Posted on 05/07/2021 12:52:35 AM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee" (Proverbs 7:1).
“My son,” we keep coming back to this thing of “my son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee.” “Keep my words,” in the sense of “do them,” “obey them,” but it more than that; it's as simple as keeping them. It’s as simple as making sure that you have them and that you keep them and protect them and secure them. “My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee. Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye.” Ezekiel's wife was said to be the “apple of his eye.”
Verse 3, “Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart. Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman [she’s got a relationship with the Bible] That they may keep thee from the strange woman [There we go again. He comes back to that thing so much and it's practical in the sense of just a wicked old woman; but it's broader in the sense of “doctrinal heresy” and “religious falsehood.” It’s just an old false religion, and it's also the world system] . . . that they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which flattereth with her lips.”
We need to understand this. The Bible is not a creampuff book. It's a rein in your jaw. It's to keep you from certain things. It's a fence. You have to be reined in. If left to yourself, you will get into stuff that you're not supposed to be in. It's just the way we are in our human nature. The Bible is to a rein as a bit and a bridal is to a horse. It's to stop you. It's to thwart you. It is to put the lust of the flash and all those things under some sort of control so that you don't go ahead and do those things that will bring harm down upon your head.
When Paul preached to the intellectual Corinthians, he deliberately decided against any academic or erudite approach in presenting the Gospel. “My speech and my preaching,” he later told the Corinthian Christians, ““was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but: in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4). Paul had the “spark of fire.”
Paul had the same evidence when he preached at Thessalonica. Just weeks after having been in that city, he wrote to the converts there and said, “Our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance” (1 Thessalonians 1:5). Again, he had the “spark of fire.''
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Very good idea.
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