“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Teach and admonish one another in all spiritual wisdom, and sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

    I sometimes wonder just how many of us Christians in this day and age spend enough time in the scriptures, listening with our hearts wide open to receive what the Spirit of our God wants to show us, in order to allow the living word to “dwell richly in us”, guiding our thoughts, our words and our actions so that we are constantly living lives worthy of the gospel of Christ.  (Phil 1:27, Eph 4:1)

    Again, I wonder just how many of us take to heart the exhortation to “Teach and admonish one another in all spiritual wisdom”. We so readily jump on the band wagon of encourage one another, without seeming to realise that the only encouragement our new nature needs is to trust more and more in, and rely completely on, the Spirit of Truth to guide us into all God’s truth.

    Conversely, the old nature needs no encouragement in its efforts to insinuate its ideas and perverse values into our everyday lives. Hence the exhortation of Eph 4:22-24, “Put off the old nature which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new nature, created in the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

    Sadly it would appear that while we may be trying to “put off the old nature” and “put on the new nature” by our own efforts, which of course will never succeed, we often ignore the all important command which is in between, “BE RENEWED IN THE SPIRIT OF YOUR MINDS.” So how are we to do this renewing? Is it by reading many different books and listening to many different teachers, or is it by just spending quality time in the scriptures looking to the Spirit of Christ to do what Jesus promised he would, i.e. “guide us into all truth.” (John 16:13)