Let me just open up the Word for a minute. We will be in the New Testament.
We will begin in 1 Thessalonians 2, starting with verse 10, though the emphasis will be on verse 12.
Ye are witnesses, and God also,
how holily and righteously and unblameably
we behaved ourselves toward you that believe:
as ye know how we dealt with each one of you,
as a father with his own children,
exhorting you, and encouraging you, and testifying,
to the end that ye should walk worthily of God,
Who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory.
Then in Luke 1, beginning with verse 26:
Now in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God
unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph,
of the house of David;
and the virgin’s name was Mary.And he came in unto her, and said,
Hail, thou that art highly favored,
the Lord is with thee.But she was greatly troubled at the saying,
and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this might be.And the angel said unto her,
Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.
And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,
and bring forth a son,
and shalt call His name Jesus.
He shall be great,
and shall be called the Son of the Most High:
and the Lord God shall give unto Him
the throne of His father David:
and He shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of His kingdom there shall be no end.And Mary said unto the angel,
How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?And the angel answered and said unto her,
The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee,
and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee:
wherefore also the holy thing which is begotten
shall be called the Son of God.And behold, Elisabeth thy kinswoman,
she also hath conceived a son in her old age;
and this is the sixth month with her that was called barren.
For with God nothing shall be impossible.And Mary said,
Behold, the handmaid of the Lord;
be it unto me according to thy word.
Then in 2 Peter 1, beginning with verse 2:
Grace to you and peace be multiplied
in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord;
seeing that His divine power hath granted unto us
all things that pertain unto life and godliness,
through the knowledge of Him that called us
by His own glory and virtue;
whereby He hath granted unto us
His precious and exceeding great promises;
that through these ye may become partakers
of the divine nature,
having escaped from the corruption that is in the world by lust.
Father, I thank Thee this morning that I am hidden in Thee and that I am in my Savior. And, Father, as we come to Thy Word this morning, I know that there is nothing new that is going to be said.
Sometimes, Lord, that troubles me. But, Lord, if it is Thou speaking, then it will be okay. If Thou art emphasizing these words, O Lord, then it is okay.
And so I ask this morning, Lord, that Thou wouldst take what is Thine and mete it out to Thy people, to Thy sheep. And, Lord, that it would come with power; that it would not just be thoughts and things that are good things to think about or good things to say, but that it would come with the power of God to perform all that it is intended to do.
I am asking this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
I would like to continue speaking out of Thessalonians. Again, as I always say, I am not giving a verse-by-verse exposition, but just letting you know what I have found from the Lord in 1 Thessalonians.
We have said that in this book, in every chapter, there is something about the return of the Lord. And with the things that have been happening in the Middle East, you start thinking, “Is now the time?”
I remember telling you before how, when I first got saved, it was the seventies—the Jesus generation. Books like The Late Great Planet Earth were out, and we were looking and hoping for the coming of our Lord. We were looking for it anxiously.
We put bumper stickers on our cars: “In case of rapture, this car is unmanned,” because we were looking forward to it. Then, as the years went on, things died out.
But with these things happening again, you have kind of been waking up and saying, “Hey, you know, the Lord is coming.” And then the question is, how should we live?
The first time we spoke out of Thessalonians, we looked at chapter 1 and talked about how we should wait, and how we have to do business while we wait. The Lord has given us faith, love, and hope, and we are to do business with them. But we are also to know that He has chosen us and that He loves us as we do this business.
Last time we talked about shepherds—how shepherds are the ones who exhort, encourage, and testify, so that none should be lost and all may be presented complete in Christ. That is the job of a shepherd. The Lord wants shepherds in these last days.
Today, if you remember, I said that the real thing people want to get their teeth into is stuff that says you have to do something. So, in 1 Thessalonians 2:12, we are exhorted to walk worthy.
That ye should walk worthily of God,
Who calleth you into His own kingdom and glory.
This morning, we want to talk about how we walk worthy. I am going to give you a formula.
There it is. To memorize this, you can solve it later in the day.
Now, true, I teach history, but I dabble in math. You can ask my daughters, whom I try to help—with some success. Not much, but some success.
That is our formula, and we will come back to it in a little while. I am not going to leave you in the lurch. But if we look at this equation, we are going to look at it in parts.
How do we walk worthy of the Lord? First, we have our natural mindset about walking worthy.
When we think about walking worthy, I cannot speak for everybody, but I look for legal stuff. I look for the do’s and don’ts. We say, “Okay, we have to walk worthy. How do we do it?”
The Ten Commandments. The Sermon on the Mount. That has some legal stuff in it. Then there are the exhortations given to the Gentiles when Paul and Barnabas came and shared about Gentiles being saved: “It is okay, you can be saved, but abstain from this and that.” Okay, we can do that.
But then you have to factor in that the flesh wars against the Spirit. You have to factor in Romans 7, which says, “That which I would, I do not; and that which I would not, that I do.” Then you cannot forget to throw prayer and fasting into the mix.
That is how we look at things naturally. We say, “I want to be worthy. What do I have to do?” We look for this and this and this little thing. That is the first part of the equation.
Now, let us look at the other parts of the equation. As I said, we will come back to that.
In 1 Thessalonians 4, I want to look at verses 1 through 7.
Finally then, brethren, we beseech and exhort you in the Lord Jesus,
that, as ye received of us how ye ought to walk and to please God,
even as ye do walk, that ye abound more and more.For ye know what charge we gave you through the Lord Jesus.
For this is the will of God, even your sanctification,
that ye abstain from fornication;
that each one of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel
in sanctification and honor,
not in the passion of lust,
even as the Gentiles who know not God;
that no man transgress, and wrong his brother in the matter:
because the Lord is an avenger in all these things,
as also we forewarned you and testified.
For God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification.
I want to focus on the phrase in verse 4: “Each one of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor.”
Before we go into this, we need to understand that there are a number of ways people translate this. Some people think the Greek is talking about possessing your own vessel as possessing your own wife. Others think it means your body. I am going to go with it being your own body.
I think one of the things being attacked, especially as young believers, is this: we are saved in our mind and saved in our spirit, but what we do with our body—well, sometimes we say we just cannot help what we do with our body.
But Scripture talks about our body as a vessel for God, like a temple. I think it talks about that in 1 Corinthians 6:19, that we are a temple for the Holy Spirit.
There is a sense in which our body is a house, and the Lord wants to be housed. He has chosen to house Himself in us. Therefore, we need to possess our house so that other things cannot come into it.
In Thessalonica, the culture and society allowed lots of things. Here Paul speaks specifically about sexual immorality. It does not say these brothers and sisters were caught up in it; it is simply saying that this was the society in which they lived.
It was nothing for people to go out and have immoral affairs or do whatever they wanted with their body, because society did not frown upon it. In earlier periods, like the Victorian age, people used to frown on things like that. Today, in our society, it is not frowned on either.
But God says, if you want to walk worthy, you have to possess your own vessel in sanctification and honor, because that is what God wants.
Before we look at possessing our vessel, we need to see two things. First, the apostle is calling their attention to the fact that they are on God’s side. Their sanctification has already begun.
As far as God is concerned, He has already taken you and set you apart for Himself. It is not, “What do I have to do for God to set me apart?” No, no, no. That is already settled.
God has already chosen you and said, “I am setting you apart for My purposes.” And His purpose is that Christ can be formed in you. He is doing it individually, and He is also doing it corporately, but I want to look at it individually: Christ formed in you as an individual.
Second, we have to see this in the light of being brought into the kingdom of God. If you look back at 1 Thessalonians 2:12, it says that we should walk worthy of God, Who calls us into His own kingdom.
So we have to see possessing our vessel in sanctification and honor in the light of being brought into the kingdom of God. In the simplest terms, the kingdom of God is God’s rule in our lives individually.
Is God ruling in your life individually? When we look at possessing our vessels in sanctification and honor, we have to see it as God ruling in our lives.
God begins to rule in our life not by our agreeing that He should rule. You can say, “Oh yes, He is the One Who should be ruling. I agree with that.” You can agree all you want.
But you have to bow to that rule. Not just agree that He should rule, but bow to His rule in your life. In other words, you give up your own rule over yourself, and you come under His rule.
I know you are thinking, “Boy, Jim is going to hammer us here. Do something.” But look: with these things in mind, let us look at the phrase, “Possess your vessel in sanctification and honor.”
We are going to look at possessing our vessel in two ways: first, as a person being pregnant; second, as a person being married.
Now, I do not have a lot of experience being pregnant, because I have never been pregnant before. But I have seen people who are pregnant, and I have lived with one very close to me who has been pregnant.
The key to both being pregnant and being married is that these situations have something in common: you are no longer living for yourself.
You must now consider another life besides yours. That is the whole key to possessing your vessel in honor.
Let us look at pregnancy for a little bit. We have to understand that God’s rule, or God’s government in us, is a rule by life.
That sounds real theological, but I will make it practical. In Romans 8:2, it says:
For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus
made me free from the law of sin and of death.
There is a Spirit of life. There is a rule of life by which God rules. It becomes operational when His life is imparted to us.
When we look at Mary, the mother of Jesus, whom I read about in Luke, she came to the place where the angel said, “You have favor in My eyes. You are going to carry the life of My Son in you.”
She had questions first: “How can this be? I have never known a man. How is this going to happen?” After the angel tells her, she says, “Here is Your maidservant. Let it be done as You said.”
That is it. Once she said that, life became operational.
I think we miss this a lot. When we lead people to the Lord, the first thing we bring up is the sin question. We bring them to the Lord and say, “I am a sinner. Lord, take away my sins.” Then we say, “Now you have to ask Jesus into your heart.”
There is a dual end to salvation. One is the forgiveness of sin. The other is the life of Christ in you. Together, that is salvation—not one apart from the other.
You cannot have the life of Jesus in you without the forgiveness of sins, but you do not have all salvation by just having the forgiveness of sins. It has to be together.
As soon as Mary said, “Let this be done,” He implanted life into her, and the rest of her life changed.
When you say, “Lord, come into my life,” what you are actually doing is giving yourself over to the influence, or the government, of that new life in you.
As guys, we have a little problem with that because we have never been pregnant before. But you women understand what I am saying. You give yourself over to that life.
That new life is going to alter and make changes in you. First of all, it alters what you can take into your body.
When my wife was pregnant with Katie, she had gestational diabetes. Because she could not take sugar in, she could not have fruit. Now, my wife loves fruit.
You could say, “Have a cookie,” and Barb would say, “No, I would rather have a peach.” Have a piece of pie? If it was fruit pie, she loved it. But peanut butter pie or chocolate pie—my wife did not want anything to do with that.
Sometimes it is not just bad stuff that alters in our lives. Some of it is stuff that we like. But Barb had to go without fruit for about three months. It was really hard.
But because she said, “I want this life in me to come out with no problems,” she did it. She was concerned about the life inside her.
She could have said, “Oh, the heck with this. I am going to eat a peach. Let this thing grow out of proportion in me.” But she did not. She had to get a blood test every week, and I know she hated it, but she did it. She was faithful every week.
Finally, after Katie was born, there was fruit on the plate when they first served her a meal.
Another thing that happens is that it alters your walk. I am not talking about the actual gait of women, though when women get large with child, their gait is altered. They can have kind of a waddle.
But it has to be so, because the life in them is great, and that is the only way they can motor around.
The thing is, you cannot continue to wear the same clothes. I am not talking only about physical clothes, though the analogy works. You cannot get into the old ones anymore, and you cannot be comfortable in them.
You might say, “These Levi’s are so comfortable.” But when you start getting big with life, all of a sudden it is, “Come on, I am not comfortable anymore.”
That is why Scripture says to put off the old clothes and put off the old garment, and to put on the new one.
It is like new wine. If you are going to put new wine into something, you need new wineskins, because the old wineskins will burst. They cannot hold it.
All of a sudden, you have to change your clothing. You wear new clothes—clothes that fit the life.
In government, one of the most wonderful clauses in our Constitution is Article I, Section 8, I think. It is the elastic clause. It allows the government to do what is necessary when something happens that the writers did not foresee.
Elastic is wonderful. Ask any woman with child, and she will sing the praises of elastic. It allows her to be clothed and to be comfortable in that clothing. It fits. She can still move around. She can walk in the new clothing and be at peace.
Oh, that is a wonderful thing—to walk and to be at peace.
Another thing about women when they are pregnant is that they go to the bathroom more often. I do not mean that disrespectfully. It is because the life in them is pressing upon other organs of their body.
You might think, “What in the world are you talking about?” I am talking about this: when we are young, before we become Christians, and even when we are young Christians, we tolerate a lot of things. We tolerate sins in our life.
We say, “That is not that bad a thing.” We tolerate it because we are used to it. We are used to those habits.
But life grows in you, and you cannot tolerate things anymore. You have to void them out of your life.
These sins make you uncomfortable. They have to be brought to the Lord, and the Lord deals with them.
As you start to grow in this life, you start keeping shorter accounts. It is not because you are goody-goody. It is because the life is growing in you, and you say, “I cannot have this and this. I cannot have both of them.”
One has to be dealt with, and the life says, “That has to be dealt with.” That is what has to go on, and you do it.
In a nutshell, you cannot live as if you do not know God anymore. When you are pregnant, you cannot live as if you are not pregnant. Sooner or later, its effect is going to be so prevalent upon you that you will not be able to do the things you used to do. You cannot. Your body will not let you.
It is the same with us spiritually. We cannot go on living the same way. We cannot live as if God is not there anymore. God is here. He is in us.
You now live in the light of the knowledge of Him, and in the light of the knowledge of Him living in you—not just that He is there, but that He is living in you.
You may say, “Gee whiz, being pregnant is a hassle.” And it is. If you have noticed your wives or other women, you know it is hard. But two things come out of this.
First of all, your countenance changes. You have heard of the glow that women have when they find out they are pregnant. It is true.
Can you remember the first time, with your first child, when your wife came home and told you she was pregnant? Do you remember the expression on her face? It was full of joy.
“I have life in me.” It is full of joy. There is joy in knowing life is growing in you. It is that mother’s glow.
It is just like when you are first saved. People know something is different about you.
Secondly, your outlook changes. Your whole outlook toward life changes because you want to serve this life that is in you. You are going to do all that you can to make sure that this life comes out healthy.
You live in hope, or expectation, because that is what hope is: the expectation of the coming day when the old is put off and the new is revealed.
For a pregnant woman, when the old is put off, there is relief. I remember my wife when Katie was late—about ten days late. Barbara was serving eviction notices: “Come on, let’s move out of here. Let’s go.”
All the time, she was looking for the time when she would no longer be burdened with this big life in there, when it would be free.
It is the same with us. We groan, “When am I going to be out of this body? When is this going to be finished?” But our looking is not, “Oh man, I have to go another day.” Our looking is, “There is a day coming. This is all going to be done.”
It changes your whole outlook. This is going to be over. It is going to be new—all of it.
That is looking at it as being pregnant. The other way we want to look at it is in marriage.
In marriage, again, you are considering a different life, but in a different way. In marriage, you must live in harmony with one another.
You have to live in harmony with this life that is in you. Becoming one is a process.
You must consider another’s opinion or another solution, because their life is affected by what you do. It is the same with the Spirit.
I am not saying that the wife is the Holy Spirit living in you, and that you had better listen to her and do the things she says. Do not take the analogy that far.
But I am saying that when that life is put into you and starts leading you this way or that way, and you start saying, “Well, I do not know if I want to go that way,” you have to come to harmony.
You can grieve that life. You can hurt that relationship. But what I have found about marriage is that the partner you are with loves you no matter what. That partner will be there.
A wonderful thing about God is that He is not in the business of saying, “I told you so.” He just says, “Okay, let’s pick it up from here. Let’s go from here.”
So you grow into oneness—oneness of mind, oneness of heart, and oneness of spirit.
If it were not for my wife, we would not be living in Virginia. I am not saying she said, “We have to go, Jim.” But she did not have a desire to continue living in California, and I did.
I never wanted to come here. I am not saying that in a bad way, because I love it here since I have been here, and I know it is the Lord. This has been great.
But at first it was not, because I wanted to stay. I had things I was doing there. I had a ministry there. I had this and that.
My wife said one little thing. I think this was the only time we really, really raised our voices. She said, “How do you know if the Lord wants you here? Is it just because He blesses? How do you know the Lord does not want you to move?”
Man, that made me think, “Well, how do I know?” You have to put a toe in the water, do you not? See if it flows.
So we went out and said, “Okay, Lord, if You are doing this, then these things have to happen. If they do not happen, we will know it is not You.”
Boom. Things just fell into place. It was the Lord. You have to live in harmony with the One Who is living in you.
The third part of our formula has to do with 1 Thessalonians 2:13.
And for this cause we also thank God without ceasing,
that, when ye received from us the word of the message,
even the word of God,
ye accepted it not as the word of men,
but, as it is in truth, the word of God,
which also worketh in you that believe.
The next part is the Word. It is not just the Word of God—not just the Bible—but they welcomed it as it is in truth, the Word of God.
In other words, they understood that it was not just Paul speaking stuff. They understood that God was speaking to them through this man.
So we are not just talking about the Word; we are talking about discerning the Word of God—discerning that this is God speaking to you through His Word or through His servant.
How do we put this into our life? Joel mentioned last time that as a young person, you can look at the Bible and say, “That is such a big book. Where do I start? What do I do?”
This is all I am going to tell you: you have to be in the place where you can hear the Word of God.
What do I mean, be in the place? Devotionally read the Bible. Have a system where you read the Bible through.
I have a little daily Bible-through-the-year plan. You get so much each day and read it through. Do something like that. Start.
Today is June 2. In my Bible, the reading for June 2 is John 13:1-20, and in the evening, 2 Chronicles 17-18. Start reading it so you become aware that it is there and aware of what is in it.
Go to Bible studies. Even if you say, “Oh, geez, I do not get any of it,” go anyway. Just go. I have many people in my class who do not know history, but they go to my class anyway.
Meditate on it. Think about things that you hear from the Word. You might read something and just think about it: “Well, what does that mean?”
If you put yourself in that position, you will get to the place where your ear becomes attuned to hearing Him speak.
We do not all hear the Lord speak. We can read the Word and say, “Okay, I have read it,” and put it on the shelf. It depends on how we listen to it.
We have all this noise around us. When I do my lesson plans, I like to have noise, because quiet disturbs me. It makes me feel alone, and then you start hearing little weird noises and get up to find out what they are. So I have to have something to block that out.
But you have to be in a place where you turn off the noise of life around you. You get in and say, “Lord, this is my time. I am going to read Your Word. I am going to put everything aside, hold my phone calls, and be with You.”
If you read the prophets, there is a wonderful phrase throughout the prophets—and throughout the Old Testament, for that matter: “The word of the Lord came to” whoever the person was.
The Word of the Lord came to them. If you are not in the place where you are listening to the Word, the Word of the Lord will not come to you.
Think about Elijah. Remember when he ran away from Ahab after the rain came down at Mount Carmel? He was depressed, and he felt that Ahab was going to kill him.
The Lord took him to a cave and said, “Come out here.” There was a great earthquake, but the voice of the Lord was not in it. Then there was a great fire, but the voice of the Lord was not in it. Then there was a still, small voice.
Elijah recognized it. You have to get yourself in tune to hear His Word, to hear what He has to say to you.
I remember teaching in California. I had a kid named Alex Mills, a little guy about this high. It was the last period of the day, and I had already taught that class five times. I was teaching it for the sixth time that day.
We were teaching the American Revolution and talking about “no taxation without representation.” I was going through it, and the light went on in that kid’s head.
He stood up in the middle of the class and said, “That’s what it means! ‘Taxation without representation!’ Now I have been wondering since fifth grade.”
That is the same thing. You could have heard something years and years ago, but all of a sudden the Word of the Lord comes, and it pulls out meaning for that time.
Why does the Lord speak to us? You want to be in the Word because the Word is going to work effectively in you.
First of all, He wants to reveal Himself to you. He wants to reveal His own purpose.
That is what the prophets got. You read the Old Testament prophets, and all of a sudden they get the thought of God and apply it to society. They say, “Oh, God is thinking this, and you guys are like this. This is not right.”
Then He wants to reveal His will to you. It might be the direction you are to take in your life. It might be, “Go and witness to somebody.” But He wants to speak to you.
I am not saying He is some chatterbox who always has something to say. There are times when you say, “I keep reading and I get nothing.” Stay with it. Be faithful, because you do not know.
The other reason He speaks to us is because He wants us to respond in faith.
A lot of things you read in the Word, or that He says to you, will be, “This is for you. This is yours to have. I want you to step out on it.”
I have used the example of quitting smoking before. I do not know if I told it to the whole congregation, but I told it in a Bible study with the kids.
My little brother came home once with a little white ribbon on. He had been listening to Kenneth Hagin. We all smoked, because we grew up in a smoking family. Even as Christians, we smoked because it was our habit.
I asked him, “What is that?” He said, “I am claiming the blood of Jesus so I can quit smoking.”
I almost had a heart attack. I thought, “Oh, quit. You are full of stuff.” We went to a movie that night, and I sat behind him smoking the whole night because I thought, “This is the craziest thing. This is so stupid.”
When we got home from the movie, my older brother said, “You know, I think I am going to quit smoking too.” I said, “Okay, just go ahead. I do not care.”
Then my best friend came out and said, “I am going to quit too.” Now the Lord started convicting me. The Lord started speaking to me.
It did not come from the Bible saying, “Thou shalt not smoke,” or something like that. But I started to discern the voice of the Lord.
I got really, really angry. I got really mad. “I am not going to do this.” It took me about an hour and a half. I was really struggling.
Finally I said, “Okay, that is it. All right. If that is what You want, that is what I am going to do.” I have not smoked since.
When the Lord speaks something to you and you step out in faith on it—when you say, “Okay, I understand this is what You want”—He empowers you. He empowers you to do what He says He wants you to do.
He does not say, “Just go. Trust Me,” and leave you hanging. He does not do that. I think some of us think He is out there to trip us up. That is not God.
When God speaks something, He wants you to have that faith, because we are to live by faith—not just believe once that He forgave our sins, but live the rest of our lives by faith, in what He is saying to us through our relationship with Him and through His Word.
Now let us go to our formula.
I know the engineering and accounting types are gone this week, so the rest of you are like me. Where do I start?
If you are normal, like me, and you think about reading, you go from left to right. You see “A to T,” and that means all those things—all the legal stuff we talked about.
I should have put in parentheses, because Jacob said, “All these things are against me.” When you start thinking you are going to have a worthy walk by doing all these things, you are going to find that all those things are against you, and you are not going to be able to do it.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that is where we usually start. We start there, thinking that is how we do it.
But mathematics does not work that way. To get the value of an equation, you have to follow the order of operations.
The order of operations in algebra says you do what is in the brackets and parentheses first, before you do the rest.
To give meaning to the formula, you want to possess your vessel by letting the Lord be King. You want to receive and discern the Word of God, and hear it with faith.
Once you have done it in that order, then you can apply what you get there to all the other things. If you get it backwards, you are messed up. You are going to be depressed. You are going to say, “I just cannot do it.” You are going to lock up.
But if you follow the order of operations, you see the value. The meaning comes from this part. You have to do this first. Then the rest comes.
To walk worthy of the Lord is to possess the life we have been given while we wait for the Lord.
Our testimony should be this: “It pleased God to reveal His Son in me.”
Is that not a wonderful statement? I always thought, “What does the Lord want to do? He must be thinking, ‘Oh, I have got this hard nut to crack over there.’” But it says it pleases Him to reveal His Son in us.
That is where it is at. That should be our testimony.
How do we walk worthy? We take the life He has given us, and we give attention to it. We give attention to the life. We give attention to the Word.
Then we let those things order the rest. That is how we walk worthy until He comes. We possess what He has given us until He comes.
Then, when He comes, all these things are taken away and Christ is revealed in us. Is that not wonderful?
Lord, sometimes we just make things too hard. We look at things, and we look at them wrong, because we look at them in our own understanding.
But I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast a higher law for us, a higher understanding. Thou art able to let us understand what Thou knowest.
Thou art able, by what Thou knowest and by the laws of the life in us, to work things out and bring things to pass that Thou hast promised.
Lord, we come today to say that we want to walk worthy. We know our own faults. But we ask to be aware this morning, Lord, of the One Thou hast put in us—the Lord Jesus Christ.
Help us to be aware of Him living in us. We ask also, Lord, to accept His living in us and give Him His place.
Lord, we ask that Thou wouldst help us give ourselves to the Word. Even if we do not understand it, Lord, may we come by faith and say, “Lord, I do not understand, but I am coming to Thee anyway.”
Until the day when the Word of the Lord comes to me, Lord, help me be faithful.
Lord, thank Thee that Thou hast not left us to ourselves, but Thou hast given us Thy Son. In Jesus’ name, amen.