The whole counsel of God.

 

Saturday, August 26, 2023


Psalms 137; 138

2 Samuel 23:1-23

Acts 20:17-38


The whole counsel of God.


The thing about surrendering our lives entirely to Jesus means we cannot decide to ignore things we do not like. This journey of discipleship began at our conversion, when something about Jesus was said to us that convinced us of His beauty and truth, but that was only the beginning.


To ignore something in the Bible because we don’t like it does two things: firstly, it reveals something about ourselves in our personal relationship with God. There are more than enough examples of a passage that, at first sniff, does not make sense or raises our emotional hackles. Today’s Psalm is one such passage (we looked at this Psalm on June 26th, 2023. Click Here.). But to write such a passage off completely simply because we don’t like it reveals that we are not fully committed to the Lord. That type of reaction reveals our spirit of rebellion, an evil spirit that needs to be nailed to the cross.


The other problem with turning our noses up at something God has said that we don’t like is that we are deliberately stunting our own spiritual growth. One term often used to describe our interaction with the Bible is that we “wrestle with the text”. Nothing worthwhile comes easy, and if we really want to dive in deep into what God thinks, then we need to be willing to sit with everything we read and give it the respect it deserves as the word of God.


Paul had no compunctions when it came to preaching the entire message of God. He had a very high view, in fact, of the potential contained in the message of Jesus. Don’t be ashamed or afraid to have the same attitude that was in Paul, who entrusted his church at Ephesus to the care of the Lord “and to the message of His love and kindness, for it can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who have been set apart for God.”

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