My ears you have opened

KAYODE CROWN

Copyright 2013 Kayode Crown All rights reserved. ISBN: 1494704773 ISBN-13: 978-1494704773

CONTENTS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

My Ears You Have Opened Building Up Zion Change of Garment Changed by His Presence Conditions for Growth Discernment From Unprofitable to Profitable Gods defining process Increasing in Learning Joy and Strength Meditating on God My High Places Supplements to the Christians Faith Partaking of the Coming Glory The Body as Slave The Lords Dealings The Path of Honour The Patience of the Lord The Thought Warfare Walking with God Appendix

1 5 8 12 16 17 22 25 28 31 36 40 44 47 50 53 56 60 63 66 70

1 MY EARS YOU HAVE OPENED

Psalm 40:6: Sacrifice and offering You did not desire; My ears You have opened; burnt offering and sin offering You have not asked.
Does God still speak today? The answer is yes except your own God is dead. The instinct to communicate inside all living things and God cannot be less than what he creates. The one who made eyes, can he not see? And by extension we can say that the one who made the mouth, can he not speak? One revelation that God would want you to have about him is that he is a God who speaks. He is in total contract to other carved objects that have mouth but they do not speak. The next question you may ask is: how does God speak? First, you should know that God has spoken (in the pages of the 66 books of the bible). In a verse in the book of psalm, it is written that once God has spoken twice have I heard (Psalm 62:11) I read/heard it in the word/preaching (general for everybody) and I am hearing it in my heart (specific for me). The scriptures are not called the word of God (John 10:35) for the fun of it. The thoughts of God have been documented in the bible and that is our primary window into the word of God. But the words are not mere letters. What we need to know is that the words were written down under the influence of the Holy Spirit (2Peter 1:20-21). It is the Holy Spirit who would guide us into the truth (John 16:13-14) which they unveil. There is prayer to that effect in the book of psalm where a psalmist prayed: open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law (Psalm 119:18). This is reminiscing of the prayer of Elisha that God should open the 1

MY EARS YOU HAVE OPENED

eyes of his servant to see what was not immediately obvious (2Kings 6:1517). We need to approach the scriptures with a heart of faith (Hebrews 11:6) as opposed to the pseudo intellectual approach of our time that is bent on stripping the bible of its spiritual angle. Paul, spoke of the spiritual faculty needed to appraise spiritual truth (2Corinthians 3:7-18). He said that with open faces we behold the glory of God as in a mirror and we are changed from glory to glory. He compared what happens when those who have not turned to Christ read the scriptures, saying for this group a veil covers their mind, but when we turn to Christ that veil is removed, just like when Moses (standing for the first five books in the bible and by extension the whole of the scriptures) turns to the Lord, he removes the veil, but when he turns to the people after his encounter with God on the mountain, his face is covered. Get this picture: looking at Moses from Gods standpoint, there is no veil. That is what we are called to do: see the whole of the scriptures from Gods point of view, and it can only be by Gods Spirit; from that standpoint, you will see it clearly. The other way round, the veil that covers the bible is removed when we turn to the Lord. Moses removes his veil when he turns to the Lord because actually the Lord is who you want to see in the Lord and that causes you to be changed from glory to glory. Moses experienced a fading glory in his time be experience ever increasing glory. Paul added that liberty to be changed by the word is by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord who we encounter in that word. And the communication of the Holy Spirit is only appraised by those who have Holy Spirit (1Corinthians 2:9-16). They are equipped to hear the voice of God. It is spiritually discerned. Hearing from God is your birthright as a child of God, as a sheep in his pasture, with Jesus Christ asserting that His sheep hears his voice; also John wrote that we have an anointing from the Holy One that teaches us all things (1John 2:27). Those are the potentials that we carry as children of God. Therefore our approach to hearing from God must not be that of trying to pry information from an unwilling suspect, it is the fostering of relationship between two family members, Father and child. That is the normal spiritual course of things. For the uninitiated, the unregenerate and the carnally minded, all I have been talking about can be mere figment of the imagination- foolishness. They do not realise that God knew they were going to say therefore he recorded it in the bible that His foolishness is wiser than men (1Corinthians 1:25). When the bible says that the fools say in his heart there is no God (Psalm 14:1), it reveals to us one way that God speaks: to our heart. The

MY EARS YOU HAVE OPENED

foolishness in the heart of the fool makes him think there is no God; the God in the believer makes him think the thoughts of God. God momentarily takes over the thought process and injects His own thoughts there, except it comes as a command, with a clear tone of authority and direction. When David prayed: let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable (Psalm 19:14), it adds to the idea that truly, God can influence the meditation of the heart injecting His own thoughts there. God said to man in the bible, my thoughts are not your thoughts, before saying, my ways are not your ways (Isaiah 55:6 -9). Note that the thoughts came before the act, therefore God guiding us starts with him putting his thoughts into us, so we may walk in his ways. In that same passage, God says that as high as the heaven is higher than the earth, his thoughts and ways are also higher than ours respectively. That is why Jesus Christ came, and set up a new arrangement whereby as the full representation of the Godhead (Colossians 1:9), he comes to live in us (Colossians 1:27), and the Holy Spirit is given us to reveal the thoughts of Christ to us (John 16:13-15). Jesus is the bridge between Gods thoughts and ours, and Gods ways and ours. Reading the bible is our initiative to put Gods thoughts into us while his speaking to us in our thoughts is God taking the initiative, which is what is meant in the focus verse that my ears you have opened. Let us be wary of things that want to close our ears to hearing from God and most of them have to do with emotional imbalances, like worry, fear and doubt. Worry Since the heart state is very important for hearing from God, the parable of the sower where four different conditions of the heart are revealed, with one pointedly affected by the cares of this world, worry about many things, which would not allow the word of God to thrive in such a heart (Matthew 13:18-23). Another kind of heart is shallow, having no place for the word of God to take root enough to translate into action. Such a heart suffers from a lack of depth of devotion, being the stony ground. Fear Paul wrote to Timothy saying that God has not given him a spirit of fear (2Timothy 1:7), but the spirit of sound mind, which is also the mind of Christ (1Corinthians 2:14-15). The spirit of fear and the mind of Christ are mutually exclusive. Sometimes in the bible, before God speaks to a group of people, he tells them: fear not (Genesis 15:1, Numbers 21:34, Joshua 8:1, Luke 5:10, 8:50).

MY EARS YOU HAVE OPENED

The first indicator of disconnect between God and man was the emotional turmoil of fear, where Adam said that he heard the voice of God and was afraid (Genesis 3:1-10), signaling the degeneration of relationship between God and man. Fear is a sign of distrust, and God gets paralysed, when he is not trusted (Mark 6:1-6). Doubt James fingers doubt as something that will block the ear (James 1:5-8). He said when you ask God for wisdom, which also translates to direction, you will not be able to get it from God, if you doubt that truly he is committed to giving you direction, and not that you are trying to force it out of him, when you dont realise his commitment to you. What all these goes to show is that a heart at rest is the one that is sensitive to the voice of God, uncluttered by fear, doubt or worry. It is interesting that all these anti hearing from God factors are all in the realm of the emotions, which is notorious for being hard to tame. Nevertheless, because of Gods commitment to reach out to his children, he can cut through any emotional jungle by the force of his grace. God cuts through all of them to reach out to Gideon (Judges 6:1-15), ditto Paul (Acts 9:1-20), and from the Song of Solomon we hear that God can cause those he has chosen, the bride of Christ, the church to hear his voice (Song of Solomon 8:13). And just as the focus verse says: my ears you have opened We are called to live by opened ears and God is ready to release his grace (Titus 2:11-13) on you to cause all doubts, fear and worry cease as he elevates his word in your life, as he elevates his words above his name in your life (Psalm 138:2) (name is the identity, word is the reality [word takes you beyond just identity]), as he causes the flood of confusion to recede, and the sure ground of settled divine direction come forth (Genesis 8:1-12). Whatever the raging storm blocking your spiritual ears, God is ready and he is by his own force of grace, saying, Be still (Mark 4:39) to such emotional storms and the divine initiative is causing you to hear his word.

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