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August 18, 2020 8:00 am
The Bible declares God's wisdom and knowledge unsociable.
You can Google it. Dr. Tony Evans says the only real source of what you need to know about God is God.
So God must reveal himself to us by his spirit.
This is the alternative. With Dr. Tony Evans, author, speaker, senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas, and president of the Urban Alternative.
Knowing God in your head is pretty easy. But on its own, pretty useless.
Let's join Dr. Evans as he talks about getting that knowledge out of your head and into your heart with all the desperate things that are happening today in every segment of our lives and of our society. Business as usual is no longer the order of the day because some of the stuff we are dealing with only God can fix. And so I am offering you to join me in the pursuit of the deeper knowledge of God, the way you know that you know God as you are changing.
So if I'm the same as I have ever been, if I'm not moving more toward the character and conduct of God, the attitudes and actions, the perceptions. If I don't feel what God feels and how God feels it about various scenarios in my life and thus I am not changing it is because I do not know him. People who know God are changed by him because he rubs off on them.
It is the transformation that is the demonstration that the information has taken hold. Let me write that down.
I just thought.
That the transformation is the proof that the knowledge of God is catching. The question then is why? If I'm constantly accumulating information, am I not experiencing transformation based on an experiential relationship with God? I'm coming to church and reading my Bible, but I'm not changing. Therefore, I don't really know him yet. That is probably if you are truly a Christian due to the fact we are knowing God in our souls and not in our spirits.
And the distinction between the soul and the spirit and the knowledge of God is critical in this well known passage in First Corinthians, Chapter two. Paul makes this statement in verse 10 four to us. God revealed them through the spirit for the spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. God says that the way God reveals or discloses himself is through the spirit. So it's a spiritual connection that must occur for the disclosure, the revelation of God to be made known. We know people in our lives at varying levels. We know some people, only barely. Other people somewhat casually. Other people fairly well. Other people very well. But all people limitedly. The best person in your life who you think you know well will surprise you. In fact, not only the best person in your life will shock you. You will shock you. How many times have you said to yourself, that's not me? The knowledge of another person or ourselves runs at varying levels.
Therefore, if the closest person in your life you don't know, and if you can even figure out you, then it ought not surprise you about our inability to be able to figure out God. We can't even figure out people ourselves. So it ought not shock you that the figure out ability. I've got on the human level is impossible to come to know, God means he must reveal exposed himself to you because the Bible declares that God's wisdom and knowledge are unsociable. You can Google it.
Revelation is where God discloses, unveils, pulls back the curtain and lets you see him. And he says he does that through the spirit. So come to know God, you must come to know him on a spirit level. And if he is not getting down to the spirit level, you are not coming to know him as he wishes to reveal himself. How do you know when God is exposing himself to you on the deepest level? Call the level of the spirit. Well, verse nine, he says. But things which I have not seen here have not heard. Which is not into the heart of man. All that God has prepared for those who love him for to ask God revealed them. So first line is not talking about heaven in the sweet by and by. It's talking about earth and the nasty here and now. So God, that must reveal himself to us by His spirit. Why? Because the spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. It is the job of the Holy Spirit. It is called in first, John, to the anointing. The anointing is your capacity to make spiritual contact and to receive spiritual information. That's the anointing.
And John says and you all have it, every Christian, every person who is really born again has the anointed.
I have as many of you have direct TV. Let's call the fact that I possess direct TV. The anointing, because I have a dish on my roof that enables me to connect with a satellite in outer space. So I can get a picture in my den.
I have the anointing.
That is, I have the capacity to receive the picture from a place I can see out of space from a reality, I can't touch a satellite. But I can see it where I live. But in order for the satellite system that I have that makes contact from a dish on my roof to a world I can see situated next to my TV is a receiver.
The job of the receiver is to receive the signal from outer space translated through my dish and reveal it to my TV.
My TV gets the revelation from what has been positioned on my roof in order to receive from an invisible realm.
If I try to see a picture without my receiver, it's not that I don't have the anointing. I have direct TV. It's that I have not engaged my receiver to pick up the anointing that I possess. If you are saying that you got a dish, that's the anointing. But if your receiver, your spirit is not working or is not on, even though God is sending the information, you're not getting a clear picture.
And if you're not getting a clear picture, you're sitting down watching a blank screen. God has placed in every believer a receiver, but it must be received on the spirit level.
The reason why many of us are not getting to know God is we're satisfied to relate to him on either the physical level or the soul level only and not the spirit level.
Stick with me here.
Now, we have received the first 12. Not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God. So that we may know the things freely given to us by God.
He said, let's clarify what kind of receiver you have.
The knowledge of God, he says, is freely given no charge.
God would be happy, delighted at no cost.
For you to experience him. He's. How do I know I'm exposing him? You're changing, but I'm a natural man does not accept the things of the spirit of God for their foolishness to Hamburg 14. And he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised. He can't trust the man who is engaged with the spirit to the natural man. Now, I know there was a time old school.
Everybody wanted to be a natural man. Okay, well, that may be good for your homies, but it's not good for your God cause the natural man doesn't have a receiver. A natural man cannot receive the things that are from the spirit of God. They don't have the anointing. They don't have direct TV. So they still fiddling with the knobs and all they can get is what the physical will reveal. But looking at nature and about what their soul comes up with, which will always be distorted. And so you hear that all the time when people tell you what they think God is like or they think God will do. And I don't think God will want me to do that. And I don't think that everybody has a thought. That's because they their soul is as far as they can go because they don't have a receiver. That's the natural man.
So if you are a natural Christian, you are a Christian who doesn't know God. Chapter three, verse one has a name for you.
It's called Carnal McConnell Christian. And he says, you know, McConnell Christian cause he looks like everybody else. Says you walk as mere men. There's nothing supernatural about you. You're regular. You're not super unleaded. You're like everybody else.
The natural man is operating on a whole different frequency.
So they left to their own information. They are left to their own psychoanalyzing their own solutions, what they can come up with, their own determination, their own resolutions, their own power of positive thinking. They are left to themselves because they they are operating on the world's spirit. That's the spirit that they have.
They are spiritually appraised or discerned or evaluated or understood.
So the man without the receiver can't get a picture. He can. She can. But the Christian. Who has direct TV? Who has a satellite?
Maybe like the natural man, cause they don't get a picture now because they don't have the system.
They have the anointing. But they have become chopper three things fleshly. First three of chopper three four. You are still fleshly. You're still thinking like men think so.
If you are going to know God in your spirit, because that's where the that's the level where you come to know that, you know, things on the soul, you think that you know things at the spirit, you know that you know things. Once you become a Christian, the Holy Spirit invades your human spirit. And the two are merged. So that now you can freely receive the things that are given by God, the natural man. He doesn't have a RACV. He's living on a soul level. He's a soul man.
Dr. Evans, we'll have more for us on what we're able to see and understand spiritually when he continues our message in just a moment. Stay with us.
Stop for a moment and think of your closest friend or relative. That connection you have the depth of the friendship we all desire relationship. So why is it we don't pursue God in the same way? And Dr. Tony Evans latest book, Knowing God, he'll show you how to pursue reconnection with God, where you will experience tremendous growth and privilege. Visit Tony Evans doorway and get your copy of the book, DVD and Bible study. Knowing God.
And right now is our thank you gift. When you make a contribution to help keep these essential messages coming to this station, we'll not only send you the power of Knowing God book, interactive study guide and resource DVD just mentioned, but we'll also include all eight full length messages from Tony's current teaching series, Knowing God Yours on both c.D and instantly downloadable digital files. This special offer is only available for a short time, so let one of our resource team members help you make the arrangements by calling one 800 800 32 22 anytime of the day or night. Again, that's one 800 800. Three, two, two, two. Or make your contribution and request online right away at Tony Evans dot org. That's Tony Evans DOT r.G. Here's Dr Evans with more of today's lesson first 15.
But he who is spiritual, who's operating spiritually from the spirit of praise, is all things. Yet he himself is appraised by no one.
How do you know if you are spiritual? It has to do with how you evaluate things. Because he looks at things spiritually. He evaluates them, praises them that way.
So he can she can understand things from a spiritual perspective while simultaneously not being understood by others.
But before verse sixteen, he has no the mind of the Lord.
That he will instruct Kim.
In light of what he just said, that the Spurs personal pride is all things, but it's a praise by no one.
Why is that the case for who has known the mind of the Lord so that he can tell God what to do?
Who has known the mind of the Lord that he should instruct him? But to my say.
But we have the mind of Christ. You have the mind. You have the brain of Jesus.
When Jesus walked the earth, he was in constant communication with the father, and the father would transmit to Jesus his will.
Let me tell you what that did for Jesus. It saved him time cause he didn't keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again, through trial and error and give some right. He was in such perfect contact with the father. He always got it right the first time. He always got it right the first time because Jesus had the mind of the father, like coming by of books to do that will. Oh, God, Jesus would say my time have not yet come. Daddy don't want me go that way yet another. He didn't waste time. Waste life. Make mistakes over and over again because he was piggy backing on the mind of the father.
But guess what you have. We have the mind of Christ.
What Jesus had from his father. We have from Jesus. That is the capacity to piggy back on his thinking.
When you and I piggy back on, Jesus was thinking, we save time, we save mistakes, we save repeating the same thing over and over and over again. Why? Because we have his thinking on the front end.
It is our refusal to evaluate things spiritually that has caused our dilemmas.
We all have dilemmas at different levels. But to keep our deliveries to not be transformed because we keep living on the physical or we keep living with the soul and we don't get down to knowing God in the spirit.
How do I do that? Go back up to verse 13, which things we also speak.
Not in words taught by human wisdom. What people think, but in those taught by the spirits. And how do we get that? By combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.
Vince Lombardi, the great football coach for the Green Bay Packers. One day a team would do into a good team, wasn't doing good at all. And he was upset and he said, gentlemen, let's get back to the fundamentals.
He said, this is football. Then he held up a football. Why did he have to start there?
Cause everything else depended on that. Without the football, nothing else happens. This is a Bible. These are spiritual words. But you must combine with the spiritual words, spiritual thinking.
And you can do that because you have the mind of Christ. So you got the line that can do the thinking, that can connect with the words when the mind connects with the words. And you think in terms of what the words say, you have now turned on your receiver. The receiver is now on your side. But my mama taught me this. My dad taught me that. That's not the mind of Christ. What does Christ mind say? And he has written it in his word. But you say. But the Bible doesn't deal with all my issues. Sometimes the Bible is general and I need a specific word from God. OK, that's fine. Get the words you do know. Collect the mind to think in terms of those words. And now the receiver can give you five hundred different channels. I know you don't want that program. You want this program to God can go all over the place cause it's still coming from one satellite, through one dish, through one receiver. But it opens up a whole world of pictures. You got comedy shows, you got dramas, you got news, you got entertainment. You got all kinds of stuff. God can give you a specific picture, but you've got to be tuned in to the one receiver. And when he know you're going to take this word and adjust your mind to that word, not just this word to your mind, then he can let the spirit of God take you deep sea diving or deep God experience Xerox machine.
You want to copy. And so what you do is you put the paper on machine in the machine and a light comes on a light, a light, a light, a light takes a picture and transfers it to another sheet of paper so that what's on the second sheet is the same as what's on the first sheet, even though the second sheet is not the first sheet.
It has on it what the first sheet has on the second sheet. Cause there was a transfer due to an illumination or a light that did a transfer. God just doesn't want you to have the first sheet of paper. He wants you to Xerox it onto your mind so that what's in his mind gets in your mind, so that you become a copy of what the revelation says. And he can illuminate you into the mind of God.
So that you experience the transfer of his being in your life. The question on the floor is, do you want to know me in your spirit?
Dr. Tony Evans talking about what can happen when we allow God's mind to invade ours. If you're ready to know God and his spirit today, Tony would love to help you get started by introducing you to Christ. Just visit Tony Evans dot org and follow the link that says Jesus. You find a very straightforward information and resources there that can help you get started on a fulfilling and purposeful brand new life. Again, that's Tony Evans dot org. Stay with us.
Black church, white shirts, Hispanic turns. These describe a division among God's people that fails to reflect the beautiful diversity and supernatural unity of his kingdom. That's the challenging and hope filled message. Dr. Tony Evans brings in his timely book, Oneness Embraced. This powerful book reflects on matters of history, culture, theology and social justice from a biblical perspective, inviting a church to lead the charge towards true racial reconciliation and put the gospel on display for all the world to see. Get your copy of Oneness Embrace today.
Request your copy today at Tony Evans dot org. And while you're there, don't forget to make the arrangements to receive those powerful resources I mentioned earlier. Tony's brand new book, The Power of Knowing God, the Companion Study Guide and Resource DVD, along with all eight messages from his current series on c.D and Digital Download. This entire Knowing God package is yours as our thank you gift. When you make a contribution to help keep this broadcast coming your way each day. Again, this is a limited time offer, so don't put it off. Visit us today at Tony Evans dot org. To get all the details, you can make your contribution and your request online at Tony Evans dot org. Or call our 24 hour resource request line at one 800, 800, 32 22. Let one of our resource team members assist you. That's one 800 800. Three, two, two, two. A loving parent protects their children by establishing rules and boundaries. Tomorrow. Jonathan Evans points out that God does the same for us and that only in our obedience to God's rules do we truly experience freedom. I hope you'll join us.
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