Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith—just as Abraham "believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness"?
Gal 3:3-6
We learn from many things and may senses. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, all of these are given to us that we might sense and learn in life. This is called gaining experience and experience can be both good and bad. To apply experience, you have to go back over it mentally and ask, “Was I successful and where was I not? What got me excited about this?” Is this experience worth in the grand scheme of things, pursuing again or is it something detrimental that I should never do again? Everything that you experience are lessons for your life; you just have to spend time examining them. When you do, you’ll see that in every failure are the seeds of success — if you learn from them.
I do not know why some people have to go through certain experiences to perceive truth, but, we are human and that is what humans do. Either we learn from experiences to make us better people, or we are destined to repeat the experience until we do, or we dive into the lies that come when I refuse to learn from what experience is teaching. This is what Paul is trying to get the Galatians to understand in Galatians 3, that I cannot start walking by the Spirit of God, and then claim to be enhancing that by augmenting it with drugs, ritual or repetition of allowing bad habits back into my life by claiming they remind me of what is good.
Joseph in the book of Genesis (Gen.30-50) is a good example of this. A man who had one bad experience in life after another, yet strives to serve God through all of them. He always keeps his good character even through his bad experiences. Yet, it is not until much later in life, that Joseph realizes that everything he experienced was for a particular moment.
Esther is another, who after seeing he people become captive in a foreign land, being stigmatized because of her nationality is chosen to be queen of Persia, only to have that blessing become the greatest challenge in her life. Est.4:14 For if you keep silent at this time, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish. And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" These famous words show us that God takes us through things that we don’t understand at the time, but later realize that it shaped you into who you are. Maybe you’re in the middle of something like that right now. Trust that God will use your circumstances to show you what he shaped you to do and how you can use your life to serve him.
Have you learned from the experiences in your life?
Obey God's message! Don't fool yourselves by just listening to it. If you hear the message and don't obey it, you are like people who stare at themselves in a mirror and forget what they look like as soon as they leave. But you must never stop looking at the perfect law that sets you free. God will bless you in everything you do, if you listen and obey, and don't just hear and forget.
Jas 1:22-25
Jim
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