We come into a unity of spirit before we come into a unity of faith, where we all believe the same way.
Most believers lean upon their own understanding, and what they have been taught by man, or the church they go to.
There are certain qualities of spirit we need to possess in order to come into the mind of Christ.
We need to have an obedient spirit, if anyone is willing to do the Fathers will, they shall know of the teaching whether it comes from God or man.
We must have a teachable spirit, a childlike spirit; we have to hunger and desire to know the truth. The truth is a person, the Lord Jesus Christ, we must desire to know Him intimately or we will be led astray.
We have to learn the difference between our spirit and soul, or we will live in our soul (mind) and not our spirit.
In acts 10 we read about Cornelius, and about the faith that is in the hearts of the people who meet God. Cornelius had a basic faith in God, but he was sincere and he feared God and was really seeking Him.
When we come into a walk with God, and people reject us because of what we believe, we need to realize it is in reality their doctrine (belief system) that is controlling their thinking and attitude toward us.
Do we then reject them?. When we have a right spirit we have faith for everyone and we love them into the kingdom, they begin to see Jesus in us.
Many people come to know the Lord Jesus Christ through many different routes.
Maybe they didn’t even believe in Jesus Christ in their religion, but they had a basic faith in God. Anyone with a real living faith has something going for them, if their faith is as sincere as Cornelius’ was.
Acts 10:2.The Word says he was a devout man, and one who feared God with all of his household, and gave many alms to the Jewish people, and prayed to God continually.
You may say, “Cornelius wasn’t a Christian.” Of course he wasn’t a Christian. “He wasn’t even a Jew.” He was a Roman Centurion. Sincere faith, wherever it is found, has this one thing going for it—God tends, by the Holy Spirit, to lead that person into the way of life.
We are not concerned over whether the religions that they are in are right or wrong. We are only concerned about what kind of faith that these people have, though it may be misdirected in its actual application and its doctrines and they may be completely off; yet, in their prejudice, if they are sincere, and they believe and seek God, He tends to meet them.
The book of Acts is full of this. In Acts chapter 8, Saul of Tarsus was as wrong as he could be in persecuting the saints (Acts 8:1–3). But he was sincere and devote in his faith and the Lord met him.
“Who are You?”
“I’m Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
“That makes everything that I’m doing wrong!” Give him credit, Paul wanted God so desperately that he turned an about-face and began to seek the Lord with all of his heart.
We are not to argue religion; we should believe for revelation, that God would reveal himself to the person. We encourage a person who is sincere and really seeking God. We believe for them. We encourage them, God is going to lead you, and we build their faith. You just keep seeking God with all your heart and Jesus will reveal Himself to you. We come into a walk with God because God reveals it to us.
The things we believe are unbelievable to the human mind. But as the Holy Spirit reveals what believers can walk in and then they begin walking in it, then they will wonder why in the world everyone else does not believe it! It seems to be the only logical way.
We need to learn how to deal with people. One reason the Lord Jesus Christ could get along so well with the harlots, the tax collectors, and the chief of sinners, was because they saw His encouragement.
On the other hand, the Pharisees were so persuaded that they were right. No one could teach them anything; they knew it all. There is not much hope for people who are that set.
Even when those who have a hunger after God and are seeking after Him have followed the wrong path, God seems to bring them into a real relationship with the Lord.
One day Cornelius was waiting on the Lord (he prayed continually), and the Word tells us, Abouth the ninth hour of the day—that is 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon—he clearly saw in a vision an angel of God who had just come in to him, and said to him, “Cornelius!” And fixing his gaze upon him and being much alarmed, he said, “What is it, Lord?” And he said to him, “Your prayers and alms have ascended as a memorial before God.” Acts 10:3–4.
We need to move away from splitting hairs about the doctrines and look to the spirit that is in a person. God was looking for that in Cornelius. Cornelius really didn’t know what to believe, but he had a good spirit. God was going to meet that spirit, but it took a little bit of listening.
When the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius, he had all of his relatives gathered together. At the angel’s instruction they sent for Peter to come and preach to them, and the Spirit of the Lord fell upon them (Acts 10). It was marvelous.
You say, “That was a great miracle; that was a sovereign moving of God to open the door to the Gentile believers.” You may want to interpret it that way, but the Bible doesn’t actually say that. The Bible really says that there was a Gentile who was hungry for God, and God met him.
God wasn’t just looking around for a way to get the Gentiles in here some way. No, He saw a man whose heart was hungry, and He led him. I believe in the leading of the Holy Spirit. I believe God is moving everywhere by His Spirit. There are many people whose prayers are being answered and to whom strange things are happening—and it should not be, because their doctrines are all wrong! That is true, it should not be happening; but it is!
God is going to lead people from so many different paths into a real relationship with Him.
We must realize that God meets a person who cries out to the Lord in sincerity. They have no idea what they are going to believe, and neither did we have any idea what we were going to believe. God led us along, step by step. The teachings have to follow the experiences, and the experiences come by grace through faith.
You say, “That is false doctrine. Fundamentalists say that you first preach the Gospel, and then others will begin to understand and can believe and can be saved.” That is not the way Jesus did it.
He said to someone, “Your sins are forgiven you” (Mark 2:5). The man didn’t even repent; he didn’t shake the preacher’s hand; he didn’t go to the inquiry room; he didn’t even make a commitment for Jesus—but his sins were forgiven!
We get people healed, and then when they realize they are healed, we ask them do you know who healed you? Jesus healed you! “And now, don’t you think you ought to serve Him?” People will receive the Lord after we get them healed.
The book of Acts opens that way. The former treatise I made, O Theophilus, concerning all that Jesus began both to do and to teach, until the day in which he was received up… Acts 1:1 This shows us something. Jesus would do something and then say, “Now, do you know what I’ve done unto you?” Then He would explain it.
He washed the disciples’ feet, and they were protesting. “Now do you know what I’ve done to you?”
“No.” And He explained it. That is the best way to receive teaching. Many times the lord meets our heart and we know something has happened
Then we look in the Scriptures and find what it was.
Great experiences are not stumbled onto by only reading the Word or many people would have found these truths; they have been there, concealed in plain sight. All one had to do was pick them up, but they didn’t, because the revelation only comes to the hungry and to those who are seeking the Lord. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. Jeremiah 29:13.
An experience without the Word is like catching the rain of heaven in two hands. You may rejoice in it, but it will leak right through your fingers. God often brings an experience that we desperately want to hang onto; “I don’t want to lose it.” Then He brings the bowl of teaching for us to hold it in.
This is the great advantage of studying the Word and having it hid in our heart. It is as if the Lord reaches into the cupboard, brings out a bowl, and says, “Now, hold that which I am doing for you in this. Here is the framework of the Word; here is the teaching of the Word to house it.” Now you have an anchor, a platform.
We look for the Spirit of truth to come; to open up parables and visions and dreams in the Word; to open up all of the cryptic sayings that we could never figure out accurately.
The reason the world has so many doctrines is because it has approached it the other way. Every person has been a law unto themselves in interpretation. The Word has been a private interpretation, but was never intended to be so; it was intended to be an element by which revelation could be substantiated and confirmed to our heart. It was to house everything that God wanted to do and become within our life.
Read the Word, devour it, love it, but don’t become inflexible about your interpretation of it. Wait for the Lord to make it an experience. Let it become alive to you.
Read about Cornelius and the hungry ones that God would meet. They were hungry; they didn’t know their right hand from their left.
Remember the colored man from Ethiopia, riding his chariot, reading the scroll of Isaiah. Philip approached him and said, “Do you know what you are reading?”
“I can’t figure out if he is talking about himself or someone else!” (That is true with us, also! We may read in the Psalms of David and say, “Let’s see, is David talking about himself, or is he talking about the Lord Jesus Christ—or is he talking about me?” The understanding has to come by revelation.) The Ethiopian stopped his chariot and Philip baptized him (Acts 8:27–38).
People have used the text about Philip baptizing the Ethiopian as an argument against sprinkling in favor of immersion because it says there was much water in that place. Actually the text is about how God directs ministries to the hungry hearts.
“I am sending you to reap where you have not sown. The harvest is ready” (John 4:35, 38).
“Well, I have to first convince them that they are a sinner.”
Wait, they may not have a clear picture of that. They may think they are almost ready for sainthood! They may have gone through all the degrees, and they are now ready for nirvana.
If we tell them that they are sinners, we have turned them off immediately. We pray for them and let the Lord give them the revelation. We begin talking about what the Lord has revealed to us and how wonderful it is; then they will respond. “Yes, that’s what we found in this meditation route.” Even though we know they don’t know what they are talking about, we don’t argue that they are off; we let them go on and stumble onto something from the Lord.
Sometimes we get a revelation of the Lord and we feel, “Oh dear, here I am, exposed before God and everybody!”
Which comes first, a conviction of sin or the revelation of the Lord? The two go hand in hand.
For example, Isaiah received a vision of the Lord and the glory filled the temple. Did he enter into ecstasy? No, he said, “Woe is me! Woe is me” (Isaiah 6:5). We get a glimpse of the glory of God, and all our self-confidence leaves.
But we also get revelations of the lord and are caught up into ecstasies. Our spirit has to grow and expand, but sometimes an area of our soul needs to be transformed.
We don’t have to convince a person that they are a sinner that is the Holy Spirits job.
Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” dangled the listener right over hell. “The arrow of divine wrath is pulled, and the judgment is pointed at your heart.”
It was a sermon that God used, but God has a variety of ways of leading people on, step by step. There are many people who are inflexible about their disbelief and many other things.
But after they find the Lord Jesus Christ, then they have to go back to the Word and accept it because God has become real to them. We need to realize that our head is not, necessarily, going to be straightened out before our heart.
The Lord will meet many people, and we will be wise as serpents and harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16). They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever. Daniel 2:3.
We are going to turn many to the Lord. But we don’t begin by giving them theories and ideas; we believe for the Lord to be revealed to them.
We stir up the hunger after the Lord that people have, we build it up. We have faith that we may be talking to another Cornelius or a hot-headed Saul of Tarsus! We believe that God will meet them.