Me: "The Spirit will supply all the needs"
Quote:
Originally Posted by YP0534
And that goes back to what Mike and I were sharing about knowing the Lord's voice.
Is that enough?
What about all that stuff in the Bible?  |
All "that stuff" in the Bible shouldn't supplant our relationship with the Spirit. When I have an abiding relationship with the Spirit, then the Bible is opened to me. It's like the two disciples in Luke 24:32 "Was not our heart burning while He was opening to us the Scriptures?"
God is pretty tough. He doesn't get frightened off when we ask the difficult questions. Rather, if we are persistent, He will give us a great blessing.
The Bible is not a rule book to get the right answers. The Bible is rather the key to finding the Spirit, and abiding with Him. And the more I ask the difficult questions (at least from the perspective of those who think everything is neatly answered in chapter 8, verse 14, footnote 6, third paragraph, e.g.), the more I sense the "parousia", the happiness of the arriving and abiding Spirit.
It is my opinion that God loves it when we wrestle with Him in His Word. When we simply take it as dead letter, which as you've noted most people do with Paul et al "organizing the church", I don't think God is so happy.
What saves us from going off the rails is that we do so not in a corner, but in public. To have
OBW knocking down our speculations like ninepins is a great blessing, I think. Witness Lee could have salvaged his ministry, imho, if he had allowed a skeptical
djohnson or two to keep an eye on him. Lee had a good mind, the Spirit, and the Bible, but he had no counselors. And in many counselors there is safety (Prov 24:6).
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Let me repeat an earlier question: if the Spirit speaking to the assemblies in Revelations 2 and 3 is not merely foretelling the future "stages" of the "church" (because that wouldn't have made any sense to the recipients, and John who loved mysteries[e.g. signs] also loved explanations), then what is the answer? What was the Spirit speaking to the churches?
I believe John was speaking in code. He had to get past the censors, but he wanted to convey information. He wanted to be understood by his readers. What was he speaking to the churches? "Blessed is he who keeps the words of this prophecy"... what were they/are we supposed to keep?
Now, I realize we might not be able to say that "The answer is 'X'", because Lee did that and we're not terribly impressed. But still, I love the kind of answers that stun my feeble brain into insensibility. Stuff like "God is love". Stuff like that. I like finding answers that I'm going to have to wrestle with for the rest of my life.
So I think it's okay to be a voice in the wilderness, asking the unanswerable questions that nobody else really wants to hear, probably.
Some kind of virus got into the churches and degraded their function. I wonder what it is? The Lord hasn't yet returned. I wonder why not? Gee, I wonder if those 2 questions are related?