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All this week, John North is focusing on becoming strong in the Lord, and shares from the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus:
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Transcript
Good morning. I’m John North here with you on this Friday morning to get this last work day of the week started in the best way possible.
We’re looking this week at what it takes to be strong in the Lord and to grow in our spiritual strength.
We’ve looked at a number of things that are important for that:
- The importance of listening to God.
- The importance of learning to put God first in our finances. Not just to give a little bit of our leftovers to God or to figure out the least percentage that we could possibly give and be spiritually OK, but rather to be looking for ways to sacrificially invest in God’s kingdom.
- Then we saw also that spending time in spiritual fellowship with other Christians is so important to our spiritual health, learning to take that time we spend with other believers and instead of just hanging out with them, really getting into each other’s lives, finding out what we can pray for each other about. A source of great strength.
Today we come to Psalm 42. And the psalmist says this:
As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?
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How can you tell if your spiritual life is healthy?
If you’re strong in the Lord, well, you have a constant hunger for God, a thirst for God.
Your soul pants for time with God.
You look forward to reading the Bible and to what God’s going to say to you in it. You look forward to some just quiet time walking and communicating with God at the end of the day. You look forward to bringing your prayer requests, the issues of your life to God and seeing Him work in those things in ways that you could never produce.
You want to know his truth. You want to be in His Word, in the Bible.
AW Tozer said the Word of God, well understood and religiously obeyed, is the shortest route to spiritual perfection.
Not that we’ll ever be perfect this side of the grave, he goes on to say, and we must not select just a few favourite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.
Learn to spend time in parts of the Bible that you don’t normally hang out in.
Some of the parts maybe the pages still stick together, well, get them unstuck. Begin reading through your Bible. Find a systematic way of doing that and learn to expand your understanding of God.
Let me read those verses again:
As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?
Why don’t you take some time right now today and get quiet. And listen. And after listening, speak to God. Open His Word. Let Him speak to you.
I’m John North.
To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.
Feature image: Canva
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