f) Believers often claim that their motives, intentions, plans and deeds are, according to their best conscience and consciousness, all right, honest, truthful and are designated for the vineyard of the Lord. But few can see and righteously judge, assess what is in their background, from where do they spring; because few can see and righteously judge in what spirit those motives, intention, plans and deeds were started and done (Pr. 16:2/ Rom. 7:2). We will never be able to see ourselves throughout, that’s why we can never with certainty speak about the goodness or cleanliness of our motives. The life in our soul is such a mixture that we never know whether we stand in it on a safe ground. Our soul is more than able to guide us into deceptions of all sorts and forms. Whenever we live only in the sphere of our soulish life and try to implement it and develop it, we are developing something which is able to lead us into the greatest confusions, disharmonies, controversies, mixtures and sinfulness. This is also the reason why the Church got into such chaos and tragedy where also an idea was born that when you give yourself to the Lord, He will take you and use you. It suffices to “sanctify” our being to the Lord and go and serve Him with our “sanctified old man”. This is a total and absolute lunacy and is totally against the Word of God. The result is that there are multitudes of people in the vineyard of the Lord and in the churches around the world, which “serve” Him in the energy of their flesh, in emotions of the flesh, in thinking, substantiating, persuading and reasoning of their flesh. Try to meet them, stand in their opposition or disappoint them and you will meet EVIL, you will taste something very evil, you will face a warmongering spirit, a deep division, backsliding, disinterest, scattering, accusing, arrogance and sometimes even an open enmity (Gal. 4:16).
Do we see what a disaster and devastation can the devil create in the organization, which is called “the Church” because people with the best intentions and most clean motives “serve the Lord” with all their intelligence, their power, their reasoning and understanding and with their emotions? To this day they have not discovered that God closed the door to the old creation! That Christ through His Death destroyed the whole old creation! That our greatest need is to be delivered from our own selves and INTO Christ. They will speak and preach about Christ, but live outside of Him. The Lord said: “to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at My Word” (Is. 66:2). To which man will He look? To him that always believes and says: “I am right, I know everything, nobody has to tell me anything“?, or to him that says: “I can be wrong as perhaps never before, there is nothing wrong, no injustice, no sin, no iniquity, which I in my self would not be able to do whenever Christ shows me, that I stand outside of Him”. And how do we know that we are of a contrite spirit when we may not know our spirit at all? And when were we the last time “trembling” at the Word of God, if ever? And when do we apply the Word of God to ourselves and use It as a mirror in which we may see ourselves through the eye of God?
We take the Bible as a textbook, a book, which in many places may be interesting and in many other places may be totally incomprehensible or even boring, tiresome. This is how our head looks at the Bible. However, the Bible is the WORD OF GOD and IT IS NOT A BOOK; IT IS A PERSON (Jn. 1:1). Therefore, when we have the Bible on our side, we have on our side the PERSON OF CHRIST, which cannot be on our side physically, but is there by His Spirit. For those that do not or cannot perceive the Spirit, He is on our side also “on the paper“. When your fiancée from America sends you a letter to Europe, she is on your side “on the paper”. When you read her letter, you imagine her, you feel her presence, you don’t read her letter as a newspaper. Whenever we realize that the Creator of Heaven and Earth even Our Own Creator and Savior stands on our side and speaks to us PERSONALLY, we would never read the Bible – HIS WORD – as a newspaper, we would read it with fear and trembling.
g) The parables, as parts of the Word, were spoken by the Lord that He might give us marvelous spiritual truths, which we may understand mentally in a limited way, but their spiritual depth, width and height we could never see until the Lord should open to us the Scripture in order for us to see and understand it spiritually (Mt. 13:13/ Lk. 24:16,31,32). Here I desire to quote a specific Parable, which has a wide significance for us especially in this time of the end of the world. It is the Parable about the mustard seed (Mt. 13:31,32) and of its significance for us. In its natural creation, the mustard seed will never grow up into a tree since in its nature, it is not a tree. It can only become a tree when man takes it into his hand and he himself cultivates and develops it. By using artificial means, man is able to make big what, according to the nature, is small. Such an artificial enlargement represents the work of man and not of the Lord through the nature.
Here, the Lord prophesies that such processes will be taking place in the future even until the end of the age. Man will take into his hand the things of the Kingdom of Heaven and will make them something big, much bigger than they are in their nature. This also means that in the future, an artificial and abnormal development and growth of the very Christianity will come where it will become a “big tree” and every kind of birds will have nests in its branches. Do you know how many kinds of strange “birds” we could find today in Christianity, which call themselves Christians though they are not and never have been? The Christianity, as we know it today, covers almost anything what you can imagine. And the Lord Jesus pointed to the fact that it is evil and the work of evil. Birds always represent something evil in the Scripture. A good example of this Parable are also today’s, so called, “mega-churches” where tens of thousands of believers gather together in various big halls or even at stadiums, where there is plenty of strange birds (evil spirits) and what is taking place there is nothing good. This never was and never will be the Body of Christ nor any part of It!
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To be continued next week
brother Hanola
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