MARCH 11 THE JESUS QUESTIONS JQ#09-01 >>> Lessons, Lifestyle, and Parables of Jesus <<< JQ#9 “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” (Matthew 9:28)

LIVING FOR JESUS --- Daily Devotional

MARCH 11  THE JESUS QUESTIONS  JQ#09-01 >>> Lessons, Lifestyle, and Parables of Jesus <<< JQ#9 “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” (Matthew 9:28)

071 of 365 - Prayers to JESUS    

Jesus, Praise be to Your Spirit that calls us to identify ourselves with You and to Your Crucifixion for the Crucifixion is the Ultimate Solution to our sin problem and only by being Crucified with You can we truly identify with Your Resurrection which is the Victory over the world! Lord You gave me a glimpse of this Great Truth in 2004 and it was then I prayed for Your Guidance as I try to die to self daily and be a part of Your Crucifixion and Resurrection each day and I continue to this day to pray that prayer. Lord Jesus, You have made my heart tender with Your Love and I pray that You will continue to heal my “spiritual blindness” until the day arrives that I behold Your Face!    AMEN

THE JESUS QUESTIONS

MARCH 11  THE JESUS QUESTIONS  JQ#09-01 >>> Lessons, Lifestyle, and Parables of Jesus <<< JQ#9 “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” (Matthew 9:28) Jesus has introduced us to discipleship using His Questions JQ#1-8 and with JQ#9 Jesus summarizes this “Introduction to Discipleship” when He gets serious and asks us bluntly, JQ#9 “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” (Matthew 9:28) The Holy Spirit has now released me to move to JQ#9 but the context for this “Summary of JQ#1-8” will include the text from Matthew 9:14 through the end of the chapter at Matthew 9:38. This study on “The JESUS Questions” has been teaching me some additional lessons on “following the Spirit” which I did not anticipate but one thing the Holy Spirit has taught me in my previous study of His Word is that if we can anticipate what is going to happen and we can explain it then it is not from God because “His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts are higher than our thoughts” (Isaiah 55) and “His understanding we cannot fathom” (Isaiah 40). The more we learn of God the more we learn that our knowledge in finite and limited but God’s Knowledge is Infinite and is not limited in any way! In my personal experience God has always answered my prayers in such a way that there is no mistaking the Hand of God at work as He has personally puts His Divine Signature on His Work in my life, so now when I discern that He is trying to teach me something deeper than I have learned before, I wait on Him to reveal to me in His Perfect Timing by some Divine Circumstance what He wants me to see. That happened this morning as I was reading my prayer to Jesus written April 10, 2004 in my Oswald Chambers journal “My Utmost for His Highest”. I had tucked my “Utmost” journal away for several years but in was my privilege to mentor a new believer in 2014 named Dominic. The Holy Spirit told me to give my 2004 copy to Dominic and let him read what I had written 10 years earlier as I had written a prayer to Jesus every day in 2004 and how relevant the teaching of the Holy Spirit was 10 years later. The lesson there for all of us is to acknowledge that Jesus is both the “author” and the “finisher” of our faith and that we are to “daily take up our cross” and “follow Jesus” and April 10, 2004 was the beginning of my journey to the “Narrow Gate” as I read “…our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin.” (Romans 6:6). In God’s perfect timing it is many years later and as I am writing and seeking how to summarize JQ#1-8 into what lesson Jesus is teaching I am directed to the words of Jesus at the end of JQ#8: “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” (Matthew 9:13) Jesus came to seek and to save the lost and to teach His followers that if we are to be like Him we are to extend “mercy” to others and in doing that we will be sacrificing ourselves as He did, therefore as “friends of the bridegroom” (Matthew 9:15) we should identify with the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the upcoming “marriage feast” for the bridegroom is the “Lord of the harvest” and we should “therefore pray that the Lord of the harvest [will] send laborers into His harvest.” (Matthew 9:38)  In JQ#1-9 Jesus is teaching His followers to be “harvesters”, so let us “Arise and enter the Harvest”!