Passage
[Romans 8:12-16]
“So then, brethren, we are under obligation, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh [13] for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the body, you will live. [14] For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. [15] For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” [16] The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God,”
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
In 1 Peter 1:16 it says, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” God commands His children to be holy.
Matthew 5:48 also says, “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The process of becoming perfect is part of the process of becoming a true child of God, a child who resembles Him completely.
We not only have to cast off sins and evil, but we also have to fill up our shortcomings and refine what is not smooth to make ourselves perfect.
We can become true children who resemble God when we deny ourselves and overcome our own limitations.
This is the 11th session in the series “The Voice and Guidance of the Holy Spirit.”
Continuing from the last session, I will talk about the examples of fleshly thoughts that come out from self-righteousness and frameworks without us even realizing it. This is the third level of fleshly thoughts.
The fleshly thoughts that are derived from self-righteousness and self-frameworks usually begin to come out after we cast off evident untruths to some extent.
Breaking down this kind of fleshly thoughts is one of the processes of achieving perfection on top of holiness.
Through the message, I hope you will become perfect children of God who clearly hear the voice and receive the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Main
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, in the third level of faith many of the fleshly thoughts that hindered you from practicing the word have already been demolished.
If you achieve 60th percentile of the third level of faith, namely if you ‘stand on the rock of faith’, you do not have any desire to disobey the word of God with your fleshly thoughts.
But sometimes fleshly thoughts are derived from your self-righteousness and frameworks.
This is the third level of fleshly thoughts.
There are some of you who are remaining at the threshold of spirit being unable to go into spirit, because you do not demolish such fleshly thoughts as these.
In the last session, I talked about the fleshly thoughts that come from the frameworks that are hidden deep inside your nature that you inherited from your parents and the frameworks of your personality that you made while you were growing up.
Also, I explained that you can have momentary fleshly thoughts because of the minute untruths that still remain in you.
Now, I am going to explain to you about the fleshly thoughts that you do not realize because of good environment.
Some people have fleshly thoughts, but because they are in a spiritually good environment, they just think they always have spiritual thoughts.
For example, our church is overflowing with the grace of God pouring down.
You can experience the signs and wonders and power of God, and you can experience many gifts and works of the Holy Spirit.
You can pray with the fullness of the Spirit and we have an abundance of the spiritual word.
There are many foreign guests who want to visit our church, too.
Soon, we will begin to build the biggest church in the world.
So, they are full of Spirit and happy because they are protected by God all the time and they also receive blessings.
Everything seems good and lovely.
It is good to have such fullness of the Spirit, but the problem is they neglect circumcising their heart.
Because of the happy feelings coming from the circumstances, they just forget about their fleshly thoughts that they have from time to time, and they mistakenly think they are having spiritual thoughts.
But God says that, if the grace of God stops pouring down, there are some who will act like Job.
Job did not realize the evil in his heart.
Only when he lost all his children, wealth, health, and everything, did he reveal the evil in his heart.
When little children are carried on the back of their parents, they are just happy.
But if they have to walk on the ground themselves, they will realize they are weak.
It’s the same with the measure of faith.
When God the Father gives us the grace and protects us, we might not be able to discern the extent to which we have cultivated heart with the truth.
They just think they have good faith because they keep the Lord’s Day and give tithes and do not commit any works of the flesh.
But if they face any hardship, their fullness of Spirit will go away.
The measure of truth that they have cultivated in their heart will be revealed.
