remas

The ship and the sail is quite a good annalogy. The spirit of the Lord moves yet cannot be seen just as the wind blows and cannot be seen from where it comes or to where it goes. The awsomeness of our creator God in His wisdom has chosen to use the mouths of men to brings His truths to the ears of humankind. His words are powerful and when His servants are used to proclaim His words they do so in the power of God's Spirit. Thus the words of His servants are in fact thiose of the Lord God and thus should be listened too. In the same way that servant needs to be haering and listening to His Lord so that he is only saying and bringing to the hearers what God is actually saying and not using the opportunity to say what he wants to say , to get onto his or her hbby horse. The servant bringing the words of the Lord thus have a challenge to obey what God is saying.

With out the Old Testament you do not have a complete picture of 'a light shinning in a dark place'. It brings everything together so that you get a real picture as to where the light is coming from and that where the darkness also originated from. Thus there is the necessity to draw from both the Old and the New Testaments to get a hold of the full story.

Hi everyone I'm remas this is an annogram for my family. I've followed Pastor Ralph and his on line studies for a couple of years but have never come into the forum before. Time is not on myside. I live and serve the Lord as a pastor in England.

I suppose that there is an easy answer to this question yet at a deeper level within a church set up sometimes things get blurred and the wood becomes to thick to see the trees. Materialism we are told is a dangerous thing yet sometimes looking at church buildings it is definitely materialism that has got in the way. The devil; uses some very subtle skills to lul us into a false way of thinking and that is when we can be so easily fooled that we feel that our faith is strong yet we ahve lost sight of our reality and reliance upon God. We have to be constantly vigilante so that we are not deceived by the prince of this world. A strong desire can be missed placed if we are trying to please God for the wrong reasons and are doing it falsely. We can not deceive God. The desire to knoe God has and must come from the heart. If we are desiring to serve God then we need the knowl;edge of God and we need to know him in a real way. We will want to serve him according to his pattern and not ours

To see the issue of faith as the same as that of Peter in some ways impossible mainly due to the fact that in the Western world the level of persecution is by no means the same. I f we have ever faced real persecution has it been life threatening? In some ways we or I should it be carry on living and witnessing without a sense of real faith expression. It is with out fear that we live thus our expression of faith has comfort zone limitations. Yet that should not be the case. If the precious nature of our faith was expressed in the same way as that expressed by Peter and the church he was writing to then the church would be as dynamic and as powerful as it was in the first couple of centuries and how it is in certain parts of the world today. I am we are to comfortable in the materialism that surrounds our churches today that we are unable to see the power of God and what real faith in him is all about. Yes we do have the potential to have the same faith that Peter showed, yet are we am I prepared to to endure what Peter ultimately wnet on to endure.