Luke 24:45 Then opened He their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.

I grew up in church.  I memorized scripture, and read my Bible often.   I’m a thinker.  I love to mull things over and puzzle them out.  And I am one of those wierdos that loves to study.  But for the longest time it felt like real deep understanding of scripture was eluding me.  Well, the Bible tells us to come to God boldly.  Now there are times I have probably bordered on being impertinant with Him, but I mean to take Him up on it when He says to ask.   So I asked Him  “God, how come it is, that I read and read this stuff and it just doesn’t come together for me?”  Do you know that every time I have ever asked God a question such as that, He has always answered me?

Before long I got an e-mail from a friend about an old man, his grandson, and a basket of water.  (Story posted on one of my tabs above). The point of the story is that the reading your Bible will do you some good every time, even if you don’t feel like you understood it, so just keep reading it.

Then the Lord gave me the idea to add fasting to my prayer for understanding of scripture, and I did, and boy did that change everything.  If you have reached a plateau, you ought to try it.  Next thing I knew, old scripture I thought I was very familiar with, just started to open up to me like blossoms on a dogwood tree in spring.

For example, God took Galations 2:20 and broke it down for me.  I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.  My old nature was “married” to sin, but when I was crucified in Christ, I died to sin.  Only death can break up a marriage.   So even though my sin nature is still around, I am no longer “married to it” so I don’t have to obey it anymore; there is another option.  Paul was looking at himself and saying, I’m dead in Christ, yet here I am still alive, so who is this life in me? (I could really relate to that crazy verse in Romans in which Paul said “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I…..and For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do…It really sounded like how I am. Hmm Clearly there is an inner conflict. A doubleminded man is unstable in all his ways.  I have to choose which nature is going to prevail! Ding.Ding.Ding. WE HAVE A WINNER!)

So who is this life in me?  It is Christ, living in me.  Now wait a minute, then that means  I don’t have any right to dictate anymore about my own life.  Whether I be sick, whether I be uncomfortable, whether I live, whether I die.  I can make a plan to go to the grocery store, clean my house, and do all sorts of other things today, but if God has a different plan for my day, who am I to get frustrated that my agenda didn’t play out?  Did I even consult with Him  about what Christ might want to do in my body today?  Maybe I ought to have?

Oswald Chambers says it this way: “No one is ever united with Christ until he is willing to relenquish not sin only, but his whole way of looking at things.”

We cannot understand scripture through our intellect.  The most brilliant scholar in the world has to come to Him with the faith of a child.  A child knows he doesn’t know, that’s why he asks Daddy.

After I understood this, I took everything I thought I knew, and I “laid it out on the table” and item by item I held it up to the Lord and said “Okay, show me in scripture, is this true or not?”  When it was all done, I had discarded a few things, and what I kept, I now knew exactly how to defend it scripturally.   Better than that, I unerstood that scripture is a gold mine and as long as you keep digging, there is really no end to what treasures you will find there.

Do you know why you believe the things you believe?  Have you ever asked yourself?  If you are honest you will admit that most of the time it’s because “it’s what I’ve always heard” or “its what I was taught”.  We can’t ride anyone else’s coat-tails when it comes to why we believe what we believe.  We can’t afford it in todays increasingly apostate church, and in a world where it is “hip” and “in” to be “spiritual”.  The Bible has warned us to test the spirits, (could that mean there are other spirits operating in churches, maybe even other spirits behind the multiple versions and “translations” of the Bible?) and that in that in the last days many will be decieved.  1 Peter 3:15 says:But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.  Fear?  Why fear?  Because a lot is at stake if you are wrong, that’s why, so make sure you are believing the right things.

If you have browsed around my blog, you know that I suffer from chronic illness.  There have been times when the pain and the fatigue were so bad that I just did not want to go on.  But now I do two things differently than I used to.  I make it an absolute priority to partake daily of the Manna of the Word, and I take everything to Him in prayer, praying without ceasing in an ongoing dialogue throughout the day.

If it were not for my illness, I know I would not have learned these things.  I would have been busy being self-sufficient.  There have been many things He has taught me in my darkest times.  I praise God for showing me beauty in the dark.