The Fundamental Truth for Your Recovery ~ blog

Wouldn’t it be great if Jesus were to return again as a man and He chose you to be His disciple?  That He would be with you wherever you go, be able to guide you in every decision you make, and help you deal with every temptation?

I mean think about what it must have been like for the 12 disciples to have dropped everything and started to follow Jesus.  Some left behind their fishing boats and business. Matthew gave up his lucrative tax collection job.  All of them simply walked away and traveled with Jesus 24/7 without so much as a pillow on which to rest their heads.

Imagine how this was received by their wives and families. “Honey, I met this guy from Nazareth in Galilee, and I am going to hang out with Him for a while.”  She would probably ask when he would be home…thinking this is an evening with the boy’s thing. “Oh, I don’t know, for a time.  Maybe 3 and a half years.”  How well do you think that played out?

However, for three and a half years they were with Jesus.  He was their Rabbi and they were His disciples, and this was a practice not uncommon to their culture.  What they didn’t anticipate was the authority of His teaching and the power of His abilities to do miracles.

It was at a wedding when Jesus did his first miracle.  The family hosting the wedding discovered something very embarrassing…they ran out of wine.  This was very bad news for the hosts who either planned poorly or were poor and could not afford it.  So, Mary, the mother of Jesus says to her son, “Jesus, they have no wine!”  To which Jesus responded;

“Woman, what does that have to do with us?”

Sounds a bit rude to me.  If we were to say to our mother or our wife “Woman” I think there might be some tension in the air.  Now it does not say this in the text, but I am willing to believe that Mary…Jesus’s Mom did not need to say another word to Him because she gave Him “the look.” 

You know what “the look” is.  It is a clear and unmistakable way of women telling you to shut up and do what they say.  It is the end of any dispute that without words communicates more loudly than just more talk.  The last time I saw “the look” was when Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi struck the gavel in the House of Representatives confirming that the article one of impeachment had passed and some of the Democrats started to applaud but she gave them “the look” and they immediately fell silent. But I digress.

Then she tells the servants to do whatever He tells them to do.  About 120-180 gallons of water are put into 6 water pots and brought to the headwaiter.  He takes a sip and is amazed that the hosts had saved the best wine for last.  And the disciples must have been thinking they did not need a refreshment item in the budget since Jesus could turn water into wine.

So, off they went watching Jesus heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, instantly heal the lame and even raise people who were dead.

However, all their hopes and dreams came crashing down as they witnessed the Lord being arrested, tried, and crucified…dead and buried with the tomb guarded by a cohort of Roman soldiers.

I doubt very seriously that any of them remembered what He has just told them the night of his capture while they were having the Passover meal.  He said He was going to leave them.  He said where He was going, they could not follow.  But He also said this;

“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you.”

What He is telling them, and He is also telling us is that His leaving this planet and returning to Heaven is not only a good thing” but it is a “better thing.”  The Holy Spirit will take His place.  He is the Spirit of truth and He is the long-term plan…He would be with them…and us…forever.  Currently, this Spirit of Truth was with them, being present in Jesus, but that was going to change because this Spirit of Truth was going to be in them.  That’s right…in them…and in us as well.

That actually happened at Pentecost and in the life of every person who becomes born-again, accepting Christ as their Savior.  In fact, here is what Paul writes in Ephesians 1;

“In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”

 

So, the moment we believed in Jesus the Holy Spirit of God, third member of the Trinity, eternally existing with God the Father and God the Son has literally entered your body and is in you all the time, in every event, in every temptation, even in the darkest depths of depression, and in the fiercest heat of temptation.

That’s right!!! This is better than Jesus being present with you because if He were here on earth in a human body and was with you…He would not be with me as well.  But the Spirit of God who in being God is Omnipresent is able to be in you and every other believer on the face of the earth.

And He is the solution to walking in the Spirit and not fulfilling the desires of the flesh.

More tomorrow …

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