Guilt is one of the biggest issues among Christians today. I can make a lot of interesting comments about that… but I won’t. The simple fact is that most believers just don’t know what to make of guilt, or how to manage those feelings. The difficulty of guilt has led some to fundamentally change essential doctrines of scripture, lessening the gospel message in the process! Not good.
The truth is that most of us have things in our past that can be a source of some level of guilt— it’s normal; it’s natural. There’s nothing wrong with you, or unique about your situation in that regard. What we do with those feelings of guilt is what makes all of the difference— and you don’t need to guess about that. The scriptures describe the incredible way that Jesus sets us free from guilt, and far from lessening the gospel message, it’s magnified through Christ.
In a few of our past studies, I’ve alluded to the fact that faith is information. And I have received some messages from people since those studies, with questions regarding exactly what this means and how to apply it.
In those messages which people sent to me, it became immediately clear that they were not understanding the difference between world information and spiritual information. Indeed, those two things are very different. Not all information is faith. Faith is a very specific type of information; information that deals specifically with Christ, what He has accomplished, and who we are in Him today.
So today in this study, I would like to share with you, the very important difference between world information (information that comes from worldly circumstances and what the world presents to us) versus Spiritual information (information about Jesus Christ, what He has accomplished on the cross, and our identity in Him today) – that is the information which is properly identified as faith.
This is what we will be looking at today.
A long time ago, there was a popular praise song that we always used to sing; the lyrics in-part were “we bring a sacrifice of praise into the house of the LORD.” This is a reference to Hebrews 13:15, saying that we should continually offer such a sacrifice to God. This phrasing has always puzzled me. Because in my human mind, the word “sacrifice” always implied cost, or some kind of a victim. Often times we hear preachers say that in order for our praise and worship to mean anything to God, it has to “cost us something”, and this left me even more confused because it really wasn’t costing me anything to praise God – as a matter-of-fact I enjoyed praising Him! So did this then mean that my praise was worthless?
I struggled with this thought for many years, and it led me into a performance-driven, merit-centered mentality where I was trying to give something of value back to God, which I naturally assumed was my own works and efforts; my performance and law-keeping. However, this idea is not actually supported in scripture. In-fact the Bible is very descriptive regarding what the real sacrifice of praise is which we are to offer, and this is precisely what we will be studying today.
What you say matters. Your words may seem insignificant, but they carry more weight and power than you can possibly imagine. Yet many times I hear believers describe in graphic and sometimes gruesome detail the victories which they perceive that the enemy is having in their lives and even in their bodies, and it is precisely because they do not understand the power of their words; and as a result, they do not realize the ground which they are giving-up to the enemy.
That's why in this study today, we will be examining the power of what we say, the words that we speak, and what the Bible says about it all. This is not new-age philosophy, but it is Bible fact and truth from the Word of God.