MERRY MONDAY PARRIS BAILEY
“YE MUST BE BORN AGAIN” John 3:7
Last week I had a encounter with a devil. Yes, sometimes it just happens. You find yourself counseling someone and out of nowhere your like—oh no I need some backup. Another leader came into the room and the next few minutes were amazing. Afterwards the person kept testifying of their freedom and compared it to huge glasses falling off their face and having the ability to breathe. WOW PRAISE HIM! Did I tell you I love my job! (haha) When Jesus walks into the room, everything else has to leave.
Nicodemus the Pharisee felt the power of God coming from Jesus and had a million questions. The darkness that surrounded Nicodemus gave way to light in the presence of Christ. One can’t pick and choose what teachings or what attributes we want from Jesus. When we take the whole teachings of the whole Christ, and confess Him to be the Redeemer of our souls, we enter the Kingdom of God. Jesus said, “We don’t know where the wind blows”, and compares the Spirit to the wind. We are living in the eternal world. Are we allowing the new life to work within us? Have I allowed my wells to get clogged up?
Maclaren commented on this, “New life in its feeblest infancy, by its very existence, is beyond this ‘bank and shoal of time,’ a region to which it is native, and in which it may grow to maturity. You will find in your greenhouses exotics that stand there, after all your pains and coals, stunted, and seeming to sigh for the tropical heat which is their home. The earnest of our inheritance, the first-fruits of the Spirit, the Christian life which originated in, and is sustained by, the flowing of the divine life into us, demands that, somehow or other, the stunted plant should be lifted and removed into that ‘higher house where these are planted’-and what shall be the spread of its branches, and the luster of its leaves, and what the gorgeousness of its blossoms, and what the perennial sweetness of its fruits then and there, ‘it doth not yet appear.’ The world does not know where that Christian life comes from. If you are a Christian, you ought to bear in your character a certain indefinable something that will suggest to the people round you that the secret power of your life is other than the power which molds theirs. You may be naturalized, and you may speak fairly well the language of the country in which you are a sojourner, but there ought to be something in your accent which tells where you come from, and betrays the foreigner. We ought to move amongst men, having about us that which cannot be explained by what is enough to explain their lives. A Christian life should be the manifestation to the world of the supernatural.”