Eight rates

For someone who hasn't had a cold in almost two years (a miracle I knew would have to come to an end some day soon), I came down with a doozy head/chest cold yesterday. My head is totally plugged up. I'm coughing so deep and hard my ribs and back muscles ache.

I have a new article near-ready to post but in the meantime, given the good response still coming in for blog post "Seven Ways 'Til Sunday," posted two weeks ago, I thought this piece on No. 8 might be a good follow-up:

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Consistently throughout the Bible, eight is the number of a new beginning.

“You’ve gone seven days and the eighth day you begin again,” says Jordan. “It’s No. 1 again. Go to a piano and start with middle C and you count up seven notes and the eighth note is another C.”

We know that with the Flood “eight souls were saved by water.” Noah’s family debarked from the Ark onto a new earth and were God’s chosen ones to begin again the creation and the earth’s population.

When God later decided to separate out a new nation for Himself using Abraham’s seed, the corresponding Covenant of Circumcision was an eighth-day covenant. Genesis 17:12 says, “And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.”

“Circumcision is the sign and the seal of the righteousness Abraham had by faith,” explains Jordan. “That covenant has a memorial to it; a token to it. In Luke 2:21 you see that ‘when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called JESUS.’ It’s an eight-day ritual for the new nation and when God wants to start a new nation in the earth, it’s the eighth day that that nation is set apart and identified that way. By the way, the ordinance that Christ is working under there in Luke 2 is in Leviticus 12.”

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After Israel found out the hard way what it was like to have a king of their own choosing, King Saul, God said, ‘I’m going to pick me a king but it’s going to be my king,’ and He installed David, the eighth son of Jesse.

“God’s saying, ‘Israel, we’re going to start over with this king thing and I’m gonna have my guy and he’s going to be the eighth,’ ”says Jordan. “By the way, the Feast of Tabernacles is the only one of the feasts that really goes eight days. Leviticus 23 demonstrates that’s that new experience when Israel has God dwelling with them.”

Elijah, the prophet of the Second Course of Judgment, performs eight miracles in Israel. Elisha, who has a double portion of his spirit, does 16 miracles. Both men were designed to demonstrate, “Here’s a NEW course of judgment. Here’s the next course.”

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A truly fascinating thing is there are eight people resurrected in the Bible. Three come from the Old Testament, another three from the Gospel accounts and two are in the Book of Acts.

“Two of them are sons of widows,” says Jordan. “You remember in I Kings 17 Elisha goes in and raises him? And then Jesus raises the widow of Naaman’s son? Two of them are the children of rich people.

“You remember II Kings 4 when Elisha goes in and raises the little boy of the woman there, the rich lady? And Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter. Two of them were raised after they had been buried. You remember when Elisha is buried and later on a guy gets killed and they throw him into Elisha’s grave? (II Kings 13) And when he hits Elisha’s bones—BOING!—he comes up.

“You remember Lazarus? He’d already been buried. There are eight of these people resurrected. Eight is a number of resurrection and regeneration.”

*****

The eighth book in the Bible is the Book of Ruth, in which there is a new beginning with the arrival of the Kinsman Redeemer. The love story of Ruth and Boaz represents a great picture of the restoration of Israel and her inheritance in the land.

For scriptural significance, eight often is the sum of seven plus one and a great example of this is in Colossians 3:12. Paul lists seven virtues a Believer is to “put on,” but then advises in verse 14, “And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness,” making that the eighth thing.

“Often times in the Bible, seven will stand and then eight will come along and be added to it,” explains Jordan. “These kind of things work themselves out even in the listing of things. When Aaron’s sons, for example, are going to be consecrated for the priesthood, they have to kind of sit there for seven days in Leviticus 8 and then, in chapter 9, on the eighth day, they’re consecrated. Eight is that new beginning that seven has set up and a new series starts.”

In James 3 is a list of seven appeals to wisdom, but in verse 17 (“But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy”), the 5^th appeal is really two in one: “Full of mercy and good fruits.”

Jordan says, “You have seven listed but one of them has two parts to it, so it’s really eight even though there’s seven. I just make the point that eight is that number of new beginnings; you’re going to begin again the series.”

Love on the highest plain

J.C. O’Hair once wrote in a poem:

If we’re on the way to glory,
Joy should fill our soul;
’Tis done by the Holy Spirit when
The Spirit has control.
There are burdens, trials, sorrows,
But God’s abounding grace,
He says, is all sufficient for
Every single case

The societal cry today is to be accepted, to belong, to have a connection. Humans will spend untold time, money, resources, etc., to gain acceptance.

The acceptance that never goes away, though, is when God Himself accepts His child into His family and meets--completely and unconditionally--the deep-down yearning, drive, thirst of the heart.

God’s assurance is the encapsulizing, safe-seal envelopment of His everlasting arms of love.

The Holy Spirit prays through Paul, who prays for Believers, “That you may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height;
And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”

Facing head-on the challenges, the struggles, the injustices, the harsh realities, we can say in and through it all: “Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
[38] For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
[39] Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I John 4:10 says, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

“When we remember what our Lord passed through as He came and died for us, we see that many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it,” writes Bible expositor Cora MacIlravy (1916). “It was as He poured out His life, that He bore His darling one through the waves and billows of God’s broken law and His wrath, and planted her upon the Rock of Ages…

“There is a peculiar condition that reveals how the love of God dwelleth in our hearts. When our love is burning strong and bright, and our hunger for our Beloved is deepening, we are more concerned to have Him work in us and make us to His glory, than we are to work for Him…

“The children of God are so busy! So busy! They are running here and there…The Spirit would woo them to draw close to the Lord, to learn to love Him; God would have them love Him with all their hearts and strength, and Jesus Christ is waiting to fill their lives so that naught could gain access to their hearts excepting that which comes from Him…

“It is after we’ve been subdued, refined, and chastened; when love of self and the world is gone, that we learn to abide in touch with Him at all times, and in all places and surroundings...

“While there is fierce, and sometimes awful conflict going on over us as the battle grounds, when we hide away in Jesus Christ and abide there, there is peace within, which flows like a river. It is the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, that garrisons and keeps guard at the doors of our hearts.

“The enemy may rage and attack us on the outside, but if we abide in our hiding place, and our hearts are thus guarded, he cannot bring to our hearts one fear or feeling of dismay.

"Oh, what wonderful peace that abides and flows like rivers of waters within our souls, watering every channel of our lives; that brings sweetness and assurance within when the conflict is raging without, and when the enemy would besiege us with all his army of darkness!...

“Nowhere can we gather sweet flowers and sweet spices to take up to our Beloved, but in this wilderness path…The peace of God is as different from the peace of circumstances, which those have who are living upon a low level, as heaven is different from earth.

“It is nearly always in the hard conflict and persecution, that the peace of God flourishes and is perfected. Many times, God’s children who are living upon a low plain, mistake the peace that comes because the enemy finds nothing in their lives to oppose, for the peace of God.

“Truly, with those who are going through with Jesus and have set their faces as overcomers, the conflict is as the company of two armies, which are engaged in a death struggle. ‘Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place.’ ”

For conscience's sake, take Word to heart

Martin Luther, when called to stand trial at the Diet of Worms, gave his defense of “justification by faith,” saying, “Here I stand. I can do no other. I’m bound by my conscience. My conscience is bound by the Word of God.”

The human conscience works upon the data it's fed through thoughts, beliefs, allegiances, etc.

“Through our attitudes and interpretations of situations, we ‘describe’ the problem to be worked upon,” explains a famous self-help doctor. “If we feed ourselves information that we ourselves are unworthy, inferior, undeserving and incapable, for example, this data is processed and acted upon as any other data in giving us the ‘answer’ in the form of objective experience . . . Our conscience makes use of stored information or ‘memory’ in responding to current situations.”

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“The conscience works on the inside as part of your soul," says Jordan. "It’s proactive; you don’t have to ask it to function. It’s mainly retrospective; it’s usually looking back at, ‘That’s what you did.'

“It encourages you to move to that which is right and away from what’s wrong. It convicts you of the wrong.

"The functioning in your inner man is of utmost importance but the difficulty with your conscience is it can be easily manipulated. Paul talks about a ‘defiled conscience.’ That is, you have a system of norms and standards but it runs on bad information.

“Paul talks about a weak conscience. A conscience’s that is weak means it doesn’t have much information to go on. It needs to be fortified. Not only can it be misinformed, defiled, weak and evil (Paul refers to ‘an evil conscience’) but it can also be muted because it can be seared.

"It can be so consistently violated, where the wrong is affirmed as the right, that it does what Ephesians 4 talks about: ‘Who being past feeling have given themselves over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness.’

*****

“Proverbs 4:23 advises, ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.’ All capacity for life—everything you have the capacity to do in your life—is initiated in your heart. That’s what God says. Jesus said in Mark 7:21 that ‘out of the heart proceed evil thoughts.’ It isn’t where you are, it’s who you are that’s the problem.

“Now, that’s a fundamental thing you have to understand about your nature. When you see the things you’ve produced in your life, understand where they came from. Your emotions are designed to be responders and respond to what your heart initiates.

“Basically, you have three aspects to you: the mentality of your soul, the physical actions you’re going to take, and the emotions. The way you were originally created by God to function was for your mind and your will to decide upon a course of action, and then for your emotions to respond to what’s in your mind, producing the action. That’s the natural way to function.

“Sin corrupted all that at the fall of Adam and Eve, but with the ‘new man’ Believer, instead of thinking, then feeling and taking action out of your feelings, God says, ‘Now take the way you think, and take the actions, by faith.’

“It’s not based on your feelings because your old sin nature corrupts the feelings and distorts the feeling, and if you’re going to take action out of your feelings, well, you know your feelings are too dumb to trust, don’t you?

“The way emotions work is they are always followers. They have no intelligence, no intellect. They can’t discern fact from fancy. They can’t tell the difference between the past, the present and the future. They have no ability to do that. All that’s done in your MIND. Your emotions respond to what’s in your mind.

“You can sit here this morning and think about something bad possibly happening in the future and become just as anxious about it right now as if it already happened. It’s an unreal thought.

“You don’t have to live in this think-feel-act circle. Romans 12:2 says to ‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind.’ You need to look at life through God’s eyes. God says your mind’s like a computer. It can be programmed one way or another.

*****

“The real culprit in life is not the particular circumstances or trials we face; it’s the attitude we take toward them. If you can understand how God created you, and how He made you to work and function, you’ve got a real leg up on things.

“While your spirit gives you God-consciousness, the soul gives you the capacity to be conscious of yourself. Your soul is the seat of your personality—of you as an individual. It is the part of you, by the way, that you never share with anyone else. The soul is the seat of who you are. The Greek term ego actually means ‘I am.’ The essence of who I am; that’s the soul.

“Now, your body gives you the capacity to communicate with the world about you. It’s the vehicle in which your spirit and soul reside and carry it around.

“In your spirit is your mind. It’s what gives us that capacity of knowing. Human spirits give us the ability to communicate with one another. That’s what the Bible calls your mind. In the mentality of your spirit, you have mental capacity; a memory center, vocabulary, frame of reference you get from all the things you know.

That same level in the soul is called your ‘heart.’ ‘In the heart’—that’s a function of your soul. The mentality of your soul is your heart. Proverbs 23:7 says, ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.’

“When it comes up over to your heart, it’s no longer a way of thinking; it’s a way of believing. Romans 10 says, ‘With the heart man believes to righteousness.’ It’s when you recognize the difference between knowing something and believing it.

“You say to a kid, ‘You know better than that!’ It’s the difference between having the knowledge of a thing and having reached out by faith—by an act of your will—and having brought that into becoming a part of you and who you are.

“I know many things about a lot of different things that I don’t make the basis upon which I live. I know a lot about theology, much of which I don’t believe. I’m not going to make it a part of myself. It’s in my mind; it’s in my understanding. I grasp it, and I understand what’s being said, but I don’t base my life on it.

“You hear people say that heaven and hell can be 18 inches apart—you can have a head knowledge but not a heart knowledge. What they’re talking about is a difference between something in your spirit and something in your soul.

“The idea is I bring it out of the realm of what I know and I say, ‘This is what I’m going to believe; this is going to become the foundation upon which I take my life action,’ and then it becomes a part of my soul; part of the essence of my being.

“It’s the will that takes that information from in my head and puts it in my heart. And so it’s vitally important to understand the will is the decision you make to take what you know and make it a part—make it the foundation—upon which you’re going to live.

“Within the soul is the will (a volition responsible to make its own decisions and choices), and it’s the seat of your emotions. Jesus said in the garden, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful even unto death.’

*****

“With an unsaved person, their spirit is dead toward God; alienated, functionally cut off. Ephesians 4:17 says they ‘walk as other Gentiles in the vanity of their minds.’

“Now, a dead spirit functions in relation to other people—Satan and his policies and programs—it just doesn’t function in relationship to God. The unsaved person doesn’t receive God’s things; he receives the philosophies of the world. His ideas come from human viewpoint, human training.

“Everything he has to draw upon to put over into his soul comes from bad sources. His authority—his source of enlightenment—comes from the philosophies of this world; the lust of the flesh, the eye, the pride of life. That’s where he gets his input. That’s where his soul draws into itself from.

“Romans 1:19-22 says consequently there’s a blackout of his soul. Why? Because instead of light and truth coming in through the spirit, what comes in is darkness. The Bible says the ‘entrance of thy Word gives light,’ but if the Word doesn’t come in, what’s left? Have you noticed light requires something, but darkness doesn’t? To get rid of darkness you’ve got to turn on the light.

*****

“The body is depraved; it’s called 'the body of sin' in Romans 6. It’s the seat of your old sin nature. It’s the place where sin gets its control. Just like God is going to work out through your spirit, sin works from your body in. It’s the part of you that’s still kin to Adam that way.

“With an unsaved person their ‘heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it.’ (Jeremiah 17:9) The self-consciousness that the soul had—sin turns it into self-importance and distorts it. Your will becomes a slave to your passions; the emotions. And your emotions are in revolt. So rather than functioning the way God intended you to function, it’s all messed up because of the entrance of sin.

“Now, you go to the Cross and trust Christ as your Saviour and God does some radical things to you. First thing He does is He regenerates you. Your dead spirit that was cut off from God is now given the life of God.

“ ‘The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life,’ and now I have God’s life. No longer am I dead to God, ‘now I’m alive unto God.’ Now God’s truth can now be assimilated into my understanding through the Spirit.

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“Eternal life doesn’t mean you wait ’til you die and go to heaven to get it. Eternal life is your present possession the moment you trust Christ. On a daily basis we have HIS life as our life! Paul says, ‘For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.’

“Paul says, ‘I’m crucified nevertheless I live.’ ‘For me to live is Christ.’ He says, ‘When Christ WHO IS our life.’ Do you see how that means right now?! Eternal life is a present possession!”

“You remember the verse in II Corinthians 4: ‘If our gospel is hid, it’s hid to them who are lost’? That light is shined into us and now we have light in our soul. We have the capacity to receive, assimilate and apply in our life sound doctrine because we can see. The light’s now on. And so our soul, our will, our emotion have all been placed into the light.

“Now our body has been ‘crucified with Christ’; it’s rendered dead. That is, it is not to be the source of our operating. Death in the Bible is when your soul leaves your body.

“If God’s going to leave us here to serve Him, He’s got to leave us in a body, but He’s fixed that body—your relationship spiritually to that body—where it doesn’t have to run your life anymore. You are free from its dominion.

“Obviously you can still choose to be influenced by your flesh, but when you do it’s because you’ve made that choice. God set you free where you don’t have to make that choice.”

*****

“When Paul talks about a ‘good conscience,’ he’s talking about a conscience that’s functioning  properly. Acts 24:16 says, ‘And herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men.’

“You see that issue of ‘exercising myself’? A good conscience requires effort in a disciplined fashion over a period of time to apply the truth of God’s word to the details of life.

“I love that verse in II Corinthians 4, Paul says, ‘But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.’

“You’re looking at someone’s heart. To put the truth in their heart and then let their conscience, a function of the heart, accuse or excuse on the basis of the sound doctrine.

“I Timothy 4:15 is a verse talking about activating your conscience: ‘Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy profiting may appear to all.’ You want the profit of your edification to APPEAR. Meditate! Have a pure heart!

“Your conscience is where you take the doctrine you’ve stored up in you and it’s how your soul says, ‘Working there but not working here.’ You take the instructions. You evaluate the things that go on in your life based upon what’s in your heart.

“And then he says ‘faith unfeigned.’ That means it’s authentic; it’s not feigned; not false. It’s not pretend faith; it’s real stuff. It’s faith that works by love. It’s saying, ‘I’m just going to trust what God says no matter what.’ ”

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“Now how that happens is what Paul calls ‘the fiery darts of the adversary.’ You have the ‘shield of faith’ to quench the fiery darts, but when you get burned it leaves scar tissue. Scar tissue has no feeing; you’re ‘past feeling,’ as Paul says.

“Acts 23-24. Paul defines a good conscience as a conscience that is void of offense toward God or men: ‘I’m living consistent with what I understand God wants me to do.’

“The problem with that is look at Acts 26:9: ‘I verily thought with myself, that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.’ That’s what religion will do; it will blind you that much.”

“You know what being positive toward sound doctrine does? You want to get some victory in your life? The first thing you need to do is get some verses in your mind that you can use to deal with what you’re facing. And if you don’t know anything yet about what you’re facing, just get in some verses and deal with not knowing what you’re facing. Just get in some verses about who you are in Christ.

“Give yourself some information your faith can latch a hold on and that you can put in your soul and, when you do, that information brings life.

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“Paul’s saying don’t walk around like a bunch of lost people, negative toward sound doctrine to the point they develop a cataract on their eye so the light can’t come in. They get that callous. They’re past feeling, past being touched by an understanding of sound doctrine of who they are in Christ. They give themselves over—completely and totally betray themselves.

“In II Timothy, Paul says ‘they oppose themselves.’ They live their life opposite of who they really are. There’s a frantic search for happiness on their own. They have all of it in Christ but they’re out there still looking for it. Their past having the truth of God’s Word reach up and impact them.

“That Lie program gets inside and begins to take hold of the heart. You begin to take your frame of reference, your worldview, the attitudes you have toward your situations and the details of your life, and you have this edifice of human viewpoint, and the wisdom of the world controls your thinking, controls your heart.

“When you have a computer, and you’ve got all this information on your hard drive, every now and then you have to ‘defrag it.’ Your hard drive gets so fragmented it slows down and won’t work. If you want to speed it up, defrag it. Get it all together. Well, your Christian life can happen that way.

“Paul says ‘learn Him.’ Learn who God has made you in Him and stand in that and say, ‘That’s what’s true about me. That’s who I really am, not all this other stuff.’ II Corinthians talks about ‘perfecting holiness.’ II Timothy 3 talks about how the Word of God ‘makes you perfect, throughly furnished unto every good work.’

Paul talks about renewing your mind, re-educating your mind. You take the old information out and put new information (truth) in. Then you develop a new frame of reference.

“The buzz word today is a ‘new worldview.’ You get a new perspective on life, a divine perspective. And now when you’re looking at the details of your life, you begin to learn to look at it through a new way of evaluating. Just like growing roses, you water, trim and fertilize the rose bush before you ever see a rose. It’s a process—a growing process. How do you know? You read the instructions.

“God has structured you in your spiritual makeup in such a way that light is designed to come from His Word through your spirit into your soul by your faith. You will by a positive choice believe that truth. It says you are to be ‘filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom, all understanding.’ Not just have a form of godliness, but have the power of that life living in you and as you grow in that maturity.

“When Paul uses the word ‘perfect’ in Philippians 3:15, he’s not talking about, ‘Don’t ever commit a sin.’ He’s talking about those of us who are mature. Those of us who have an occupation with the mind of Christ and the things of God. Those of us who have reached a level of spiritual maturity, applying God’s Word to the details of life.

“You know what happens as a result? You never quit growing. You need to be fat on the inside. Have a big fat soul. As you grow in the fruits of righteousness, you master the details of life. In being able to handle the details of life as Christ would, there’s the peace and the joy and the real true happiness. It’s being filled with the love of Christ.

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Paul writes in Titus 1:9, ‘Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.’

“These elders he’s addressing are going to be in the front line of defense against the Lie program. He’s saying, ‘In order to hold fast to God’s Word as you’ve been taught, where you’re able to exhort and convince the gainsayers, or people who talk against something, you need to have a clear conscience.’

“Boldness in the ministry, or ‘holding fast the faithful word,’ comes out of a conscience that is clear. Proverbs 28 says, ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion.’ That’s a conscience issue.”

No clearer way to explain how to become:

When Paul implores the Philippians to “only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ,” he’s not referring to physical speech.

“In the middle of that word conversation are the words ‘converse’ and ‘concourse,’ ” explains Jordan. “When you’re conversant with something, you’re intimate in the way it works; you know how it happens and how it’s accomplished.

“You can become conversant with a book, or a subject, or with a computer, or whatever it is you want to be conversant with. It means you have a thorough knowledge of it where you’re able to live it and handle it and deal with it.

“It’s more than just being able to talk about it; it’s that you get right into it, and into its life, and let what’s at the basis of who you are and the way you live be as ‘becometh the gospel of Christ.’

“Paul says, ‘Let your manner of life, your lifestyle, who you are be becoming; let who you are down inside adorn the doctrine.’ It’s Titus 2 terminology. 

*****

“When Paul advises to ‘be filled with the Spirit’ in Ephesians 5, he’s not talking about getting more of the Spirit of God; it’s to be filled by His instrumentality.

“God the Holy Spirit is going to be used by the Father in an objective, measurable operation to put some things into you that ought to be there. It isn’t about putting more of the Spirit of God in you; it’s that some things are beginning  to be produced in your life.

“It’s something that can be measured by words on a page in the Bible and identified in your life in specific ways. To be filled with anything is to be saturated by that thing to the point that it completely dominates and controls your life.

*****

“In Luke 5, when it says the Pharisees were ‘filled with fear,’ that means they were so astonished and afraid that fear just took control of them, and the emotion of fear just completely consumed them to the place they were incapable of doing anything.

“In Luke 6:11, they were ‘filled with madness,’ meaning they were completely controlled by their rage and it gripped them and carried them along and they couldn’t get shed of it.

“John 16:6 says ‘sorrow hath filled your heart.’ The emotion just came in and grabbed them and wrenched them to the place where they couldn’t get out from under the control of it.

“We could go on and on with passages like that. To ‘be filled with the Spirit’ simply means to be under the complete total dominion and domination of the Holy Spirit.

“It has to do with surrender. Boy, we don’t like that word. It’s the total surrender of your life and thinking over to the control of the Holy Spirit so that HE carries you along through life.

“Being 'filled with the Holy Spirit' means, ‘I can’t, I give up, I lose,’ and He wins. Paul said, ‘I’m crucified.’ If your Christian life is going to be what God produces it won’t be anything of you.

“It requires the DEATH of selfishness and of self-will in your life. It isn’t my thinking, my way. It’s His way! We got this whole thing about ‘my way or the highway,’ but it’s the opposite.

“Being ‘filled with the Spirit of God’ is equivalent to Paul advising, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.’ It’s the Holy Spirit working THROUGH the Word of God to fill your life with the qualities of spiritual maturity. It’s taking the Word of Christ and letting it INFUSE every part of your being, having all your thinking and actions controlled by the Word of God.

*****

“One of my favorite verses is I Thessalonians 2:13. Paul says, ‘For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.’

“When you by faith take the Word of God and step out upon what God says, God the Holy Spirit takes His Word . . . God the Holy Spirit today works indirectly in your life through the instrumentality of the Word of God as you by faith rest upon it. I don’t know how to say that any clearer; if I did, I’d say it another way.

“As you objectively take your thinking processes, your actions and your attitudes and bring them under the authority of the Word of God . . . As you begin to think in your own heart and mind the way God says He thinks in His Word, that is God the Holy Spirit working in you both to will and to do His good pleasure.

“Rather than asking God to move and do out there (in the physical realm), it’s His Word that WORKS and He’s in us, living His life out through our mortal bodies as we walk by faith in what He says in His Word.

“If something is effectual, that means it WORKS. It’s effective; it gets the job done. It’s not a misfire. It works effectually IN you. That’s where God’s working starts. It’s in you that believe! That’s the catalyst of it.

“Colossians 1:9 says, ‘For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be FILLED with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.’

“There’s that word again! Let the Word of Christ DWELL in you! Let it come and fill up your life and be at home in you and live there!"

Unselfish love made visible

“To love life through (godly) labor is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret,” writes Jo Petty in her classic book from 1962, Apples of Gold. "Charity gives itself rich; covetousness hoards itself poor."

People mistake charity for love in Paul’s epistles but it’s actually “love in action,” says Jordan: “Charity is the motivation of the love of Christ and not all these other kinds of things constraining us in our Christian life.

“In Colossians 3, Paul says charity is the ‘bond of perfectness.’ It’s the thing that binds maturity together. When you have perfected saints, what binds them is the fact that they instinctively look out for the benefit of the other, not for themselves.

“To walk charitably with a saint means to put his needs, his concerns above your own. Now, where does the motivation for that come from? The motivation is an understanding of God’s charity to us. Charity has to do with the motivation behind your good works.

“Charity isn’t a braggard, it’s not proud, it’s not covetous, doth not behave itself unseemly. It’s patient and suffereth long.

“Boy, you read those things and you think, ‘Wow! That’s quite a mental attitude to have!’

“Paul says ‘charity never faileth.’ So what charity is is a complete lifestyle that puts the interests of the other ahead of your own.

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“I Timothy 1:5 says, ‘Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned.’

“The heart is the mentality of your soul. It’s single-minded; it’s a heart that just goes on sound doctrine. It’s not living on emotions; it’s living on the application of the truth of God’s Word rightly divided.

“We’re to have a system of norms and standards that reflects God’s thinking. You’re able to walk by faith and not by sight. That verse is a beautiful description of a mature Christian walk. And not just an individual walking that way, but a group of people gathered together and working together in the work of the ministry.

“Paul told the Corinthians, ‘As unknown and yet well known.’ I love that verse because that’s exactly what you’re . . . your spiritual power and influence far outweighs your appearance.

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“When Paul talks about ‘in spirit’ that’s the idea of your disposition; your attitude that you do something by.

“In Ephesians 1:17, for example, he writes, ‘That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.’

“He’s not talking about the Holy Spirit. That’s not the initial giving; it’s not a later ‘re-giving.’

“He talks about the spirit in the sense of the ‘spirit of slumber,’ or the ‘spirit of bondage.’ When you have the spirit of slumber, you have this disposition of being asleep at the switch. Bondage is the disposition of being controlled.

“Paul’s saying, ‘I want you to have the spirit of wisdom and revelation God has given you right here in this text. You get it in the Book.’

“The attitude with which you do things affects an awful lot. He’s saying, ‘I want you to walk around with this attitude and disposition that’s produced by understanding this great cosmic plan God has in His Son.’ ”

Seven ways 'til Sunday . . .

Old-time preachers used to say humans make the same seven excuses for sin: It's going to okay; everybody else is doing it; we've always done it; a little bit won't hurt; we know when to quit; you got to make a living; it all depends on how you look at it.

Throughout time No. 7 has been significant in its relationship to humans' intellectual capacity and ability to process raw information.

"There seems to be some limitation built into us either by learning or by the design of our nervous systems; a limit that keeps our channel capacities in this general range,' explains famed psychologist George Miller in his essay The Magical Number 7. “This is the reason that telephone numbers have seven digits."

Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell explains that the man who designed the telephone number "wanted a number as long as possible to have as large a capacity as possible but not so long people couldn't remember it. At eight or nine digits, the local phone number would exceed human channel capacity and there would be many more wrong phone numbers."

Examples of No. 7’s special designation include: The Seven Ancient Wonders of the World, The Seven Seas, seven visible planets and luminaries (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) marking the seven days of the week, the seven liberal arts and sciences and the seven orders of architecture.

Other commonplace examples are the seven notes in the musical scale, the seven primary colors, the seven members to a human body and the seven holes in the head.

The reality is life itself operates in a cycle of sevens and, as a whole, revolves around the number seven, which symbolizes "completeness."

Most births are multiples of sevens, for example. The hen, for instance, sits three weeks (21 days), and the pigeon two weeks (14 days). This is after having laid eggs for two weeks.

The majority of mammals have a period from conception to birth of an exact number of weeks, a multiple of seven, and children are born to mothers in a certain number of weeks (usually 280 days), a multiple of seven.

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As the most frequent number in the Bible outside of No. 1, seven can be found 735 times in the King James Bible—54 times in the Book of Revelation alone.

The Word of God is, in fact, founded upon the number seven and it is the symbol of divine perfection—the seven days of creation, God rested on the seventh day, the seven churches, the seven Spirits, the seven stars, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, on and on.

"There's a reason your Bible counts by seven. . . seven is a number creation counts by," says Preacher Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church (www.graceimpact.org). "Sometimes it's called a perfect number, but it's more than just the idea of perfection, there's a pattern being demonstrated here. . . Have you ever wondered why a week isn't 10 days? Or five days? I mean, who decided we're going to count a week a week and make it seven days? God did that. The whole world works on that basis and doesn't even know why. . .

"In God's calendar of redemption, No. 7 plays a tremendous part. You go to the last book of the Bible, seven is the key to that book. You go to the first chapter of the first book, seven is the key to that chapter.

"In Genesis 1, the issue of creation had to do with God dwelling in creation. He pitched the tent where he was going to dwell. He creates in six days and on the seventh He rests. And there was a pattern God set out in creation. There's a design, there's something He's teaching and something He's developing in those seven days of creation."

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Not only is the word finished found in connection with No. 7 in the Book of Revelation, so is the Bible expression, "It is done."

Revelation 10:7 reads, "In the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound the mystery of God should be finished." Revelation 16:17 reads, "And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne saying, it is done."

In preparation for mankind's destruction by the Flood, God instructed Noah in Genesis 7 to take the animals into the Ark by sevens: "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth."

Then God said, "For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth."

As Peter tells us in I Peter 3:20, those seven days in the Ark before the Flood's arrival completed God's longsuffering and time of waiting. Genesis 6:9 confirms Noah, in what is the seventh mention of his name, was "a just man, and perfect in his generations."

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Similar pictures using No. 7 in relation to completeness, divine perfection, or consecration to God for service, are spread throughout the Bible.

There were seven feast days (Passover, Unleavened, First-fruits, Pentecost, Atonement, Trumpets and Tabernacle). King Solomon spent seven years building the Temple and kept the feast for seven days.

The seven branches on the candlestick in the Holy Place in the Tabernacle signify the complete light of God for the souls of men.

In Leviticus 16:14, the high priest, on the day of atonement,  sprinkled the blood upon the mercy seat seven times, representing the completeness of the redemptive work of Christ.

When Job, in his afflictions, was paid a visit by his friends, they sat in silence seven days and seven nights, later being ordered by the Lord to offer seven bullocks and seven rams in a burnt offering.

In Matthew 18: 21-22, when Peter asked, "Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?" Jesus Christ responded, "I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven."

In essence, Christ was exhorting, “Keep on forgiving until you are complete.”

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On Page 7 of the Scofield Reference Bible, the margin notes reveal even God's use of No. 7 to sum up His own name in connection with completion and divine perfection.

"In His redemptive relation to man, Jehovah has seven compound names which reveal Him as meeting every need of man from his lost state to the end," reads the notation.

The names are Jehovah-jireh ("the Lord will provide"); Jehovah-rapha ("the Lord that healeth"); Jehovah-nissi ("the Lord our banner"); Jehovah-Shalom ("the Lord our peace," or "the Lord send peace"); Jehovah-ra-ah ("the Lord my shepherd"); Jehovah-tsidkenu ("the Lord our righteousness") and Jehovah-shammah ("the Lord is present").

For the whole King James Bible, C.I. Scofield says its divided into seven dispensations, or "periods marked off in Scripture by some change in God's method of dealing with mankind, or a portion of mankind, in respect to the two questions: of sin, and of man's responsibility."

He explains, "Each of the dispensations may be regarded as a new test of the natural man, and each ends in judgment, marking his utter failure in every dispensation. Five of these dispensations, or periods of time, have been fulfilled; we are living in the sixth, probably toward its close, and have before us the seventh, and last: the millennium."

Toward the end of this current sixth dispensation we're still so incredibly blessed to be living in—

named by the Apostle Paul as the " dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to youward," (Ephesians 3:2)— and right after the Rapture of the Church, will come the tribulation and an intensified seven-year period of horrific suffering on earth called the Great Tribulation.

"It is evident that we are living in the terminal generation of the Church age. . . an epoch that immediately precedes a seven-year period known as 'Daniel's seventieth week,' " writes Bible researcher Noah Hutchings in his book, God Divided the Nations. "This 'week of years' is called elsewhere the 'Great Tribulation' and the 'time of Jacob's trouble' in Scripture. It is of vivid interest to Bible students how the basic seventy nations of Genesis 10-11 will finally align in these last days."

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In his book, The Signature of God, Grant R. Jeffrey outlines a phenomenal discovery of now-deceased mathematician Ivan Panin, who, in the 1930s, examined the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1 and found 30 separate codes involving multiples of seven that couldn't be explained by chance, even by Harvard math professors.

In part, Panin found:

1.     The number of Hebrew words = 7

2.     The number of letters equals 28 (7 x 4 = 28)

3.     The first three Hebrew words translated "In the beginning God created" contain 14 letters (7 x 2 = 14)

4.     The last four Hebrew words "the heavens and the earth" have 14 letters (7 x 2 = 14)

5.     The fourth and fifth words have 7 letters

6.     The sixth and seventh words have 7 letters

7.     The three key words: God, heaven and earth have 14 letters (7 x 2 = 14)

8.     The number of letters in the four remaining words is also 14 (7 x 2 = 14)

9.     The shortest word in the verse is the middle word with 7 letters

10.  The Hebrew numeric value of the first, middle and last letters is 133 (7 x 19 = 133)

11.  The Hebrew numeric value of the first and last letters of all seven words is 1393 (7 x 199 = 1393)

"When professors on the mathematics faculty at Harvard University were presented with this biblical phenomenon they naturally attempted to disprove its significance as a proof of divine authorship," writes Jeffrey. "However, after valiant efforts these professors were unable to duplicate this incredible mathematical phenomenon.

"The Harvard scientists used the English language and artificially assigned numeric values to the English alphabet. They had a potential vocabulary of over 400,000 available English words to choose from to construct a sentence about any topic they chose.

"Compare this to the limitations of word choices in the biblical Hebrew language which has only forty-five hundred available word choices that the writers of the Old Testament could use.

"Despite their advanced mathematical abilities and access to computers the mathematicians were unable to come close to incorporating 30 mathematical multiples of 7 as found in the Hebrew words of Genesis 1:1."

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As Jeffrey further explained, "The number seven permeates the totality of Scripture because the number speaks of God's divine perfection and perfect order. . . Panin and others have examined other Hebrew literature and have attempted to find such mathematical patterns, but they are not found anywhere outside the Bible."

Panin, whose own book, The Inspiration of the Scriptures Scientifically Demonstrated, details the "seven" phenomena examined and verified by numerous authorities, had accumulated over 40,000 pages of detailed calculations covering most of the Bible before his death, says Jeffrey.

"These incredible, mathematical patterns are not limited to the number seven," writes Jeffrey. "There are numerous other patterns. These amazing patterns appear in the vocabulary, grammatical forms, parts of speech, and particular forms of words. They occur throughout the whole text of the Bible containing 31,173 verses.

"When you consider the amazing details of this mathematical phenomenon you realize that the change of a single letter or word in the original languages of Hebrew or Greek would destroy the pattern. Now we can understand why Jesus Christ declared that the smallest letter and grammatical mark of the Scriptures was persevered by God's Hand: 'For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled' (Matthew 5:18)."

So what was Panin's own belief on divine origin of Scriptures? Jeffrey records this statement from an essay by Panin "warning of the limitations of wisdom found in secular philosophy":

"Not so, however, with The Book. For it tells of One who spake as men never spake, who was the true bread of life, that which cometh down from the heavens, of which if a man eat he shall never hunger."

In conclusion, Panin wrote, "My friend of the world, whose you are: Either Jesus Christ is mistaken or you are. The answer that neither might be is only evading the issue, not settling it. But the ages have decided that Jesus Christ was not mistaken. It is for you to decide whether you shall continue to be."