Sunday Worship Good Morning!!! Let your worship show forth your devotional love and heart felt gratitude… He is worthy! /
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It is Wisdom to scrutinize Praise!
Tonight’s chapter in Proverbs is one of the simplest we have yet encountered. Its wisdom ranges from just solid common sense and good advice to instruction which is both practical and well thought through.
Nearly the whole chapter is worded so clearly, that other than some simple commentary on a per verse basis, there are only two verses which I felt needed any real study. These are verses 9 and 21.
Verse 9 is just a simple clarification and personal disclaimer whereas verse 21 does offer more than one possible meaning regarding scrutinizing praise. So I felt as if we would benefit from spending a little time on it.
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Love, Respect, Surrender & Trust towards God
This week we picked up where we ended last week, using both a trail that came into my life, to attack the word I taught two weeks ago as well as the words of Jesus and Moses regarding loving the Lord our God!
In the end we saw a “general pattern” which begins with love for God, which naturally leads to RESPECT for God, which promotes SURRENDER towards God which gives way to TRUST in God.
While this is a somewhat “mechanical” progression, it is also deeply relational.
I hope this teaching blesses you as it not only illustrates how faith develops in the heart but also how we express this trust in the person of the Holy Spirit as He carries out His mission of revealing Christ TO us, forming Christ IN us and revealing Christ THROUGH us!
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Meddling in someone else’s argument is like…
This chapter offers guidance on very practical matters, includes a few nice little proverbial puzzles to solve as well as a comical illustration of a stone and a sling.
One of the puzzles deal with silver being used as a glaze on some cheap clay pots and another regards two paradoxical statements regarding whether to and how to answer a fool. This last one employs some rich combinations of parallelism which adds both to the intrigue and the mystery of the verse’s wisdom.
I hope you enjoy the teaching as much as I enjoyed studying it out.
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Encounters with the Author leads to Relational Trust
Adoration leads to seeking. Seeking to encounters with God. Encounters with God to loving surrender to Him, which leads to trust!
This IS relationship – it is ETERNAL LIFE. Knowing Him and being intimately known by Him. But in the revelations which come from these encounters with God, we still need to…
⦁ Choose to reject other thoughts
⦁ Choose to not be anxious
⦁ Choose to respect the God of the words – value the words because of WHO spoke them
⦁ Relinquish control (surrender)
All of this facilitates faith!
Even after hearing from God you have to make the decision to trust what you heard.
There will always be competing voices and not all of them are from the enemy directly. For some, we need look no further than our own minds which have been trained towards unbelief, towards protecting self, towards guarding self against failed hope or disappointment.
So it is that we have to be intentional to believe with ALL the heart, rather than ration out our trust in small segments to avoid the devastation of our hopes being let down.
Faith, real faith is ALL IN. There is no back door, there is no backup plan, there is no protection of the heart against the possibility of failure! NONE of these things are consistent with real, genuine relational trust!
You either know God in the area of your trust or you do not. There is no fudging on this!
IF you know Him, you WILL trust Him WITHOUT ANY reservations!!!
Key concepts covered in this teaching are – worship, fear, encounters with God and surrender leading to trust!
In a nutshell, adoration for God provokes surrender leading to faith!
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