Smallest Seed

Image from 8 Tracks. I was watching this popular Filipino evangelist on TV preaching about prosperity. I respect him and learn a lot when I watch him, but there are certain things I don't agree with him---like his view on God's prosperity. He suggested there may be something wrong with you if you've been a born-again Christian a long time and still poor. Yup, God's will is prosperity. I agree to the max. He even quoted 3 John 2 and Deuteronomy 18.8 and I believe them with all my heart. Yet, we have to get a hint from Jesus and see how he came to earth. He came as a poor fellow and left still a poor fellow, if not poorer. The same with John the baptizer. And look at how James (1) put it: Believers who are poor have something to boast about, for God has honored them. 10 And those who are rich should boast that God has humbled them. They will fade away like a little flower in the field. In the Old Testament, prosperity was material. But these are just shad

Image from WallpapersCraft. "He was with God in the beginning." Moses saw creation in the beginning, but God took John further back in time. John saw things before  the creation. And he saw that "in the beginning was the Word." It's powerful when I sit back and try to imagine all this. Moses said, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But John saw that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. Creation came only afterward. They talked of the same thing but saw differently. So, I imagine  "the beginning" covered a lengthy stretch of time, especially when John saw things prior to creation---specifically, when "the Word was with God."  He saw the companionship, relationship and fellowship of the Word and God. He tried to stress this by repeating, "He was with God in the beginning." I see an effort of emphasis here, an accentuation of God and the Word together for a period. A pow

Image from cnet.com "...and the Word was with God." It's the foremost reason why we cannot afford to ignore the Word. There was nothing and no one in the beginning but God and the Word. Before anything else came to being---when there was nothing but deep black emptiness (in fact, "emptiness" and "black" didn't even exist)---there was God and the Word. The Word was already there with God. The Word was God . So, God was with God in the beginning. Sometimes, I like to read it "In the beginning was God and God was with the Word, and God was the Word." It makes you see more how the Word takes prominence in it all. You cannot just go content in the morning with your 15-minute "devotion" if you understand this. You'd see clearly why the Word must be meditated day and night. There's so much to know about Him that even a lifetime wouldn't suffice to cover even a third of it---even if we lived 100 lifetimes--

Image above from Inside Higher ED. Paul said guard your life and doctrine closely. And this is understood as doctrines found in the bible, nothing more, since there were no denominational doctrines in Paul's time. All churches believed one and the same set of bible doctrines, which was consistent with Jesus' prayer in John 17.23---complete unity of all believers. But then one day, actual experience in life began contradicting bible truths. Things said in the bible didn't happen to them. Real life contradicted what the bible said. And as more church people experienced this, they concluded that truth should be adjusted to their experience. That should solve the conflict. But the problem was, different folks had different experiences. This becomes the problem when you adjust truth to your experience rather than adjust experience to God's truth. So they adjusted Scriptures to their own experiences. One group found it hard to experience real holiness, so they

Image from Shutterstock. Sons are exempt. Jesus said this about paying taxes but principles like this have spiritual implications and ramifications. Exemption here is not just about earthly taxes. I can see it applied to our entire sonship in Christ, for instance. We tend to box ourselves in traditionally and humanly accepted meanings and fail to see passages like this through the mind of Christ and miss the glory. Like muzzling an ox that treads the grain. How did Paul conclude that to apply to ministers of the Gospel and not really to an ox? The context in Deuteronomy 25 is to point out how imposing unreasonable punishment on a guilty offender is like muzzling an ox while it’s doing its burdensome work. The comparison is on the difficulty and cruelty. Imagine subjecting the ox to heavy work without feeding it. Sons Look for Spiritual Principles in the WORD But Paul took it to apply to ministers (though we see no hint on this whatsoever in Deuteronomy). Why? Becaus

Image above from Flickr. It's alarming when the church relies mainly on its intellect, logic and reason to understand God and his Word---which is where it's plunging headlong today. And at best, what it thinks it has spiritually is just plain instinct, not spiritual discernment. Instinct has to do with a fixed mindset or action in response to a stimulus. It's really inbred thinking pattern. God can use it to reveal to you but it's not the Holy Spirit's gift. Lots of mothers, even non-Christians, have instincts. Nothing spiritual about that. You can know a used cup was left on the table by your spouse (and not your child or someone else) due mainly to familiarity. If you've been counseling folks for years, you get to a point where sometimes you can easily tell their emotions by simply seeing familiar hints on their faces or moods. That's intuition and has nothing to do with God's spiritual gifts. What It Is and It Is Not God's discernm

Image from Pulpit and Pen. The weakness of the church these days is that it has almost totally done away with spiritual discernment and embraced extreme moral neutrality. It doesn't want to be labeled judgmental so it totally got rid of judgment. You seldom hear the church say plainly what's right or wrong for fear of offending people. In the process, it demonized the word "judgment" with everything bad, forgetting that you can never discern accurately without good judgment, and vice versa. If they find you guilty of judging people, they scorn and ostracize you as "judgmental" (and that in itself is being judgmental, too). But fact is, we need to judge things and people correctly to accurately discern between spirits. Blind Leading the Blind Paul was once pissed off by the Corinthian church for not judging correctly: Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to