2 - How do you find out what God's will is? That is a question everybody wants to know. This gives us some clues: fight against cultural conformity; and allow Christ to fill your mind - not worldly junk. How could we possibly hear God's voice in our lives when we are allowing it to be drowned out by all the "noise" of our culture?
3-4 - Humility is something I need to work on. Humility is hugely important, because it bring us closer to God. When we are humble, we understand how much we need God...when we allow arrogance to creep into our minds, we begin to believe that we can do things through our own power...through our own strength of will. This passage reminds me drop the damaging "comparison game" and remember that every member of the body of Christ is invaluable. Every single person who is a follower of Christ is completely unique and the only person that can do the task that God has assigned to them. Humility can see the importance of all the members...arrogance is blind to the gifts of anyone other then itself.
6 - Prophecy freak us out, but this is the first thing that Paul mentions when it comes to gifts that we need to be using. What we need to understand is that the majority of the time, the prophets were not making future prophecies...they were calling God's people back to Him. Maybe we don't have enough people in our churches today, calling God's people back to His way. Maybe we don't have enough "prophets" willing to speak the hard truths.
9-21 - I just want to make a short list of the marks of the Christian believer in this passage that I believe the modern church is pretty terrible at living out (Me included)...
- Abhor evil and hold to what is good
- Be zealous and fervent in the Spirit
- Bless those who persecute you
- Avoid arrogance and hand out with the lowly
- As far as you e concerned, live peaceably with all
- If your enemy is hungry feed him
What would it look like if you really lived those things out?
2 comments:
From the Message - Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. If we could only think of offerings and sacrifices as so much more than money.
Just really like what part of vs 2 in the Message said - Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Finally – when we really think about what it means to love our neighbor as our self, we should really look at 9-21 here. I pray that I can really try to do these things whenever the opportunity is presented.
Peace,
j
In my office, something we do every morning is we start the day with office wide prayer. We get everybody in the office together, share prayer requests and praises, laugh a little, and pray. It is a really great way to start the day in the office and really helps get us on the right foot.
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