Faith Words Always Point Us to Experiencing Jesus (11.26.13)

Most of us Christians love words, especially the words of the bible.

What a joy to have our spirits lifted, strengthened and even washed when we hear anointed preaching, professing, and prayer.

But even all our precious words of faith and the bible can be used without sincerity, without the Spirit, be distorted, and even faked. 

Jesus never misused his words in any way.

Instead, he used them, as the bible does, as lighted directions toward the higher and better Spiritual realities of God himself (cf1Corinthians 10,16).

Take for example, the words of Hebrew 11,1: "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." 

This definition presents faith as a noun, a subject to talk about, but before "faith" can be something to talk about, it has to be preceded by some human act, some human verb, some human experience, in response to a graceful nudge of God's Spirit.

In other words, faith is more about the reality of experiencing and responding to these ongoing and loving nudges of God, than it is about defining (or quibbling about) concepts and words.

As the cliche goes, the man with an experience of God is always more effective than a man with an argument about God.

And when we keep acting on the promises of faith, and acting on the nudges, and experiecing God again and again, our faith becomes a faithful-Spiritual way of living, serving, loving, and being transformed from the inside out.

It's not that we born again Christians do away with rational thoughts and concepts and words. No these simply become both sharpened and secondary to experiencing the reality of God's higher Spiritual realities, and his leading and greater wisodm in all areas of our lives.

So for example, Jesus defines himself at John 14,6 as "the way, the truth, and the life." If we have experienced a true Spirit to spirit fellowship with Him (by and through faith), we have no human need to quibble about the words the "way" "truth" and "life" because we have already, in the Holy Ghost faith sense, gone beyond these mere words and experienced the Holy reality of the person who backs them up with an actual experience of them, the risen Jesus Christ.

All this is a sort of long way to make one simple point- we Christians love the words of our bibles, of our preaching, of our praise and worship, and of our doctrines, but we must be ever vigilant not to fall so in love with our favorite words about God (and the sound of our own voices), that we fail to pay attention to the reality of what Jesus is saying here and now to the churches.

John 8,31 expresses this point of keeping our experiences of God both real and fresh: "if ye continue in my word [if you continue to recieve it, by God's Spirit], then ye are my disciples indeed."

Likewise, see also 1John 4,1 whereby John's church was warned to test the nice sounding (so modern) antichrist words that make light of sin and Calvary.

(first pub. 8.27.12?)