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| John 12:43 |
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Lesson # John 12:43 Study Material - John 12:43 You must be in fellowship prior to your Bible study, so that the spiritual information you receive can become a source, of blessing to your soul and produce spiritual growth. John 12:43 43 For [gar] they loved [agapao] the praise [doxa] of men [anthropos] more [mallon] than [eper] the praise [doxa] of God [theos] . KJV-Interlinear John 12:43 43 for they loved the approval of men rather than the approval of God. NASB The single most common failure in most peoples lives, is that they have two scales of values in their lives. The first is set for mankind, ones environment, workplace, social place, family place, and the second set of values is for God. This is the one which people do not generally understand, so they put it on the back burner in their lives. In dealing with people we generally get immediate feedback of some kind, whether positive or negative. And with God, we do not see this same type of feedback. With God we have to deal with faith, and with people faith is not in view, our senses are. Our senses are closer to us, more immediate, and we think we know where we stand. However this is a superficial evaluation at best. People are not dependable, and certainly they can be fickle, so one would think that you would not trust in the folks around you. However this is the contradiction which occurs in our life. Without Bible doctrine we have nothing with which to gauge our environment. So we go by our emotions. We call it going by our instincts. And we come up short over and over again. We evaluate people and then are let down when we set them up on a pedestal and they fail in life. Somehow we expected folks to be perfect, and of course there is no basis in life with which to conclude that anyone is perfect. We are shocked when we hear of a politician falling on his face, or a celebrity doing something wrong in life (imagine that). We are shocked when we learn of some failure of some one we thought we knew. And yet all of us are failures in Gods sight. Our big failure in this is that we have our eyes on people and or expectations of them, using false standards, rather than on God, and His standards for our own life. It is easier to judge others than to evaluate ourselves. Sure we might not all be murderers or thieves, but then we all lie, cheat, gossip, judge, feel sorry for ourselves, or do something which is based in arrogance and therefore sinful. So why should any of us be shocked at the failures of others. It is far easier to point the fingers at others than to point to our own failures. After all, our failures aren't 'as bad' as theirs! Anyway, we can always look back in the history of someone's past and 'remind' them of their failures. Ah, Ha! See there???! And we can justify our own failure just by pointing out that those failures of others are far worse than ours. The pressures of the world are powerful, but only to those who lack spiritual growth. Then there are the standards which we set up for God. These are tougher to identify, because God does not exactly come down to our bed side every night and give us an evaluation of our day. So Gods standards get lost in the shuffle, and become less real in our lives. The Pharisees who believed, in these last few days, had a whole world of established bureaucracy lined up against them. To them, that was more fearful, the thought of losing their job, or being stoned to death, or just being ostracized, than fearing the creator of the universe who could at the mere thought of it, wipe out the entire world. This is typical and generally found in the attitudes of people everywhere and in every generation. People make compromises in their life style, because they are more comfortable or they feel more secure and less threatened with those compromises, than they otherwise might feel if they made a change in their life. Take an unmarried couple who live together. Clearly not the proper thing to do. Can it prevent you from growing to heaven? No. That is determined by whether or not you believe in Christ. Can it prevent you from growing up spiritually? No. That is determined by your consistency in your Bible study and fellowship status. But it can limit your growth however, because you allow a compromise into your life which God states is taboo. By allowing one compromise into your life probably will lead to another compromise of some kind and so forth. The more attempts you make to redefine Gods principles of life, the less of a spiritual life you will have. This same principle applies to homosexuals, to bank robbers and so forth. All can go to heaven. All can have some form of spiritual growth with exceptions. But the more you allow your own standards or the standards of the world to run your life, then the less of a spiritual life you will have. You will look to blaming others for your problems. You will never accept responsibility for your own failures. You will make the failures of others greater than your own and thus render your failures as not important. When pressed to a decision point (and God always does this to you sooner or later in your life), then you will cower and choose the standards of the world (less trouble from people that way - so you think), over those standards from God. And the truth is, you lose more when you turn your back on God, than you could ever lose in a hundred life times with people. 
Now is the time to post a prayer. End Of Lesson Study to show thyself approved (mature) unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing (studying/discerning), the Word of truth. |
