All for Love - Part III

God's answer is simple, but in order for him to bring us to a place of accepting it, he must first put us through a series of courses that will exhaust us, leaving us despairing of self and others and prepared to listen to whatever God says with a believing heart. It is not until man refuses to trust himself that he will begin to trust God. Many unbelieving Christians are merely in the process of learning to give up on themselves.

Regain the lost simplicity of faith and repossess the joy that is mine in Christ.

The end result for Israel was their banishment to the wilderness where they had to learn particular lessons that would once again turn their hope and faith to God.

The ignorant, the untalented and the ungifted, and the rich and the poor are all on equal footing when it comes to living the victorious life.

All knowledge needs to move 18 inches lower than the brain into the heart!

True Christian counseling leaves the person looking to Christ, not to himself. I have always found puzzling the measure of hostility that can be raised among Christians when they hear Jesus is all we need. We are commanded to cast our anxiety on the Lord, not on psychology.

The believer who has lost his joy and victory in Christ too often looks where things appear to be clearest, not at the source of defeat. Looking in the wrong places never yields the key to success, and just because there is a measure of light, this is no reason to continue down the wrong path.

A critical spirit is born when one eats of the good side of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and then expects self and others to perform it. There is a deep blindness that comes from eating from the good side of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... that forbidden tree.

God doesn’t want us to do good works, but what makes the work fitting is not the content but the origin; when the source of the work is faith as Christ expresses himself through us, then it is acceptable 1 Thessalonians 1:3

The deception from eating from the good side of this forbidden tree is in many ways worse than doing evil. It becomes false religion.

Witches study the evil side of the tree to gain more knowledge of evil; some so called theologians study the good side of the tree to gain more knowledge of good, but there is no lasting difference between the two. Again, the question must be asked, are today’s teaching yielding more additions to God’s standard or promoting performance that would apply equally as well to the Hindu? Are they from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or are they from the other tree, the Tree of Life?

If we are living out of his life, we need not worry; the action, no matter how insignificant in our eyes, will always be good. The source must be from Christ’s life.

This principle is at work among all legalistic teachers; the greater they place above God’s standard, the farther they fall.

The enemy loves to see us eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Just as there are levels of evil for man to commit, so there are levels of good. The Christian who gave his life to Christ strived to be a +10 on the good scale. The problem is that to the level of good one arrives, to that same level of evil he will tend to fall, so before he knows he is back down to -10.

Spirituality comes from the Spirit of Christ not from a certain set of circumstances.

A big name for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is bipolar manic depression.

The supernatural life is manifested in the small, often unseen areas of our lives in such things as peace, mercy, and lack of condemnation when wronged.

The first few miracles Moses performed were duplicated by pharaohs magicians. In the same way, Satan can duplicate the large, spectacular signs and visions by which many judge spirituality. We must remember that we have a relationship with our God.

When we are in the perfect will of God, we hear and feel nothing. Wisdom is shown after one makes a decision. You should wait prayerfully seven days before acting, giving God a chance to close the door. He is the Creator and we are the creature. We make God much too small if we cannot trust him to direct our path.

Prayer is simple when experienced at zero. Not -10 or +10.  It is more hearing and talking. The talking part comes as we let requests be known to God; the hearing comes as we rest before him very quietly, slowly reading scripture, and allowing the Holy Spirit to speak.

Let me explain that an unbelieving believer is someone who is a Christian, is born again, and will arrive in heaven; the problem is that this person has never believed in the Lord Jesus with his whole being. That is, with his mind he receives and believes all that is told him about the grace, care, concern, and love of the Lord Jesus-he is a believer. And yet at the same time, he feels that he is in charge of every aspect of this Christian life-that he must change the lives of those around him, bring transformations into his own life, and work to make himself pleasing to God. That is, in his emotions he is unbelieving.