Spiritual Strength

I have been going to church for 15 years. There have been times when I have not attended due to circumstances beyond my control but overall I have attended one church or another for that time frame. I have been teaching Bible Studies for at least 10 of those 15 years. I claim my blessing from God, for the great understanding of the Holy Bible, and the great zeal for applying it into my life, even when it hurts.

The application of the Bible is how we can gage our maturity in the words preached to us by the Holy Spirit and by the Book that is meant to teach us maturity. The Holy Bible is a circular book. It gives us information to apply into our life, then, to do it Biblically, we have to go back into the Bible to understand how to apply it. Do we see the people in our church doing it that way? Are our fellow pew warmers and example of that?

Let’s look at what kind of people are sitting in the pews next to us right now. As I see it there are three: those who love Jesus but don’t know Him, those who know Jesus but don’t love Him and those who love Jesus and know Him.

Those who love Jesus but don’t know Him are those who are sitting beside you because their mom sat beside you. They love Jesus because their mom loved Jesus. They love Him because people told them loving stories about Him. They may have seen His work or heard about His work in the lives of others but they know it not in their own life because they know Him not. It’s sad but very common. Is this you?

Or maybe this is you. Those who do not love Jesus but know Him are also sitting beside us in the pews. They are the ones who know Jesus but do not believe who He is. They have also been in the church for a long time based on their knowledge of Jesus. But the more they know Him the more they hate Him. Their hatred is not something they keep to themselves, they want us to hate Jesus too. They are the false prophets among us. They love Him not.

And then there are the people who love Jesus and know Jesus. These are the ones sitting beside you who worship Jesus with all their being. They want to know Jesus and they want to love Him more. They are addicted to the way they feel about Jesus. They have the spiritual strength we envy.

Guess what. You don’t have to envy it, you can have it too. You can know those who love Jesus for no reason of their own and those who hate Jesus because their knowledge is not perfected about Him. It is all about your knowledge.

We know that it takes time to learn. Knowledge lingering around in our heads without pondering its importance to our life causes our knowledge to be incomplete. No mystery is solved, no problem worked out, no advanced knowledge gained, no spiritual growth resulting in no spiritual strength.

A Christian without spiritual strength is a weak Christian. Someone who is swayed by a false prophet into hating Jesus. Someone who is lulled into thinking, the Jesus they love, is their Jesus and not their parents. We got out of the mud with our spiritual strength would it be a good thing to land back in there again. It would be tragic to say the very least.

Spiritual strength comes from loving Jesus and knowing Him or vise versa knowing Jesus and loving Him. Any other way will not give us the strength we need because we will not even know we have it. Do a search this week on strength in the Bible. Learn about the strength we have in us as a result of the Holy Spirit bringing it with Him. Then believe it so you can use it to ward off deception.