PJ:
Thank you for your notes from your message Saturday night. I don’t know when I have felt such a pull in my heart to want more of/from God. And I know it’s there if we want it. Reading your notes tonight, I just felt such a Presence of the Lord. As he once told me, “it is not hard-seeking, but heart-seeking” that lets Jesus into the chambers of our hearts that need more of him. Your message and notes meant so much to me tonight as I read them, that I just wanted to share some of the ones that really flooded me with feelings. Reading some of them even made me weep knowing how much God is calling to us to know him and his righteousness, and to know who he has made us. Thank you so much for being such a faithful servant for us and feeding us what God has given you. There are so many more feelings in my heart tonight from this message, but I have tried to keep it as brief as I could right now. This message makes it clear that God has given us what we need to live beyond this world and man’s righteousness. Sandy
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Excerpts from your sobering and encouraging notes:
The unborn infant is formed in the mother, but after it is born, the mother must be formed in the child, her knowledge and her abilities. So, we are formed in the womb of the body of Christ, as Christ convicts us, encourages us, and nourishes us until we come to the hour of birth. And after the birth, Christ must be formed in us.
Any person who has received the Spirit of God is in a much better spiritual condition than John the Baptist because he is a new kind of creature, a creature that has a divine nature – God’s – in a fleshly body. And that divine nature is filled with a divine kind of righteousness.
When someone is born of God, God⁷ shares His divine nature, His Spirit, with that person. The holy Ghost is God’s free gift to you, given because He wants you to know Him and be blessed.
Before Jesus paid the price for mankind to have God’s nature, with its right thoughts and holy feelings, God put up with man’s ignorance of Him. But things changed with Jesus.
In this covenant, God is pleased –– and well pleased –– only when His children live as righteously as they can with His nature instead of their own.
God lives from the heart, not by a set of rules. It is His nature to think right thoughts and to do good things. And the entire reason God sent His Son to earth was to make the way for us to live that way, not being against rules; they are needed in this world, but being above rules, being ruled by the love and peace of God. That holy nature is in the Spirit, and Jesus paid the price for us to have it.
If we have been born of God and received His holy nature, we are in a far better spiritual state than Job, Abraham, or John the Baptist ever were. – if you want it. You can neglect that gift and retain your carnal mind. But if you do, you will never find out how much better a place you are in than anyone who lived before the Son came, like Job.
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Whew! We are so blessed!
Sandy