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The very resource of Holy Spirit empowerment granted to Jesus for his life of obedience and faithfulness to the Father is now granted to Jesus’s disciples as they carry forward the message of Christ, living lives of obedience to Christ, all in the power of the Spirit.
Bruce A. Ware -
May our minds be granted greater comprehension so that our hearts may be filled with deepened affection.
Bruce A. Ware
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There are no “little obediences.” Every opportunity given us by God, either to obey or to disobey, is an opportunity for that character formation and strengthening of faith that can prepare us for the greater challenges of faith God has in mind for us in the future.
Bruce A. Ware -
Though the Holy Spirit is God, equal in essence to the Father and the Son, yet his role is consistently to defer honor, to seek to bring about the glory of another.
Bruce A. Ware -
This truly is the God of lesser glory, because of his lesser knowledge, lesser wisdom, lesser discernment, lesser ability, lesser reliability, and lesser guidance.
Bruce A. Ware -
The only way to make sense, then, of the fact that Jesus came in the power of the Spirit is to understand that he lived his life fundamentally as a man, and as such, he relied on the Spirit to provide the power, grace, knowledge, wisdom, direction, and enablement he needed, moment by moment and day by day, to fulfill the mission the Father sent him to accomplish.
Bruce A. Ware -
And what about sin’s power? If Christ has “died for our sin,” and sin’s greatest power is death, then what is the necessary expression that Christ has conquered the power of sin completely and decisively? He must rise from the dead. If he remains in a grave dead, then sin’s power is greater than his, and rather than conquering sin, he is subject to it and its hold on him. The only way to show that the power of sin is conquered completely is that Christ was raised from the dead. This shows that Christ’s power is greater than the greatest power sin has. Christ’s resurrection demonstrates that Christ has completely, decisively, and once for all triumphed over sin and its greatest power!
Bruce A. Ware -
To obey to the point of death requires the ability to die, and for this, Jesus had to be human.
Bruce A. Ware