst of a world populated by hundreds of Gods collected up from cultures all over the then known world, along with many differing philosophies developed from intelligent minds that are nevertheless limited by the fact that they are merely human. He was speaking in an environment with a vast diversity of faith expressions and he was saying there is only one true God. Only our common faith in him can bring all people to true unity. As we continue in our study of the letter known as 1 Corinthians today we are looking at the second thing that unites us all as Christians. Today we are looking at the one Holy Spirit who unites us all in that saving faith by that one Spirit.
The second chapter of 1 Corinthians tells us three very important things about the Holy Spirit. He is a spirit of power. He is a spirit of wisdom and He is the only means by which we can know God’s plan of salvation and know that we are Christians. It is only by the Spirit that we understand and believe the gospel that saves us.
Let’s take a closer look. Listen again to 1 Cor. 2:1-5. “Brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
We may wonder what that demonstration of the Spirit’s power looked like. Paul wrote about that in 2 Cor. 12:12 where he says, “I persevered in demonstrating among you the marks of a true apostle, including signs, wonders and miracles.” All through the book of Acts we see that the gospel message was confirmed among the people by the power of God working miracles of healing and driving out demons. Even Jesus’ testimony about himself was confirmed by signs and wonders. It is recorded in John 10:37-38 that Jesus in his ministry said, “Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” And there are several other places in the gospels where it is said that the people believed in his name because of the signs he performed.
After that we may well wonder what the demonstration of the Spirit’s power looks like today. Certainly we would have to say that people coming to faith in Jesus is itself a mighty display of the Spirit’s power. Some say that every ministry that is truly of God will be validated today with the presence of signs and wonders just as in the ministries of Jesus and the early apostles. But that leaves us to wonder why we don’t see more miracles today. Or more specifically, why we don’t see miracles, signs and wonders validating every particular Christian ministry, such as this one, right here, at First Covenant Church. Our prayer list is long. And though we have given thanks for answered prayers on occasion, why doesn’t God answer all our prayers immediately as he did for Jesus and the apostles when they prayed for people to be healed?
Must we conclude that God is not among us? Some would. There are ministries today that insist that if there are not signs and wonders, then the true gospel is not being preached. Or else the preacher doesn’t have enough faith to believe in miracles. So what could be the reasons he does not bless us with more signs and wonders? It could be as some say that the amazing sign gifts have finished their work. God has stopped using them because his inspired word is complete and sufficient. But we know that miracles still happen. There are places in our world where miracles happen very frequently. It looks like in those places, mostly where the gospel is being preached for the first time, the miracles are still being used by God as they were at first. Just as in the days of the apostles, signs and wonders validate the messengers and help people believe in a message they had never heard before.
That might let us off the hook. We are an established church. We have faith in God’s Word and do not need miracles to prove it. In fact, we are careful to not fall into the error of the Jews who always demanded signs and said if they saw them they would believe. Yet they actually saw many and refused to believe. In addition almost everybody in America has already heard the gospel before, even in childhood. And yet, I know in my own case, when it came to actually believing the gospel I had heard before, I personally asked God for some evidence that he really knows me, and God worked a miracle of provision for me and answered many of my early prayers in quite miraculous ways. That also shows that God doesn’t always works his signs and wonders through a particular messenger to validate that messenger’s presentation of the gospel.
So in my own personal testimony I can show that miracles still help unbelievers today to have faith. That is why whenever I pray I try to pay attention to whether I am asking for miracles that would help unbelievers to know that God is real and loves them. Yet, too often in this nation’s own recent history ministers have made a decent living by putting themselves up on pedestals with claims of being used of God to perform miraculous healings. And it is not hard for them to find many willing followers who are later disappointed and disillusioned to find that the so called wonder worker was actually a thieving charlatan. Maybe that kind of abuse of signs and wonders is why God doesn’t provide us with very many in modern American congregations.
But before we breathe a sigh of relief about this issue of why the Holy Spirit does not move more powerfully among us, and before we congratulate ourselves for our maturity because we don’t need signs and wonders and look warily upon those who claim that the power of the Holy Spirit is active in their ministry, let us remember that Jesus himself had some critical words for most of the seven established churches to whom he caused John to write in the book of Revelation. There is such a thing as an apostate church, from whom God’s spirit has departed. There is such a thing as a lukewarm church that is just going through the motions on very little faith and very little effort to win new believers for whom God works signs and wonders to establish the faith of those babes in Christ.
When a church’s ministry is not very fruitful, even it had been fruitful at one time, it is wise for each of its members to consider, am I a hindrance to the power of the work of the Holy Spirit? Have I become so jaded in my seniority as a Christian? Have I become so uninterested in whether or not anybody else becomes a believer? Have I lost my sense of call to discipleship, thinking I am a good enough Christian already, even if I never talk about Jesus with any unbeliever? Have I myself become so compromised by this world’s sinful ways that I have fallen asleep in the faith? I will confess to you that those very questions trouble me. Especially because I am the messenger, I wonder if I am the problem, and I pray that it is not so!
But I also have to say that as a pastor there are many in whom I do not perceive much concern for the lost, any effort to save some, or especially any maintenance of personal growth in discipleship through the disciplines of prayer and earnest Bible study. We all want to do something to save our church, and we realize that for that we need new people. But do you see how the emphasis may very easily be in the wrong place if we are intent on saving our church more than on saving lost souls! Let us burn to save the lost as Paul did and I think we will see more miracles! Faith must not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to save souls and unite us in Christ. We must make sure that we are not standing in His way.
The second thing that Paul teaches us in this text is that the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of wisdom and that the wisdom that comes from God is of a very different sort than the wisdom that comes from the world. This human wisdom is obvious everywhere, and it is not just the kind of thinking that denies God even exists.
All religions today except for one are built on human efforts to figure out God. They start with what they know, such as nature, or morals and ethics that are pretty universally built into us and they try to figure out from there what God wants from us. A lot of that is based on experience too. People make connections and draw conclusions based on what they see happening in the world or experience for themselves. They have recognized higher powers, called them Gods and tried to control them or appease them using religion or even magic and sorcery. It’s all based on misunderstandings, sin clouded faulty memories of the original worship of Adam and Eve have corrupted true religion down through the ages and across the miles of separation from our common ancestors. After the tower of Babel, people spread out and became isolated from each other, allowing for a variety of religious developments, plus new ideas and innovations of vain imaginations that have led to new variations of worship. That is why there are so many different religions in the world worshipping false gods and idols, even though they also have a lot in common.
The wisdom revealed by God’s Spirit is profoundly different from anything that the world could come up with. It is also far superior because it is God’s wisdom. Wisdom that is from God makes us who believe wiser than those who think they can save themselves or just don’t have to be saved at all. It is hard for people to believe in Jesus if they insist on operating only under what they can understand by human reason and are not willing to accept that some truth must come from God and could not be known or discovered by man if God did not reveal it.
There are many people who think they are wise, but actually are very foolish to think they can run the world without regard for God’s will. Even the Jews, to whom God had revealed his Word, through whom God had given signs and wonders and prophecies about the coming Messiah, had become so corrupted by the wisdom of this world that most of their spiritual leaders had become keepers of just another religion, so much so that they did not recognize their own Messiah when he came to them. If they had known the wisdom of God, Paul says, they would not have crucified Jesus.
The same goes for the Romans, though Pilate knew Jesus was an innocent victim of a great injustice, yet he allowed himself to cave under the political pressure from the crowd. Pilate thought that was the wisest choice he could make, even though it pained him. But if he had received the wisdom that comes from God through the Holy Spirit, surely he would have been stronger to stand up against the Jews and he would have refused to crucify his own Messiah who had come to set him free from such bondage to sin and evil.
The wisdom that comes from God has a unifying power. We will have a lot in common when we all believe the same things. And we will be wise when we all believe the things God teaches us by his Spirit in accordance with is revealed word. You have probably heard talk of the one world religion. It is often spoken of as the evil goal of this world’s leaders, to combine all cultures under one common faith sounds like a worthy goal but we see it as something that the devil is seeking to do according to his own wisdom. The one world religion will be a powerful sign of the end times because the antichrist will be trying to compel all people in the world to worship him alone.
But I say to you there is really nothing wrong with one faith governing all the citizens of the whole world, as long as it is the correct faith, the one true faith that comes from God by His Holy Spirit. Indeed one day it shall come to pass. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord! Then all the world’s people will be united as one. And by the wisdom of God, believers in Jesus Christ ought to declare and celebrate that unity in Spirit that we can enjoy today, and ought to be about the business of carefully, lovingly and yet boldly and powerfully warning everybody else to leave their false religions behind and join us in worshipping the one true God who is revealed to us in Scripture and whose Holy Spirit helps us to rightly divide the words of Truth.
In speaking to the Corinthians Paul said three things that we need to know about the unifying power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power. He is the Spirit of Wisdom, and thirdly he is the only means by which we may know the mind of God. 1 Cor. 2:11-12 it is written, “Who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God.”
Unless God speaks to us by his own Spirit, we won’t really get to know him as a person. We can even deny that he is really there. Look at a mannequin modeling clothes in a department store. It can be made to look exactly like a living person. But unless it speaks, we know that there is nobody in there. Look at a comatose human body lying on a hospital bed. We believe there is a person in there just because it’s breathing. But who is it? What is she like? Some will remember. But others, who meet the person for the first time while she is in a coma, will never really know the person inside. Unless she recovers enough to at least speak, the most I can do is know about such a person by what the ones who knew her because she used to speak to them, tell me about her.
So how do we get to know God? Truly we can only know Him if he speaks to us in a living relationship with us. Short of that, we can only know about God by what the ones who knew Him because He used to speak to them, tell us about Him. That’s this book, the written testimony and record of the ones to whom God has truly spoken. Fortunately for us, God himself has also spoken to our faithful hearts and in fact He still uses the Words in this book to speak to us today. He has also promised, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Do you want to know about God? It’s all written down in this book, everything you need to know. Many people know about God, but they don’t know him personally. That’s about as good as I could know anyone whose biography is available to me. For example I know things about Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin. But I don’t really know them. I haven’t met them. So if you want to know God the person, you have to meet him. Seek Him out in this book and He will speak to your heart. Unless the Spirit speaks to us of the things of God, we will never know anything worth knowing!
Way back in Deuteronomy God already told his people that even if they go astray and are scattered into foreign lands, “if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.” This does not say that you will figure him out or discover all his secrets and mysteries. It means you will find Him, God himself, the person who loves you and reveals himself to you by His Spirit.
You can know a lot about a person from what physical evidence identifies them and yet if you don’t have a personal relationship you can never really know the person. It is the same with God, only more so. The Heavens declare the glory of God. But that only gets you as far as the fact that there is a God who has done great and marvelous things. What the Heavens don’t declare, but God does share personally, is how he feels about human sin and rebellion and what he decided to do about it.
The Holy Spirit makes us one by His power and by His wisdom. The mind of Christ is one. All who have the mind of Christ, will think like Jesus and act like Jesus and love like Jesus with a wisdom that is beyond the understanding of this world. He is the head of the body as it says in Ephesians 4;15, “speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” As we all obey the teachings of Jesus we become more and more united in spirit with each other also. If we all share the same Spirit, we are all moved by the same will, the will of God. This is the goal of our Christian faith and our relationship with God, to be the body of Christ, obediently doing his will together so that his will is being done on earth as it is in Heaven. Let it be so among us. Amen!
Here I have a large glass jar. In the jar there are several different objects. Keys, a toy, a little book, some food… What do all of these things have in common? They are all in the jar! In the same way that these different objects are united by being in the same jar. Paul helps us today to understand that all kinds of people are united in Christ by being in the same Spirit. When Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians he was concerned about how all the Christians in that one city had become divided in to varying factions. He wrote to them about the importance of unity. Last week we talked about Paul’s first of four sources of unity that God has provided for the Christian Church, the gospel of the cross of Christ, and him crucified, as the one thing by which we all are saved.
Today’s message is about our unity in the Holy Spirit. There is only one Spirit of God and all Christians are united by being in the same Holy Spirit. The story of the gospel of Christ is something anyone can hear about. But there are two possible responses to that offer of forgiveness. Believe it or don’t believe it. The population of the world can be divided up into three categories. There are those who have not heard the gospel story. There are those who have heard it and don’t believe it. There are those who have heard it and do believe it. That third group of people, those who have heard the gospel and believe it are all united in one group called the Church, the body of Christ.
All those different people come from different lands and cultures. They come from different times and histories and from different families and backgrounds. But as believers in the gospel they are united together in the one Holy Spirit who is given to every believer as a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance. The apostle Paul ministered in Corinth, in the midst of a world populated by hundreds of Gods collected up from cultures all over the then known world, along with many differing philosophies developed from intelligent minds that are nevertheless limited by the fact that they are merely human. He was speaking in an environment with a vast diversity of faith expressions and he was saying there is only one true God. Only our common faith in him can bring all people to true unity. As we continue in our study of the letter known as 1 Corinthians today we are looking at the second thing that unites us all as Christians. Today we are looking at the one Holy Spirit who unites us all in that saving faith by that one Spirit.
The second chapter of 1 Corinthians tells us three very important things about the Holy Spirit. He is a spirit of power. He is a spirit of wisdom and He is the only means by which we can know God’s plan of salvation and know that we are Christians. It is only by the Spirit that we understand and believe the gospel that saves us.
Let’s take a closer look. Listen again to 1 Cor. 2:1-5. “Brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.
We may wonder what that demonstration of the Spirit’s power looked like. Paul wrote about that in 2 Cor. 12:12 where he says, “I persevered in demonstrating among you the marks of a true apostle, including signs, wonders and miracles.” All through the book of Acts we see that the gospel message was confirmed among the people by the power of God working miracles of healing and driving out demons. Even Jesus’ testimony about himself was confirmed by signs and wonders. It is recorded in John 10:37-38 that Jesus in his ministry said, “Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” And there are several other places in the gospels where it is said that the people believed in his name because of the signs he performed.
After that we may well wonder what the demonstration of the Spirit’s power looks like today. Certainly we would have to say that people coming to faith in Jesus is itself a mighty display of the Spirit’s power. Some say that every ministry that is truly of God will be validated today with the presence of signs and wonders just as in the ministries of Jesus and the early apostles. But that leaves us to wonder why we don’t see more miracles today. Or more specifically, why we don’t see miracles, signs and wonders validating every particular Christian ministry, such as this one, right here, at First Covenant Church. Our prayer list is long. And though we have given thanks for answered prayers on occasion, why doesn’t God answer all our prayers immediately as he did for Jesus and the apostles when they prayed for people to be healed?
Must we conclude that God is not among us? Some would. There are ministries today that insist that if there are not signs and wonders, then the true gospel is not being preached. Or else the preacher doesn’t have enough faith to believe in miracles. So what could be the reasons he does not bless us with more signs and wonders? It could be as some say that the amazing sign gifts have finished their work. God has stopped using them because his inspired word is complete and sufficient. But we know that miracles still happen. There are places in our world where miracles happen very frequently. It looks like in those places, mostly where the gospel is being preached for the first time, the miracles are still being used by God as they were at first. Just as in the days of the apostles, signs and wonders validate the messengers and help people believe in a message they had never heard before.
That might let us off the hook. We are an established church. We have faith in God’s Word and do not need miracles to prove it. In fact, we are careful to not fall into the error of the Jews who always demanded signs and said if they saw them they would believe. Yet they actually saw many and refused to believe. In addition almost everybody in America has already heard the gospel before, even in childhood. And yet, I know in my own case, when it came to actually believing the gospel I had heard before, I personally asked God for some evidence that he really knows me, and God worked a miracle of provision for me and answered many of my early prayers in quite miraculous ways. That also shows that God doesn’t always works his signs and wonders through a particular messenger to validate that messenger’s presentation of the gospel.
So in my own personal testimony I can show that miracles still help unbelievers today to have faith. That is why whenever I pray I try to pay attention to whether I am asking for miracles that would help unbelievers to know that God is real and loves them. Yet, too often in this nation’s own recent history ministers have made a decent living by putting themselves up on pedestals with claims of being used of God to perform miraculous healings. And it is not hard for them to find many willing followers who are later disappointed and disillusioned to find that the so called wonder worker was actually a thieving charlatan. Maybe that kind of abuse of signs and wonders is why God doesn’t provide us with very many in modern American congregations.
But before we breathe a sigh of relief about this issue of why the Holy Spirit does not move more powerfully among us, and before we congratulate ourselves for our maturity because we don’t need signs and wonders and look warily upon those who claim that the power of the Holy Spirit is active in their ministry, let us remember that Jesus himself had some critical words for most of the seven established churches to whom he caused John to write in the book of Revelation. There is such a thing as an apostate church, from whom God’s spirit has departed. There is such a thing as a lukewarm church that is just going through the motions on very little faith and very little effort to win new believers for whom God works signs and wonders to establish the faith of those babes in Christ.
When a church’s ministry is not very fruitful, even it had been fruitful at one time, it is wise for each of its members to consider, am I a hindrance to the power of the work of the Holy Spirit? Have I become so jaded in my seniority as a Christian? Have I become so uninterested in whether or not anybody else becomes a believer? Have I lost my sense of call to discipleship, thinking I am a good enough Christian already, even if I never talk about Jesus with any unbeliever? Have I myself become so compromised by this world’s sinful ways that I have fallen asleep in the faith? I will confess to you that those very questions trouble me. Especially because I am the messenger, I wonder if I am the problem, and I pray that it is not so!
But I also have to say that as a pastor there are many in whom I do not perceive much concern for the lost, any effort to save some, or especially any maintenance of personal growth in discipleship through the disciplines of prayer and earnest Bible study. We all want to do something to save our church, and we realize that for that we need new people. But do you see how the emphasis may very easily be in the wrong place if we are intent on saving our church more than on saving lost souls! Let us burn to save the lost as Paul did and I think we will see more miracles! Faith must not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. It is the work of the Holy Spirit to save souls and unite us in Christ. We must make sure that we are not standing in His way.
The second thing that Paul teaches us in this text is that the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of wisdom and that the wisdom that comes from God is of a very different sort than the wisdom that comes from the world. This human wisdom is obvious everywhere, and it is not just the kind of thinking that denies God even exists.
All religions today except for one are built on human efforts to figure out God. They start with what they know, such as nature, or morals and ethics that are pretty universally built into us and they try to figure out from there what God wants from us. A lot of that is based on experience too. People make connections and draw conclusions based on what they see happening in the world or experience for themselves. They have recognized higher powers, called them Gods and tried to control them or appease them using religion or even magic and sorcery. It’s all based on misunderstandings, sin clouded faulty memories of the original worship of Adam and Eve have corrupted true religion down through the ages and across the miles of separation from our common ancestors. After the tower of Babel, people spread out and became isolated from each other, allowing for a variety of religious developments, plus new ideas and innovations of vain imaginations that have led to new variations of worship. That is why there are so many different religions in the world worshipping false gods and idols, even though they also have a lot in common.
The wisdom revealed by God’s Spirit is profoundly different from anything that the world could come up with. It is also far superior because it is God’s wisdom. Wisdom that is from God makes us who believe wiser than those who think they can save themselves or just don’t have to be saved at all. It is hard for people to believe in Jesus if they insist on operating only under what they can understand by human reason and are not willing to accept that some truth must come from God and could not be known or discovered by man if God did not reveal it.
There are many people who think they are wise, but actually are very foolish to think they can run the world without regard for God’s will. Even the Jews, to whom God had revealed his Word, through whom God had given signs and wonders and prophecies about the coming Messiah, had become so corrupted by the wisdom of this world that most of their spiritual leaders had become keepers of just another religion, so much so that they did not recognize their own Messiah when he came to them. If they had known the wisdom of God, Paul says, they would not have crucified Jesus.
The same goes for the Romans, though Pilate knew Jesus was an innocent victim of a great injustice, yet he allowed himself to cave under the political pressure from the crowd. Pilate thought that was the wisest choice he could make, even though it pained him. But if he had received the wisdom that comes from God through the Holy Spirit, surely he would have been stronger to stand up against the Jews and he would have refused to crucify his own Messiah who had come to set him free from such bondage to sin and evil.
The wisdom that comes from God has a unifying power. We will have a lot in common when we all believe the same things. And we will be wise when we all believe the things God teaches us by his Spirit in accordance with is revealed word. You have probably heard talk of the one world religion. It is often spoken of as the evil goal of this world’s leaders, to combine all cultures under one common faith sounds like a worthy goal but we see it as something that the devil is seeking to do according to his own wisdom. The one world religion will be a powerful sign of the end times because the antichrist will be trying to compel all people in the world to worship him alone.
But I say to you there is really nothing wrong with one faith governing all the citizens of the whole world, as long as it is the correct faith, the one true faith that comes from God by His Holy Spirit. Indeed one day it shall come to pass. Every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord! Then all the world’s people will be united as one. And by the wisdom of God, believers in Jesus Christ ought to declare and celebrate that unity in Spirit that we can enjoy today, and ought to be about the business of carefully, lovingly and yet boldly and powerfully warning everybody else to leave their false religions behind and join us in worshipping the one true God who is revealed to us in Scripture and whose Holy Spirit helps us to rightly divide the words of Truth.
In speaking to the Corinthians Paul said three things that we need to know about the unifying power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of power. He is the Spirit of Wisdom, and thirdly he is the only means by which we may know the mind of God. 1 Cor. 2:11-12 it is written, “Who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God.”
Unless God speaks to us by his own Spirit, we won’t really get to know him as a person. We can even deny that he is really there. Look at a mannequin modeling clothes in a department store. It can be made to look exactly like a living person. But unless it speaks, we know that there is nobody in there. Look at a comatose human body lying on a hospital bed. We believe there is a person in there just because it’s breathing. But who is it? What is she like? Some will remember. But others, who meet the person for the first time while she is in a coma, will never really know the person inside. Unless she recovers enough to at least speak, the most I can do is know about such a person by what the ones who knew her because she used to speak to them, tell me about her.
So how do we get to know God? Truly we can only know Him if he speaks to us in a living relationship with us. Short of that, we can only know about God by what the ones who knew Him because He used to speak to them, tell us about Him. That’s this book, the written testimony and record of the ones to whom God has truly spoken. Fortunately for us, God himself has also spoken to our faithful hearts and in fact He still uses the Words in this book to speak to us today. He has also promised, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Do you want to know about God? It’s all written down in this book, everything you need to know. Many people know about God, but they don’t know him personally. That’s about as good as I could know anyone whose biography is available to me. For example I know things about Abraham Lincoln and Ben Franklin. But I don’t really know them. I haven’t met them. So if you want to know God the person, you have to meet him. Seek Him out in this book and He will speak to your heart. Unless the Spirit speaks to us of the things of God, we will never know anything worth knowing!
Way back in Deuteronomy God already told his people that even if they go astray and are scattered into foreign lands, “if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul.” This does not say that you will figure him out or discover all his secrets and mysteries. It means you will find Him, God himself, the person who loves you and reveals himself to you by His Spirit.
You can know a lot about a person from what physical evidence identifies them and yet if you don’t have a personal relationship you can never really know the person. It is the same with God, only more so. The Heavens declare the glory of God. But that only gets you as far as the fact that there is a God who has done great and marvelous things. What the Heavens don’t declare, but God does share personally, is how he feels about human sin and rebellion and what he decided to do about it.
The Holy Spirit makes us one by His power and by His wisdom. The mind of Christ is one. All who have the mind of Christ, will think like Jesus and act like Jesus and love like Jesus with a wisdom that is beyond the understanding of this world. He is the head of the body as it says in Ephesians 4;15, “speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” As we all obey the teachings of Jesus we become more and more united in spirit with each other also. If we all share the same Spirit, we are all moved by the same will, the will of God. This is the goal of our Christian faith and our relationship with God, to be the body of Christ, obediently doing his will together so that his will is being done on earth as it is in Heaven. Let it be so among us. Amen!
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