Dear friends, do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God. For there are many false prophets in the world. This is how we know if they have the Spirit of God: If a person claiming to be a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ came in a real body, that person has the Spirit of God. But if someone claims to be a prophet and does not acknowledge the truth about Jesus, that person is not from God. Such a person has the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming into the world and indeed is already here.
But you belong to God, my dear children. You have already won a victory over those people, because the Spirit who lives in you is greater than the spirit who lives in the world. Those people belong to this world, so they speak from the world’s viewpoint, and the world listens to them. But we belong to God, and those who know God listen to us. If they do not belong to God, they do not listen to us. That is how we know if someone has the Spirit of truth or the spirit of deception. -- 1 John 4:1-6Life is Full of Mysteries
- A Female Chinook Salmon will die a few days after laying her eggs leaving the fry to hatch and fend for themselves. Those that hatch in the Yukon River swim 1900 miles downriver into the Bering Sea and travel as far as 10,000 miles in the ocean for up to 8 years before somehow returning to the exact place where they were born to start the life cycle all over again. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? It isn’t a learned behavior, it is something God put within them.
- The Dutch zoologist, Nicolaas Tinbergen, found that a newly hatched flock of baby turkeys, not more than a few days old, already had sophisticated patterns of behavior. When he held a goose shaped silhouette over the baby turkeys that continued to peck at pieces of food. But when he held a hawk shaped silhouette over their pen, they immediately ran for cover. They hadn’t been taught that geese are okay and hawks are predators. That was something God put within them.
- Every year, over a period of nine months, Red Knots fly from their home in Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, all the way to the Canadian Tundra and back. By making this annual 20,000 mile journey the little shore birds are able to live in a spring-like climate all year long.
If that isn’t amazing enough, The young Red Knots that are born each year make the journey without the help of their parents. Shortly after the young have hatched, females red knots form flocks and head south, leaving the males behind to feed the young.
About the time the young have begun to fly, the males also head south. Then, several weeks after they have gained enough fat reserves for the 10,000 mile flight, the young make the journey alone. How do they know where to go? God put the map within them.
The Greatest Mystery of All
God is at work within us! His Spirit lives in us! And because the Spirit of the living God lives within us, we are enabled to do some incredible things, and we are able to overcome enormous obstacles... anything the world might throw at us. Here's how Paul puts it:
“The message kept secret for centuries and generations past, has now been revealed to God’s people… And this is the secret: Christ lives in you.” -- Colossians 1:26-27The Mystery Explained
“Behold I stand at the door and knock. Whoever hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him!“ -- Revelation 3:20The Spirit of the Lord is leaning toward us... reaching out to us... yearning for us... speaking to us... We need to learn to listen!
Early one winter morning, when Katie was sleeping at her father’s house, I walked into St Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian – or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut. But on other long walks I’d passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity.
We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting. “Jesus invites everyone to his table”the woman announced, and we started moving up in a stately dance gto the table in the rotunda. It had some dishes on it, and a pottery goblet.
And then we gathered around that table. And there was more singing and standing and someone was putting a piece of fresh crumbly bread in my hands, saying “the body of Christ,” and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying “the blood of Christ,” and then something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.
I still can’t explain my first communion. It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from behind…
All the way home, shocked, I scrambled for explanations. Maybe I was hyper-suggestible, and being surrounded by believers had been enough to push me, momentarily, into accepting their superstitions…
Yet that impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb. I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me understand. I had no idea what it meant; I didn’t know what to do with it. But it was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: It was as real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine. And the word was indisputably in my body now, as if I’d swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh.” Take this Bread, Sarah Miles
"For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom!" -- 2 Corinthians 3:17
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