29/10/2018
TOPIC: Get in Touch with the Spirit of the Word.
*BIBLE VERSE(S): 2 Corinthians 3:6: Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.*
One of the mission ethics states that a missionary should condescend to the level of the people s/he wants to change. And the key word in mission is communication. If a missionary went to a people who are highly uncivilized, s/he would become uncivilized like them. This could be a man or woman who has fleet of cars, lives in duplex in one of the highest rated countries in the world. Now, in his or her mission expedition, s/he lives in a thatched house with leaking roof, goes around naked. These people can only describe this missionary from his identification with them. And this missionary can only communicate with these people based on the things obtainable in that place.
When the need arises for the missionary to tell the people about mobility, especially vehicle, he will lack words to explain it to their understanding due to vocabulary gap. If the only form of human carriage the people know is being carried on a person's back, certainly the missionary will employ it to drive home his or her message.
The mind of the missionary will be made bare when he decides to take one of the indigenes of the land to his place. It's then s/he will understand with obscurity, who the missionary is and his words. With obscurity, because he is not part of the place, and he is not yet conversant with the culture.
The Bible is abridged; by this, I mean that it's not detailed. It means a mere letter like every other writeup, if we are not brought to the Spirit of the Word. This is easy to understand since we have some how similar thing in our literature. When a person writes a book, no matter how picturesque and illustrative the work is, you might not still get to the mind of the writer, until you come closer to the author of the book, who will now tell you what he had in mind in writing his book, and what he had in mind in selecting his or her diction.
Moses could understand God because he dared to come close to God. The children of Israel couldn't understand God, because they were faraway from Him. The original plan of God is not to write down His Words, but to communicate His Words to us personally. But because of the inability of man to comprehend His Words, He wrote down His Words in a tablet of stone for man. In Exodus 20:18, the children of Israel trembled at the Word of God, and asked Moses to go and get the Word for them. This is exactly the way we delegate pastors and others to go and get the Word for us. Since the children of Israel couldn't get the word spoken to them, and Moses would not live forever to always get the word for them, God decided to write His words down for them. It was this incident that gave rise to the Bible. It's only the people who like Moses can meet the Master, can get the Spirit of the Word.
PRAYER: Father, help me to live by the Spirit of Your Word in Jesus name. Amen.
ACTION POINT: Decide today to develop an intimate relationship with the Spirit of God, and always and consciously ask Him to direct you to the mystery of His Word.
*STUDY PLAN*
Psalm 132