Calvin Synod Herald, 2010 (111. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2010-09-01 / 9-10. szám
6 CALVIN SYNOD HERALD The Word Gives Light “Blessed is every one who fears the LORD, Who walks in His ways. ” - Psalms 128:1 ...1:24 AM. Iam still awake. I have been laying in my bedfor hours now. I can’t sleep because the thoughts in my mind trouble me. Today is going to be a big day in my life. I am going to take an oath I will keep my whole life. It will affect my future, even the outcome of my eternity. Am I going in the right direction? How will the people who know me react? Iam willing to take the fight and the burden, but is it the perfect will of God? Should I put such a big burden on my family ’s future? I would, but I have to know that the Lord will be with me. I have to know that this is according to His will. I am going to join the Calvin Synod, and take an oath according to a tradition that is strangely new to me.... We all want to walk ‘in His ways’. Why? Because we fear Him. We fear Him with a healthy apprehension, like a son wants to please his father by obeying him. It is part of our Father-son relationship as Paul described it in Romans 8:14: “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. ” Well, how does He lead us? So many times in life we want to follow signs, or use our natural abilities to choose the right path. We reason according to things that we can sense with our bodily senses. We are so accustomed to following our five senses. But we have to keep in mind that God is a spirit (John 4:24). He lives in the spirit realm. We cannot reach out to Him with our physical eyes or ears. But man is a wonderful creation. We are part of the materialworld and at the same time, part of the spirit-realm. Therefore our spirit nature (which Paul calls the ‘inner man’ [Eph.3:16] or ‘inward man’ [Rom.7:22 and 2Cor.4:16] and Peter calls the ‘hidden man of the heart ’ [ 1 Pet.3:4]) is able to communicate with God. God is just. He would never ask us to do anything if we did not have the ability to do it. If He wants us to walk in His ‘ways’ then He wants us to know His perfect will. To be able to know it, we have to communicate with Him on a daily basis. We have an insight into this communication in Matthew 10:18-20: “Andyou shall be brought before governors and kings for My sake, for a testimony against them and the nations. But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what you shall speak; for it shall be given you in that same hour what you shall speak. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father who speaks in you. ” The same account in Luke 12:12 reads like this: “For the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour what you ought to say. ” In these examples we can see that the words will be given to those who need them, and the Spirit of the Father will speak in them. The Holy Spirit will teach them. Where? ‘In you’, says the Lord. These are extreme situations, of course, but never-the-less, examples of the communication between the Father and us. Jesus called these situations ‘testimony’ times. Paul also had something to say about ‘testimony’ or ‘witness’ in Romans 8:16: “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” We can see from these scriptures that God’s Spirit teaches us, communicates, ‘bears witness’ with us in our spirits. Than the spirit (our spirits) passes it into our mind. I am convinced that the Lord speaks to us in this way, but our mind is too busy to listen. However, we can educate our minds to pick up these messages from our spirits. ...Almost 2 o ’clock in the morning. I am still awake. I have to sleep to be able to serve in the church in the morning. But I need the answer... And suddenly it was there! In a second (it was less than a second, it was a moment of timelessness) I saw it with the eyes of my heart. I saw Ruth as she walks through the field of Boaz. 1 felt her doubts and fears. I felt them because they were mine. She did not know the outcome. The situation, the land, the people around her, the traditions, everything was strange to her. She started to walk. Walk out from her own land, from her own people. As I lay in my bed, I was sure that even she could not tell why. She just did it, because it seemed to be the best thing to do. She was acting on the words of her mother-in-law, inspired by the Law of Yahweh. My troubled thoughts were leaving. Then I felt as Boaz spread his skirt upon Ruth. Words started to take shape in my mind: ‘As Boaz spread his skirt on Ruth, the Calvin Synod spreads its spiritual skirt on you. You were without family for a long time, now you are going to be part of this family... ’It was peace as a river, and I fell asleep. The key is the Word of God. The Holy Scriptures came through ‘the holy men of God ’(2 Peter 1:21). These Holy Words are established in Heaven forever (Psalms 119: 89). They were (and they are) part of the realm of God. They are ‘spirit and life ’ (John 6: 63). We know that the ‘word of prophecy’ is one hundred percent pure. As we fellowship with it (read it, listen to it, meditate on it, speak it, write it down, draw it, do everything to make it part of our daily lives) among other effects, it will edify our minds. We will be more alert to the ‘God kind of communication’. Proverbs 20:27 says: “The spirit of man is the lamp of Jehovah, searching all the inward parts of the belly. ” John 1:9 states: “He was the true Light; He enlightens every man coming into the world. ” This first part of the first chapter of John’s Gospel speaks about the Word (John 1:1). We can paraphrase it like this: ‘the word is light’ and the Lord continuously uses His Spirit-inspired Word to light up our lamps. Rev. Viktor Toth aaa Ordination of Rev. Toth by Bishop Bela Poznan
