Thursday, February 7 ~ Miriam

Today's passage from the Bible In a Year Reading Plan is Exodus 25-26; Psalm 28; Matthew 28.

Today's scripture focus is 1 John 2:24-27.

²⁴ As for you, let that abide in you which you heard from the beginning. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, you also will abide in the Son and in the Father.

The Promise Is Eternal Life

²⁵ This is the promise which He Himself ^[a]made to us: eternal life.

²⁶ These things I have written to you concerning those who are trying to deceive you. ²⁷ As for you, the anointing which you received from Him abides in you, and you have no need for anyone to teach you; but as His anointing teaches you about all things, and is true and is not a lie, and just as it has taught you, ^[b]you abide in Him.

I'm going to take a chunk from Mark Driscoll's sermon for this passage, for two reasons.  #1 - it's thought provoking, and I like his sense of humor.  #2 - my brother-in-law (husband's brother, who was diagnosed with lung and liver cancer last June) passed away last night, and I don't have the energy right now to make my own thoughts coherent.


Now anointing means this: That you have the Ghost. We’re not gonna call it the Holy Spirit because Oprah’s got a section on her show called “Spirit,” and I hate that section. So we’re gonna go with the King James. The King James calls it the “Ghost.” Now that is much better. That, you can mark it the Ghost.

That’s got a little more to it. So we’re gonna go with the Ghost. The anointing is the Ghost. Everybody say it. One, two, three, Ghost. Whoo, see that’s good. That’s good.  Okay, now in the Old Testament, there was anointing with oil. You get anointed with oil. It was prefiguring, typologizing, foreshadowing the coming of the Holy Spirit, who would anoint you.

Jesus, we’re told in Isaiah, would be anointed in his earthly ministry, and he was. He was baptized. He came up out the water, and what came down from heaven? The Ghost anointed the Lord Jesus for his ministry. We now are anointed by the Ghost. One of us or all of us? Read it. “You” – plural – “have an anointing from the holy one, and all of you know the truth.” All Christians have the anointing of the Ghost. This is hugely important because if you go to the wrong church, they’ll tell you one guy has the Ghost.

He yells a lot, and he’s always got a hanky to do this. Apparently, the Ghost makes you sweat a lot. You know, the Ghost sort of triggers the secretion glands and the sweat in the guy. “Oh, the Ghost is on me now.” So he’s got the hanky. He’s doing a lot of this, a lot of this, and he’s always got a handheld mike. “Whoo,” and he’s doing a lot of this. You know, he pulls a hamstring, comes up ____. That guy’s busy. That guy’s – and you know that guy’s got the Ghost because he’s just, “Look what I can do. You know, you can do it, too,” and everybody’s, “Yee, whoo, hoo, ha, ha. The Ghost, he’s anointed. I’m anointed. We’re all anointed.”

The problem with that is it sets up. I wore myself out. I don’t know how they can do that in a suit, in a suit. How do you do that? I don’t – they must have the Ghost, and now the problem with that theology is that God only has one man in every church, and that man is the fourth member of the Trinity, and that man. God speaks to that man. He’s the Lord’s anointed. You don’t come against the Lord’s anointed, and he’s real powerful and authoritative and does a lot of this stuff, and the problem with that is that if you believe that only one man has the Ghost and only one man’s anointed, you put your Bible down.

You stop praying. You stop asking Jesus. You just go to that guy, and you walk around quoting that guy, and not the words that were inspired by the ghostwriter. Yeah, it was supposed to be – it wasn’t as good as I was thinking, but it was still a pretty good line. Now that’s what happened, I think, in this church. These guys show up. “We got the Ghost. Everybody, Bible’s down. We got new revelation. Listen to us, secret things we know. All you need is us.” Everybody’s like, “Hmm. That’s good,” and then, they start quoting all their teachers and leaders, not their Bible anymore.

They’re not going to the Holy Spirit saying, “Holy Spirit, you wrote the book. Holy Spirit, you live in me. Teach me the Scripture. I want to know the truth.” Don’t quote me, okay? Don’t test sound doctrine by me. If I do my job well, which I aspire to, I want you to learn the Scriptures, okay? That’s my goal. You then should check everything by what the Ghost has said. You should take it to the Bible, and if anyone, myself included or especially myself, should say something that is in disagreement with what the Ghost has said, please go with Ghost. Please go with the Scripture.  (emphases mine)
The rest of the sermon talks about what our posts for the last couple of days have been discussing, so I purposely pulled out the part that talked about the anointing because that is what I was most curious about in these verses.  If you'd like to read or listen to the entire sermon, you can find it HERE.

Happy Thursday.

Tomorrow's scripture focus:  1 John 2:28.

Tomorrow's Bible In a Year Passage passage:  Exodus 27-28; Psalm 29; Mark 1.