What We Should Know

  

John 6:45 "It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.

From the time we are born, our lives are a learning process. It is an amazing thing to realize the amount of learning each of us accomplished in the first five or six years of our lives. Often in the Bible our spiritual lives are compared to our physical lives. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food.
¹³ For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.
¹⁴ But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. (Hebrews 5:12-14) 1 Peter 2:2 as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby. So what are some of the spiritual things that we should have learned as we have grown spiritually?

There is only one way to salvation. Jesus in comparing himself to a door said, "I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. (John 10:9) Peter in preaching about salvation says of Christ, "Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved." (Acts 4:12) By following Jesus’ teaching and the examples of conversions found in the Book of Acts, we have that one way to salvation.

We must be honest about ourselves and our relationship to Christ. Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you? --unless indeed you are disqualified. (2 Corinthians 13:5) Sometimes the hardest thing we have to learn in our spiritual life is self-examination. Can we look at the standards as put forth by God’s word and apply them to how we are living our lives? Are we willing to make those changes in our life styles that will keep us from being “disqualified”?

Just as we grow in our physical lives, we need to grow in our spiritual lives. We must gain knowledge of what is in the Bible. We must be producing the fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)  We should be able to bear one another’s burdens and not grow weary in doing good. We should always try to be a good example to the people we have contact with, especially our families.

As we grow to old age in both our physical lives and our spiritual lives, we get closer to that time when  death shall end the knowledge we can accomplish. Then as we read in Daniel 12:2 And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, Some to everlasting life, Some to shame and everlasting contempt. You don’t want to have everlasting shame and contempt because you did not grow spiritual! Think about it!

Harold