Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen (1 John 5:21).
Here’s John’s last instruction. If we don’t follow this one, we will be in deep trouble. We are to guard ourselves against idols. Anything can be an idol. Just look at people on drugs who have made drugs an idol in their lives. They have to have it! Anything can be like that. Anything can drag us away from Jesus Christ; that’s why it is so important to spend quality time with Him. I’m not a quality time person, I’m a words person. You want to butter me up? Use words. But Jesus? He’s a quality time person. He doesn’t want every encounter to be a strategy meeting. He simply wants to be with you and to have your full attention. He wants to impart things to you, and He can’t do that while you are agitatedly in the room with Him, but your mind is elsewhere. Things you think you must attend to are probably your idols. Things that come to your mind while you are Practicing His Presence, and you put away your spiritual prayer cloth and run to the phone, or to the computer, or whatever, these are idols, something you deem to be more important than Jesus. Make Him your idol! Make Him your Perfect Everything. Go to Him first and find out what is happening in heaven before mopping up the mess you find yourself in. In fact, you’ll probably find out there is no mess. The path of Jesus lies right in the middle of what you called a problem. Guard yourself from making your mess, making your problem, bigger than Jesus. Lean on Him. Don’t bother with your own understanding. He’ll make your path straight. Yes, He will!
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And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life (1 John 5:20).
He is our Perfect Everything. We don’t need other gods. In comparison to The Truth, we have and know about God our Father, Jesus Christ His Son, and their Holy Spirit. Where else can we go to find such satisfaction, such completion? Here on earth we only know in part, like seeing through a haze or a cloudy mirror. But in heaven—in our eternal life—we will know it all. Even now our eternal life has already started because we made Jesus our Lord. He lives inside of us with His Father and the Holy Spirit, and we can already know all things. We have the mind of Christ. It’s just a matter of standing still in the dizziness of distractions and KNOW that He is God. He’ll give us every answer we need! We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one (1 John 5:19).
The whole earth is like a playing field, and there are only two teams on that field—us and them. Either we are with Christ, or we are against Christ. If an unbeliever tells us that he just hasn’t made up his mind yet, he has. He has chosen the other team without even making an X in the box that indicates his membership. No one can miss the mightiness of God our Father. Nor His creativity. No one really has an excuse for not choosing Jesus to be their Lord. However, our compassionate Father sends us out to explain and demonstrate what every creature knows internally: only God created the heavens and the earth and put everything into motion that we see and know today. Only God sent His Son, part of Himself, to pay for our sins, our sicknesses, our failures, our prosperity, our peace, and so on. . . . There is only One, and there is only One way to reach Him—through Jesus. After that, we are given God’s own Holy Spirit to live His life through us, a life of plenty, a life of peace, a life of righteousness. Only God! We know that whoever is born of God does not sin; but he who has been born of God keeps himself, and the wicked one does not touch him (1 John 5:18).
Oh, my. This sounds like a conflict, doesn’t it? I said I sin, and believers are sinners, yet here it says that those who are born again do not sin. Step back a minute and look at this truth. There is sin that misses the mark. There is also sin that is hatched in hell. A believer has a new spirit. This new spirit comes from God and is the image of God. It’s who we really are. This new spirit cannot plot and carry out deliberate sin. The mind might manufacture some fanciful ideas about getting revenge, etc., but our new spirit will not allow the action. We’re no longer made that way. Like the Scripture says, we keep ourselves. Now I know deadly gossip can run rampant in a church and wound many members. Just remember this. Our God does not gossip about His children, nor is He happy when gossip happens. Don’t let the devil touch you. You hold your tongue and the gossip will soon end. |
Marty
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