I just LOVE the relationship I have with my Heavenly Father, with my Lord Jesus, the Christ and with the Holy Spirit. Every morning in the pre-waking dawn, He speaks to my spirit with clear and lovingly gentle instructions. Now, don’t get me wrong, I listen for His voice all through the day as He leads and guides me. But it’s such a wonderful way to wake up. I so enjoy and cherish every morning with Him. What I’m about to write is what He was speaking to me this about morning and wants to share with you. In fact, He may have already been gently trying to speak to you about this already. But you’ve not been or have been refusing to hear, listen or obey. I trust you will have eyes to see and ears to hear what the Spirit of God would say to you today and every day of the rest of your life on this earth. This will be a 2 part message, so pay attention to and dwell on what you read today. Allow the Holy Spirit to open your eyes. Then make sure you read part 2 tomorrow as well. What is written today is only laying the foundation of what the Lord desires for you to understand and if necessary, correct so that you can represent Him to the fullest in authority and in the power that comes from Him and only Him. To Him be all glory and honor and praise now and in the ages to come. Here we go. In the gospel of Mark 7:9 & 13 (Amplified), Jesus said to the religious of His day…”You have a fine way of rejecting [thus thwarting and nullifying and doing away with] the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition…Thus you are nullifying and making void and of no effect [the authority of] the Word of God through your tradition, which you [in turn] hand on.” Jesus also in the Gospel of John 8:31 said that the TRUTH…not traditions…will set you free. The Apostle Paul PLEADS with the Roman Believers not to be conformed to this world with their ways and their traditions, but to be transformed by renewing their minds to the Word of God so that His good, perfect and acceptable Will can be proved and displayed in and through their lives. This applies to you as well. He writes to Timothy that he needs to study the Word of God in order to display himself a capable and trustworthy workman for the Lord by learning to RIGHTLY DIVIDE the Word of God. If you can rightly divide the Word of God by studying it, then you can WRONGLY DIVIDE the Word of God by not studying it for yourself and just blindly accepting what you’re told In the second chapter of the Epistle written to the Believers in Colosse, that when you just blindly believe all you hear, you open yourself up to believing and adopting the traditions of men, not having their foundations in the Kingdom of God but in the ways of this world. You’re thereby rendered ineffective for the Kingdom’s use. So many traditions were instilled in us prior to beginning our relationship with God that if not dealt with will affect the way we worship Him and the way we represent Him. Jesus said in John 4:24 that in order to worship God you must learn to worship Him in Spirit and in TRUTH…not tradition. Additionally, over the past and recent centuries many traditions of pagan worship have also crept into the church, becoming an annual part of our worship, polluting the way in which we worship Him and emasculating the authority of His Word to work in and through our lives. To understand this better let me offer you this example. There are few things that smell better to me than fresh cut grass on a warm spring day. One of those things are steaks cooking on a grill. There’s just something so pleasing and enjoyable about the smell of grilling steaks over an open flame that it not only awakens your taste buds and sets your mouth to watering but moves you to immediately stop what you are doing and go to the store to buy steaks and charcoal. Close your eyes and imagine that smell. Can you smell it? Do you remember that smell? Can you catch a whiff of it? Now…imagine if you spread a huge pile of cow dung over the top of those beautifully grilling steaks. Immediately you would protest…”But that would ruin it!” Yes, it would! Can you imagine the stomach churning stench it would produce? With this new life and relationship we have with God our Father, we are to offer up our lives in such a manner that produces a sweet smelling savor to the nostrils of God…now a foul, putrid stench. Yet that is exactly what happens when we knowingly or unwittingly allow these traditions to remain or to creep in or worse yet grow to dominate our relationship with and worship of the Living God and Father of our Lord Jesus, the Christ. To further explain...I was raised in a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant suburban family. We almost always went to church on Sundays. At first, we went to the Methodist Church and then later the Lutheran Church. Yet, the only thing that I knew about the Jews and their faith was that Jesus was a Jew. I didn’t have a clue as to what their culture and lifestyle consisted of, yet, my Lord and Savior was one. Every Easter morning we would wake up and gleefully search for our baskets filled with candy so we could proudly survey our new found treasure and eat as much of it as we could before getting dressed in our finest and piously going to the Easter service to “celebrate” the Risen Lord. Maybe, just maybe we could sneak some candy to take with us to eat during the service. In the late 60’s it started to become popular for churches to have Sunrise Services. Because, as we were all taught, it was at sunrise on that Sunday morning 2,000 years ago that Jesus rose from the dead. Wonderful memories and cherished traditions…..right? Yes. Wonderful memories and definitely tradition but, through them the Word of God is wrongly divided. W H A T ! ! ! ! ! ! Yes, that’s right….wrongly divided. Now, don’t turn me off. Listen and learn. Here’s a tradition that has no understanding of the Jewish culture and of what REALLY took place. You see as far as the European and Western culture is concerned a new day begins at 12:00am and ends at 11:59pm. But that’s not the case when it comes to the Jewish culture and the Bible is Jewish. When it comes to time, days, months and years, it expresses their calendar and not the Gregorian calendar that we observe. For the Jew, a day begins and ends at sunset…at approximately 6pm. A Jewish day goes from 6pm one day to 6pm the next day. The celebration of Passover begins at sunset on the 14th day of Nisen (the first month of their calendar year) and ends at Sunset on the 15th day of Nisen. So what we know as the last supper began after Sunset on the 14th day of Nisen. Later that evening Jesus was captured, tried and sentenced. By noon the next day (still the 14th day of Nisen) Jesus was crucified and buried. All before sunset, which would begin the 15th day of Nisen. Now Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. That is correct. But He didn’t rise at Sunrise on that third day. It was D I S C O V E R E D that He had risen in the early morning hours of that third day. The Gospel of John (He was there) records in the 20th Chapter, the first verse; “cometh Mary Magdalene early, WHEN IT WAS YET DARK, unto the sepulcher and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulcher.” This wasn’t at Sunrise and it wasn’t at Sunrise that He rose from the daed. It was pre-dawn that it was DISCOVERED that Jesus had risen from the dead. Now according to the Jewish calendar of days, Jesus rose anywhere in the twelve hour span between Sunset 6pm and Sunrise 6am on that 3rd day. You may say, I’m splitting hairs and that it’s not that big of a thing whether He rose at Sunrise or in the 12 hour span prior to Sunrise. The point is this. I had always believed the tradition I had been taught that Jesus rose from the dead at Sunrise on that third day. I had never studied it out for myself. I just bought, hook, line and sinker what I was told. As a result, I was not in a position to RIGHTLY DIVIDE the Word of God to accurately represent Him and more important to worship Him. When you just buy what you’re told or practice traditions youve been raised on, without checking it out for yourself, you open yourself to believing all sorts of half-truths and wrong practices and beliefs, thereby emasculating your ability to represent the Kingdom of God as He desires for you. I’m not suggesting to be rebellious and unteachable. You are to submit to those in authority over you…AS THEY FOLLOW CHRIST. But you ARE to check out on your own what you’re feeding on. It’s your responsibility When you stand before the Throne of God, the response of…..”But, that’s what I was always taught!”….“That’s what I was led to believe”…just W I L L N O T C U T I T with God. It’s your life and it’s your responsibility to serve and worship God in Spirit and in TRUTH. So….study the Word of God so you can rightly believe what it says and properly represent the Kingdom of God. Be BLESSED today
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:50:23 +0000
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