Tag Archives: Living Grace Fellowship

Denying the fruitless enticements of the flesh

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Series: In Pursuit of Relational knowledge

We ventured away from John 15 today as we studied correlating scriptures which help up develop a more broadstroked vista of our position as branches in our Vine.

Our spirits have been made alive in and to God, our souls are being converted to think, see, feel and desire as God does, but we live in a physical body which still has both sin and death in it. So while we have very real desires to honor and obey our God and Father, we also have very real enticements from our flesh to do otherwise.

This inward conflict is not simply one of external morality, but one of intrinsic inner character at war with an external hard wiring. As such, like Paul lamented, “I find myself doing the very things I hate!”

Today we learned a little more about this, so as to better understand how to live out our “branchness” and bear fruit pleasing to God.

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Good Heart Parable

The Good Heart

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Series: In Pursuit of Relational Knowledge

Parable of the Heart Soils

What makes the ‘Good heart’… good?

First, it is incline to understand the message of the kingdom – that it requires surrender to the King of the Kingdom and that for now all who belong to the Kingdom of God will suffer persecution, temptation and hatred.

God offers the Good Heart this understanding because BEFORE the message of the kingdom was planted there it was already worshipping God to the degree that it understood how (consider Cornelius and Lydia).

The other primary attribute of this heart is that even though it knew the cost of entering the kingdom it welcomed the message, clung to the king of the kingdom and through patient endurance it produced the fruit of conformity to Jesus’ likeness over time.

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Thorny Heart Darwin

The Thorny Heart Pt. 3: Darwin’s Thorn

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Series: In Pursuit of Relational Knowledge

The Thorny Heart Pt. 3

When it comes to the Thorny Heart, the thorns were already present before the message of the Kingdom was sown there. These “thorns” choke out and starve the seed of the Kingdom in the human heart so that it bears no fruit unto God.

This week we addressed the desire for other things entering in and choking the Word.

As I was preparing for this lesson my years of teaching Creation and Evolution made me think of Darwin and the “thorns” which led to his eventual agnostic views and rejection of the gospel. It serves as a poignant warning for anyone in the world’s battle for the heart against the inroads of the Kingdom of God.

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Judah Ephraim Zechariah

Judah is a bow, Ephraim is arrows, Greece the Target!

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Thru the Bible: Zechariah 9&10

Nearly 200 years from the time of this prophecy Greece would run a circuit all around Judah, making war and conquoring but leave Israel untouched. Tyre was to be a major part of that campaign. The last land to be actually conquored would be Persia itself thus bringing the empire’s dominion to an end all under the leadership of Alexandar the Great.

This prophecy is a starting point. It moves on past Alexandar and the Grecean Empire to the time of the Maccabean revolt when Israel would achieve independance from Greece, just before Rome took their place.

All of this was prophecied by Daniel MANY years before Zechariah, but Zechariah’s served both as a witness to these things AND added more details about this time.

In this prophecy greater Israel, meaning the Northern Kingdom is represented in Ephraim and the southern kingdom in Judah.

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Thorny Heart

The Thorny Heart Pt. 2

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Series: In Pursuit of Relational Knowledge

Parable of the Heart Soils

Thorns represent anxieties, worries, cares, the seduction of wealth and interests in things other than God’s kingdom. All of these choke out and starve the seed of the Kingdom in the human heart so that it bears no fruit unto God.

The thorny heart is also the cowardly heart. It holds on to what it knows, for fear that surrendering control to the Lord will forfeit the good life for a life centered on the mundane.

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