Who's Your Teacher

I have had some great teachers in my life; teachers that I just wanted to be around and soak up every ounce of knowledge they offered. I admired them for their wisdom and looked to them for guidance. They could only share what they had learned and applied. They couldn't make me learn - I had to do that for myself. 

So it is with our Lord. People can share from their personal experiences and give inspirational messages, but I cannot know The Lord through someone else's experience. I must know Him for myself. We must go beyond prescribed ritual and have a personal relationship with Jesus our Savior. 

I would like to suggest we have one source of revelation - that is scripture itself. The Bible is God's story shared to offer a picture of the great love that reconciles sinners to a Holy God. God wrote it Himself. Jesus is described as the word. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God" John 1:1. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" John 1:14. 

Jesus is the Word. He was the Word spoken at creation that caused all things to come into being. It is His story penned on the pages of our Bible. We cannot have a personal encounter with Jesus without personally encountering God's Word. Way too many Christians depend on the study their pastor does in preparing a sermon or watching a message on TV without personally investing themselves in reading and learning directly from the source - the Word. 

We cannot develop the character of our Savior if all we get is second hand teaching. But Jesus himself offers a helper for us - His Spirit. The Spirit of God Himself takes residence in our souls at the time we are saves. We have God himself as our teacher; the 3rd person of the Trinity. This teacher is not human capable of misleading us. The Spirit has a clear mission in our lives. "When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me." John 15:26. We have a teacher who can unfold scripture more profoundly than any gifted speaker and we can know Christ personally through this combination of studying scripture and being taught of the Spirit. 

No human can impose their experience in our lives. We must learn and apply what we have learned personally. We cannot witness for Christ until He his character is developed within us and radiates through us. Until this thing we have with The Lord becomes personal, we are just reporters of the news and not eyewitnesses. 

So who is your teacher of things spiritual?  Is it the pastor, the priest, the books you read? Or is it God Himelf in the form of the Word and the Spirit?  There are many false teachers about in these end times, but the Spirit of God bears witness if Jesus and does not inflate Himself. Jesus is the only hope of reconciliation with a Holy God and His Spirit teaches us and develops within us His character.