1 Corinthians (Program #36) – Dealing with Eating of Sacrifices to Idols (1)

After opening the book of 1 Corinthians in a very spiritual way, the apostle Paul then turned his attention to several practical matters in the middle chapters.

Chapter 7 for instance deals with marriage. Chapter eight with eating, our diet. These are some of the most basic and practical of all human items. Yet as he begins this fellowship on eating in chapter 8 he inserts a very wonderful and very spiritual phrase. Listen to the first verse of chapter

8:1 “Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”

Building up, a theme that runs through out this book. And a very important theme for all of us God’s people to understand.

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Luke (Program #52) – The Man-Savior’s Highest Standard of Morality Constituting His Qualification and the Basic Factor for His Dynamic Salvation (1)

You wake up in the morning full of love toward your wife. But during the day, little things began to irritate, and her words cut, and by the evening you both ready for marriage consoling. Sound silly or sound familiar? The problem is our love is frail, damaged and weak. 1 John says “God is love”.  Would His love ever be so fickle or so easily given up? Of course not. But love is just one example of the difference between God’s life and our natural human life. But the hope of salvation is not just that God has forgiven us of our short comings and He wants to take us to heaven.  But the full salvation that He promises is that our live would be filled with His life, so that His love, and His righteousness and all His attributes can fill us and be expressed through us.

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Genesis (Program #22) – To Work God into Man as Life

Today we are going to come to the final portion of chapter two and the first marriage in the Bible.

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Hosea (Program #6) – On Hosea (7)—Jehovah’s Unchanging Love Versus Israel’s Stubborn Unchastity (2)

Ask any married man, and he will tell you that the single most important virtue of a wife is her chastity or her faithfulness. Once that is gone is very difficult to hold a marriage together. In the Old Testament book of Hosea, Jehovah liken the nation of Israel to an unchaste wife. Israel had been betrothed to God but soon after another and became caught up in spiritual harlotry. As a result Jehovah was left with no choice but to chasten her. His chastening or discipline was motivated not by His wrath but rather by His unchanging love. And Hosea Chapters 11 through 14 give the account of how this mighty and powerful unchanging love of God eventually subdued Israel and even transformed her.

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1 Peter (Program #17) -Christian Life and Its Sufferings (4 & 5)

The Bible speaks about marriage and about the marriage life in many places.  It’s common for people to select their own favorite passages on this most personal of subjects.  How often, for example do husbands anxious to establish their authority quote such verses as Ephesians 5 :22 where the apostle Paul says “Wives, be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord;”  While many wives might prefer to remind their spouses of verse 25 in the same chapter; “Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.”  But Peter also speaks of marriage and may in fact offer one of the most excellent passages in all of Scripture on the subject.  Speaking to the husband, he says in chapter 3 of his first epistle, “Husbands, in like manner dwell together with them according to knowledge, as with the weaker, female vessel, assigning honor to them as also to fellow heirs of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered.“

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Ruth (Program #3) – Ruth’s Seeking for Her Rest

In Ruth chapter 1, Ruth made a strong decision to follow Naomi back to the good land. And this typifies our decision to receive Christ. Today in the life study of Ruth, we are going to see that is not enough, we also need to enjoy Christ as typified by the gleanings that Ruth did from the Boaz’s field. And we also need to enter in to a marriage with Christ as typifies by Ruth marrying Boaz.

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Judges (Program #5) – The Miserable History of Israel’s Forsaking God (4)

The Bible begins with the story of Adam and how he gained a wife, Eve. In the New Testament of course we find out that Adam is a type of Christ, the very God and Eve, a type of God’s people, the Church.  So, from the beginning the Bible becomes a book of the marriage of God Himself with His people.  Yet by chapter 3 of Genesis, God’s enemy comes in to seduce man, to forsake God as their husband.  The result of this separation or divorce is the story of the chaotic history of mankind. Whatever nation, whatever group, whatever person forsakes God to become involves in something else ends up in a chaotic situation.  Israel’s history has seen this story repeated again and again in a cycle after cycle and soberly as we consider the situation even in the church, we’ see the same thing today.

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Joshua (Program #12) – The Saving of Gibeon

One of the most interesting aspects of the relationship between husbands and wives is how easily and freely the wife can agreed to do something often involving money without checking first with her husband. The husbands also make the same mistake with unfortunate frequency and result is usually the same. A cooling trend seems to over take the relationship for a period of time and the sweetness at least for a season is gone .

God’s relationship to Israel in the Old Testament was also as a husband and the Israel was as His wife. Listen to Israel Jeremiah chapter 2, “Thus says Jehovah: I remember concerning you the kindness of your youth, The love of your bridal days, When you followed after Me in the wilderness.”  So what happened in this marriage when the wife acted on her own? Predictably the result was always a suffering for Israel. Such a case is recorded in Joshua 9, the story of the Gibeonites.

Today’s message touches the very essence of the divine romance; a favorite subject of the life study of the Bible and also a topic that Witness Lee frequently came to in his ministry.

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Ephesians (Program #9) – To Head Up All Things in Christ (1)

The book of Ephesians presents the highest view in the entire New Testament. The apostle Paul identifies the focus of this book in the very first chapter when he says, “Making known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, Unto to the economy of the fullness of the times, to head up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth, in Him;” (Ephesians 1:9-10) This is not a book about improved behavior, how to raise our children or even how to have a successful marriage; yet in one sense, it’s on all these things. But fundamentally this book is altogether dealing with God’s eternal purpose which is according to His good pleasure and on how He is working in the world situation without and more specifically on how He is working within us to bring this purpose into reality.

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