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Advent Productions

Benjamin Ng

True Knowledge

Father in heaven, thank you so much for the time that we have to come and study your Word together again.

Lord, as we look at this important topic this morning, we ask for your Spirit to be please present with us to guide us through these scriptures, to lead our thoughts heavenward, and also that we might understand how to apply this message to our hearts and our lives this morning.

The Bible says in John 13, 17, a very important verse about how we ought to live our lives.

John 13, 17 says this, If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.

If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.

You know friends, doing the truth is based solely on knowing it first.

We can't do something that we don't know.

God, he judges us based upon what we know, not what we don't know that we're not doing.

And so if that were the case, If it was all just about knowing, we should just go get our masters and our PhDs and doctorates and just spend our whole life just learning and learning and learning.

John 15, 13 says, if you know these things, happy are ye if you what?

How well we know a subject is determined by what we do with the knowledge that we have.

We can't do what we don't know and when you look at that verse the the first thing that it starts with is an if.

If you know these things, if you have the knowledge, if you have the understanding of what this is saying, then The second part is also a condition as well.

Not understand it, but when you are able to put into practice what you have been learning, what you have been storing in your heart and in your mind.

Last week we looked at what the Father's will is.

How can we know whether we're on the right track?

How can we know if where we are is where God wants us to be?

How can we know if what we're doing is what God wants us to do.

How can we be sure that the relationships that we formed are the relationships that God wants me to have?

Don't just read it like a magazine or a newspaper or you're browsing through Facebook or the internet or whatever.

The Bible is not a book just to be sitting back lightly and just reading without much thought.

We've got to study, we've got to search, we've got to know for ourselves, we've got to make sure that we understand and have that knowledge to know what God wants us to do.

We've got to allow God to speak to us, but we've got to be focused in our prayers and that's what we had to look at last week.

We've got to learn to pray out loud, to make sure that it's not that God needs to know, but that we need to understand what we're praying for.

For too often when we pray silently remember our thoughts wander and wherever we started sometimes we end on a different total understanding of where we began and it had nothing to do with our prayers whatsoever.

We start thinking about our families, Maybe it's not movies or music or things that we read, but we start thinking about family, then we get worried about work, and by the time we're done with prayer, we don't even know what really we're praying for.

We've got to make sure we speak our prayers.

We've got to make sure our prayers are focused so that we ourselves understand, and then in the midst of that pause ask God to speak to us.

And so last week we looked at the first if.

If you know these things, if we take the time to study, If we take the time to study, if we take the time to pray, we definitely will understand what the will of God is.

We'll definitely understand what God wants us to do.

We'll definitely get to that point where we can have the assurance that God is saying, yes Ben I want you to be here, I want you to work in this job, I want you to marry that person, I want you to live there, I want you to do this, I want you to do that.

It becomes a clear voice behind us saying This is the way, walk ye in it.

We must take time to pray if we are to understand what God wants us to do.

But doing God's will, making it practical, not just understanding what He wants us to do, but being able to put it into practice is absolutely essential.

And this is highlighted in Matthew chapter 21, in a little parable or a story that Jesus told verses 28 to 31 Matthew 21 28 to 31 but what think ye a certain man had 2 sons and he came to the first and said son go work today in my vineyard he answered and said I will not but afterward he repented and went And he came to the second and said, likewise.

And he answered and said, I go, sir, and went not.

Whether of them Twain did the will of the Father, they said unto him, the first." You know, both understood what the will of God was very clearly.

And 1 said, I don't want to go first, but eventually he went.

The other 1 said, yes, I will go, but he did nothing.

It's not just about searching the scriptures and studying it and praying to God and asking God, reveal your will to us.

The knowing is important if you know these things.

We must be doers as well and you know sometimes we get these 2 things really mixed up and we don't like to talk about it.

When we talk about doing, too often people point to, oh, you're trying to work your way to heaven.

Oh, you're trying to do this and do that and keep the Sabbath holy and make sure you're at church and make sure you eat this right and you dress right and you don't do that.

Don't misunderstand me and I hope that You're not thinking that I'm trying to make everybody a works-based, but Jesus was the 1 that said if you want to be happy, you've got to do what you know.

You can't do something you do not know, and you can't do something that's not practical.

So the things that we study and even in life the things that we remember most are the things that are practical.

You know sometimes education can be totally impractical and you know bear with me I wasn't the most studious person in high school but you know history to me was not practical.

It was just a bunch of things that happened in the past.

It only became practical to me when I began to study the Bible and saw, whoa, history repeats itself.

That if I want to understand the future, I've got to go back and study history.

You know, History comes alive when we can see how it impacts our life today or the lessons that you learn from the past, knowing that, oh, this happened before and here's the next step.

People try to determine recessions based upon historical data.

We try to predict the stock market on historical data.

We try to predict many things based on history.

It becomes practical to many people, not that it's always 100% accurate.

But sometimes we can just study history for the sake of just studying it.

Like a person coming in, a teacher coming in, just, I'm teaching you about Rome.

But they never teach how Rome impacted us, how it impacts our lifestyles today and the different countries and historical records that impact us on a practical level.

All I remember about Rome when I was in high school was coloring in their armor and that was it.

Rome became more relevant to me when I began to study Bible prophecy.

So the subject sometimes we learn in class, if we don't understand how to practice it, it becomes meaningless.

You know, mathematics, math, all of us have to study that.

We think the foundation, right, is math and science and some English, right?

That's what we normally study in schools.

But math can become impractical unless the teacher shows the importance of this equation or why I need to learn the Pythagoras theorem or why algebra is so important or why ratios become so important and all these formulas to me when I was learning in high school It was just formulas that we had to memorize and memorize and memorize and memorize.

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True Knowledge

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