Welcome back to part 2 of our series on blessings in the Kingdom of God. Last week we saw how much God cares for us, which can be a sticking-point for people who see God as more of a judge than a loving Father.
We also saw how the Kingdom of God is not something that we strive toward or reach for, but in-fact the Kingdom comes to us, through Jesus Christ. If you haven’t yet watched the previous study, I would encourage you to see that study first as we will be continuing upon that foundation today.
In this study, we will be looking at blessings and how they come to us, and also in what measure they come to us – the reality is greater than what we often think.
If you’ve been reading the Bible for any length of time, you may be familiar with the words of Proverbs 4:23, which counsels us to be diligent to guard our heart, because the “issues of life” flow from it. And this has been interpreted to mean many different things… but if we aren’t sure what it means then we also can’t be sure if our heart is guarded properly!
Thankfully, the scriptures do not leave us guessing about how to guard our heart, and the benefits of doing so; and as we examine this today, we can see that it is not only simpler to guard our heart than we might think at first, but also incredibly beneficial for us to do so.
There are literally millions of people who claim to believe in God, and Jesus Christ. Millions of people claim to be part of a vast spiritual family, and claim to be brothers in Christ. The question that I want to pose to you today in this study, is the one in the title… Who’s Your Daddy? Do you know who your daddy is? Do you know His character? Do you know His love? Are you simply existing in a spiritual family that you don’t really know… and if so, what can you do about it?
I had a conversation recently with a person who claimed that they didn’t really know what the will of God was… they didn’t really know what He would do (this happened to be in regards to healing, but the same could be applied to anything really) – this seemed strange to me, because if you have a close, personal, intimate relationship with someone, you get to know them, and you get to know their character and how they respond to things. If you see a couple that has been married for a long time, you find that they know one-another so well that they finish each-others sentences!
So what I want to share with you today, are some things about the character of God, the way in which He has revealed Himself, and how you can get to know Him in a more personal way.
What role does the Holy Spirit of God have in your life? I have asked this question to a lot of people over the years, and I have heard a lot of different answers. Some people say that the Spirit of God tells us when we sin. Others say along a similar line, that the Spirit is our conscience, telling us wrong from right, good from evil. And of-course there are others still who just plain have no idea what the Spirit is for, or if the Spirit of God even exists today at all.
What I want to share with you today, is what the Bible says about the Spirit’s Role in our life today, and how the Spirit of God interacts with us. Jesus said that it would be better for us when He departed, because He would give us another Comforter, that being His Spirit – and He didn’t leave us guessing about who this Comforter was or what role the Spirit would have. So we shouldn’t be hesitant to look at it.
Do you know who you are? It sounds like a strange question at first, but I have conversations with people every day who are still confused about their spiritual identity… that’s why I teach so often on this very subject, because there are a great number of people in the church who still suffer from some sort of spiritual identity crisis. Not seeing who they are in Christ, but still identifying with their old nature. The part of them that is dead, they still see as alive, and they have bought into this lie that their still trying to become the new creation in Christ and they get stuck trying to fight a battle that is already won by Jesus Christ Himself.
God, of-course doesn’t want you to fall into this trap. He wants you to fully embrace the identity which He has given you. He wants you to walk in this identity every single moment of every day… It’s why He continually moves me to teach on this. I have been on a tangent for years now, because God’s heart is so strong for this, because so many of His children have bought into this lie that they are less than what they actually are in Him. So today we will be examining your identity in Christ Jesus – and even if you have been here for our previous studies on this subject, this will still be a good refresher for you, because faith comes by continually hearing, not just having heard one time.
You have probably heard it quoted before, that you must fear the LORD thy God and serve Him only. This is a popular quote from scripture that seems to get a lot of circulation. Though in all of its popularity and use, it never really is explained what exactly this fear is. Are we to tremble and quake before a holy God as some preachers would have us do? Or does it mean something else entirely?
You might be surprised to learn that Biblical fear is something different than the kind of fear that we often associate with it today. It is by understanding the word fear as the Bible defines it, that we can begin to see what the scripture is actually telling us, versus what man merely assumes of it. This is what we will be studying today.
Over the last few weeks, we have been asking a reoccurring question: Do you know? Do you know that you have an inheritance in Christ? Do you know that you are safe and secure in His hands? Do you know that He loves you beyond measure? While countless blessings have been given to you in Christ Jesus today, if you do not know them or receive them, they will not do any good in your life.
So today we will be studying the goodness of God, because it is when we truly see His goodness directed towards us in all things, that we can have the belief necessary to receive all of His provision for us.