2)
We give thanks
to God always for you all, making mention of you in our prayers;
3)
Remembering
without ceasing your work of faith, and labour of
love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the sight of God and
our Father;
4)
Knowing,
brethren beloved, your election of God.
5)
For our gospel
came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and
in much assurance; as ye know what manner of men we were among you for your
sake.
6)
And ye became
followers of us, and of the Lord, having received the word in much affliction,
with joy of the Holy Ghost.
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"T |
he Power of
the Gospel" is getting weaker in the lives of men, everyday because of his
trying to make "human" sense of it. When Jesus questioned the
Apostles as to whom others said that He was He was not asking because He didn't
know. Their response, however, allowed Him to make a point about Peter's
answer. His point was that spiritual knowledge comes only through the
revelation of Jesus Christ.
The Church is
empowered by the gospel because both it and the gospel are laid upon the
foundation of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. The gospel can be taken
to be the most powerful force on the face of the earth in that it has the power
to spiritually loose or bind. It is so powerful, that it can work beyond
understanding to accomplish what it promises. All that is necessary is
acceptance.
The only way
that one is able to accept the truth of salvation is by being "born
again." You see, this experience is essential to be able to supersede our
innate fleshly understanding. Once we have gained that understanding, we are
under obligation to the Lord to proclaim the "good news" we have
heard.
There is no
other way to the truth so essential to salvation than through the Word of God.
That is why our efforts at witnessing are so important. Unfortunately, too
often, those efforts are misdirected, for either we try to let words substitute
for deeds, or we try to get the unsaved to understand what they cannot.
We must begin
to acknowledge that the responsibility of Man is to accept the things of God,
periods while He does tell us that we can ask of Him many things, He is neither bound nor required to explain anything to us.
You see, it is we who are blessed through exhibiting simple obedience. While to the World, "seeing is believing," if we would only "believe" God, we would "see." Why is it so hard for us to do this? Because the human mind is always trying to protect its body.
In all of
this, we never seem to realize that the more that we "do" for God (in
the way of obedience, service or anything else) , the
more He does for us. We will never be able to say that we did anything for God
and He failed to take care of us.
Sometimes, it
seems as if we think that we can help people simply through "telling"
them things. No amount of Bible stories in the World
can bring deliverance for problems. Man must come to the Lord, to the Source of
Power—which is contained in the gospel. Once a man is rooted and grounded in
it, he will always be able to attain his deliverance because deliverance always
works according to the gospel of Christ.
We see it is
not that deliverance is unavailable, but that man will sometimes not accept it.
We seem to have a strange desire to hold onto what is "bad" and
remember all the negative that has been done to us.
Therefore, one must become miserable enough to want things to change and then
be willing to turn one's mind from trouble to deliverance.
The secret? Focusing on and praising God for what you like and being willing to sacrifice what you don't. There are few greater blessings than becoming able to ignore what people try to do and embracing what the Lord has already done.