Jean @ Rosehill

Hello to everyone. I am glad to be joinging in this study. It has been about a year since i was here. Glad to be back.

Your post is a blessing! Thanks!

What a powerful testimony! God bless you!

Sexual **** is difficult because we are created sexual beings. With sin entering the world, sexual things became perverted and impure. We must continually allow God to renew our minds and thoughts by meditating on His Word and through prayer. We must also repent and allow the Holy Spirit to live and breathe in us.

This means that every day we have the choice to focus our mind and thoughts on God. We do this by reading His Word and taking time to talk to Him and then listen to Him speak to us. We also can praise Him in song and with thankfulness throughout the day. The opposite of setting our minds on things above is to set our minds on things of the world. Satan wants to use the things of the world to take our focus off God and to lead us into sin and away from God's will for us. It is important to guard our hearts each day, for "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

Thanks, Sweetie!

Thanks, Rod. I am really not "feeling the love" in my church body right now. It is very discouraging.

In Jesus, we can find all wisdom and knowledge. It is available to everyone. It is not a secret that only a few privileged can have. Anyone that accepts Jesus' blood sacrifice for the forgiveness of their sins can start on a journey to get to know Jesus. It is a day-by-day process. We can never quit learning about Jesus. His wisdom and ways are beyond understand in the human flesh. We need the Holy Spirit to quicken the Word of God to us and to assist us in hearing what the Spirit speaks to us. The Spirit will lead us into all Truth. This truth will always agree with the Word of God. As we study the Word and spend time in prayer and listening to the Spirit speak, we become more intimately aquainted with Jesus. He literally becomes our Best Friend. We find we can't survive a day without His wisdom and strength. I also liked this topic because it describes how a healthy church body functions. The Body should be "encouraging" and "united." I have personally found this to be very true. This is how we will grow. We MUST have the preaching, admonishing and teaching, but we also need the fellowship, love and encouragement to live for Jesus.

As we grow in our Christian walk we are becoming more and more like Jesus. Paul's purpose is to bring believers to a level of maturity in their Christian walk to which they will no longer be tossed about with doubts and uncertainties. He wants them to stand strong in their salvation of Jesus and not be led astray by strange doctrines. We won't be completely perfect until heaven, but we can reach a place of maturity in Christ. That is exciting to me!! I want to get there. I struggle, not with WHAT I believe, but in living it out. I cave under pressure so many times and just feel like quitting my work for the Lord. Paul's methods for helping believers achieve maturity included three levels: preaching, admonishing, and teaching. Paul was also an intercessor in prayer, which involves struggling in the spirit for the believers, persistence, and deep concern through prayer. It is a gift.

The mystery Paul is talking about is that salvation is provided through Jesus for the Gentiles, and not only to the Jews. The hope of glory refers to the presence of God which is so magnificient that it is really beyond description. Someday we will live continuously in God's presence, after we have suffered here on this earth for "a short time." When we finally live eternally in His wonderful presence our suffering will be only a distant memory, and it will all be worth it. Whenever we are in deep trials, when we seek God desperately with our whole being, He will meet us by sending the Holy Spirit to comfort us and give us a glimpse into what is in store for us someday. Right now we are "looking through a glass dimly", but someday all things will be made clear. Even here on earth, if we seek God's face, He will give us a magnificent glimpse of what is to come, and it brings us great comfort and joy to help bear us up and sustain us through our trials and temptations.

I just have to say that I am enjoying reading the replies to this question. It is blessing me, and I have printed out the replies that have been posted so far. God bless you all.

2 Corinthians 4:17 (Amplified Bible) 17For our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory [beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!], I am so glad for your post. This is exactly the lesson the Holy Spirit has been trying to teach me the past several months. I am going to print your reply to meditate on. PTL.

Jesus' suffering on the cross completed our salvation. However, we are also called to "share in his sufferings." This means we will also suffer for the sake of the gospel. It is our turn now to face persecution of some sort for our faith. As we suffer, we become an inspiration to fellow believers to endure suffering, to persevere, and to accomplish much for the Kingdom.

Satan tempts us to turn away from faith in Jesus. He will try whatever avenue he can get a foot it. His goal is to get us to lose our hope, confidence and trust in the goodness of Jesus. Just like with Eve, he tells us there is something else that God is holding back from us. He tempts us to look in other places for satisfaction through our earthly lusts which he capitalizes on. We must put on the whole armor of God to withstand him, including taking up the shield of faith. If we believe the lies of Satan, we bring misery and harm upon ourselves and others around us. The Holy Spirit calls us to repentence, and we must respond to that. If we don't, we continually harden our hearts. In Colossians, the context of this Scripture is that the believers were being tempted to turn back to Judaism for their salvation.

agreed!

That's awesome! Also, Psalm 32 is my favorite Scripture.

Jesus took the punishment for our sins on the cross. His sacrificial blood cleanses away our sins so that we can stand before God in the righteousness of Jesus. He was bruised for our iniquities.

Jesus reconciled us to God by taking the punishment for our sins on the Cross. His blood was innocent because He had never sinned. So His blood is the accepted payment for our sins. This reconciliation makes us now friends of God. We are presented before God now as righteous, without accusation and holy. We don't see ourselves this way, but God sees us this way if we have confessed our sins and accepted His Son's blood as the atonement for our sins. We must continually come before God in repentence to make sure we are walking in the light and not falling into error or sin, allowing Him to shed His light on our lives by the washing of the Word. The Word is a mirror that shows us what we lack and corrects us. It is our responsibility to humble ourselves, repent, and obey the leading of the Holy Spirit. Without the New Birth we are powerless to do this, or to even desire it. But once we have been born-again, we then have the power and the desire to follow after God's heart.