How is your spiritual reception? Are you “out of range” of the frequency of God’s teachings? You can lose the ability to receive and understand spiritual things when you are not seeking after the Lord and desiring Him. As you are drawn farther away, your ears cannot hear His voice, your eyes cannot see Him, and your heart becomes hardened so you cannot feel Him.
Just like physically we cannot perceive with our senses what is “out of range”, so spiritually, our heart and mind cannot grasp the things of eternity without surrendering to the Lord in obedience and drawing near to Him daily. This means we cannot let sin reign in our lives but need to confess daily. We are already forgiven for past, present and future sins but confession keeps our relationship with Jesus pure and unbroken, with a clear conscience.
Keeping in prayer, in the Word and in fellowship with other believers is what keeps us connected to Jesus and enables spiritual reception. Humility and dependence on the Lord in all things as well as surrender to His will is also necessary.
Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord: Hebrews 12:14
Without holiness, no one will see the Lord. Holiness comes through sanctification and sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit.
In Matthew 13:10, the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you speak in parables?” Jesus answered in Matthew 13:11 that “Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” It is a privilege to be given salvation by grace and it is
also, a privilege to be given the ability to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. These mysteries refer to deeper truths in God’s Word. Those without this gift, do not see, do not hear and do not understand. The prophecy in Isaiah 6:9,10 tells us that those who do not understand have hearts that have grown dull, ears hard of hearing and eyes that have closed. We are blessed to be able to see and hear and understand!
Truth is given to those who are committed to following Jesus. A footnote in David Jeremiah study Bible said that the spiritually receptive understand more and more spiritual truth while those who do not pursue spiritual growth go backward in their walk with the Lord. It is not only that you do not gain greater understanding and understand more, but that what you do have will be taken away.
For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Matthew 10:12
The spiritually receptive receive deeper revelation and greater understanding of God’s truth. What makes me spiritually receptive? Being humble, dependent, and poor in spirit and being sensitive to God’s Spirit in me.
The immediate and physical can overshadow the spiritual and the eternal. When my focus is on physical, not eternal truth, based on what I see, I can misunderstand what Jesus is teaching as the disciples quite often did.
The disciples did not understand so much about Jesus and His plan to fulfill His Father’s will even after confessing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. They embraced that truth but so often slipped back into their own
humanistic way of thinking. They didn’t have the Holy Spirit like I do, but Jesus was right there with them. They missed so much of His teaching while He was living among them because they focused on what their limited minds could understand.
I don’t want to limit God in my thinking but I pray He can reveal His truth to me every day so I can have deeper intimacy with Him and know Him better. This will lead to me trusting Him to a greater degree.
God shines His light to illuminate truth so we can see Jesus for who He really is. (P. 29 in BSF Matthew Study Notes.)
I am learning greater dependence on Jesus Christ.
What we have in our hands is never enough. (Matthew 14:13-21: 5 loaves, 2 fishes, Miraculous feeding of 5,000) Have faith that God is not limited by our weakness, lack of resources, emptiness, etc. We need to be weak to trust His strength that is far greater than ours.
He spills over in us when we have nothing in us but Him.
Receiving God’s Word and failing to respond to it and act upon it in your life causes you to become hardened and insensitive to what the truths teach. You are blessed and fruit is displayed when you are willing to see, hear, and understand. There is a cost to discipleship but it is
small in comparison for the price Jesus paid for our redemption. Matthew 16:24-25
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