Does it seem to you that God’s pace for your life has slowed down to a crawl? The important thing is to walk with him, whether that pace seems slow or suddenly speeds up, as it often does. In Galatians 5:25, the Apostle Paul had the best advice of all: “Keep in step with the Spirit.” 

Methuselah, a California Bristlecone Pine tree, is coming up on its estimated 4,789th birthday. Squat, twisted, weathered, and storm-battered, it stretches its jagged fingers toward the blue skies over the White Mountains in eastern California. It is alive and growing, although very, very s-l-o-w-l-y. It was already ancient when Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and it may very well last until he returns. 
Looking at a picture of this amazing tree made me think of a passage I once read in a book by Frederick Faber, an English hymn writer and theologian who lived a couple of centuries ago. “In spiritual life,” wrote Faber, “[God] vouchsafes to try our patience first of all by his slowness…He is slow: we are swift and precipitate. It is because we are but for a time, and he has been from eternity. Thus grace for the most part acts slowly…He works by little and by little, and sweetly and strongly he compasses his ends, but with a slowness which tries our faith, because it is so great a mystery…We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and the lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and he will come.”  
Yes, from our perspective God’s grace sometimes moves slowly. Paul remained in a Caesarean jail for two long years before he finally arrived in Rome. God’s people waited in Egypt four hundred years before they were ready for the next challenge. The Israelites sometimes camped in one spot in the wilderness for a year at a time, waiting for the cloud of God’s presence to signal a resumption of their march to the Promised Land. 
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Written by Kevin T. Bauder |
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Jesus’s promise is not that the Holy Spirit would help the disciples to understand truth they had already received. Rather, the Spirit would guide them into the truth—all of it—that Jesus wanted them to have but that they were not yet ready to bear. In other words, these verses are about receiving truth (new revelation) and not about understanding truth already given (illumination).

Jesus cited, used, and endorsed every section of the Old Testament, whether law, prophets, or writings. Consequently, the Old Testament stands as a unit with His stamp of approval upon it. To reject its authority is to assail the authority of Christ Himself.
The authors of the New Testament had a very high view of their own writings. They asserted the authority of what they wrote, comparing it to the authority of recognized biblical texts and of the Lord’s own words. They also endorsed each other’s writings. To accept apostolic authority is necessarily to accept the authority of the New Testament.
A question arises, however, and it is an important question. Did Jesus ever endorse the New Testament? Does it stand beside the Old Testament with His stamp of approval upon it?
To discover Jesus’s opinion of the New Testament will require a different kind of evidence than His explicit endorsement of the Old Testament. By the time Jesus was born, the most recent document from the Old Testament was several hundred years old, widely distributed, and well known. Yet not one book of the New Testament was written during the earthly life and ministry of Jesus. If Jesus endorsed the New Testament at all, then He had to do it before it was written. His words about the New Testament would have to take the form of foretelling a later event.
Such words can be found in Jesus’s discourse on the night before He died, which appears in John 13–17. This discourse is divided by the departure of Judas in John 13:31. After Judas had gone, Jesus addressed the eleven remaining apostles. Most of what He said was directed specifically to them. When Jesus meant to include other believers, He either used indefinite language, such as when He referred to “every branch in me” (15:2) or broadened His reference with some phrase such as “them also which shall believe on me through their word” (17:20). In this discourse, when Jesus used the plural “you,” He usually meant specifically, “you apostles.”
He certainly meant the apostles when He said, “I have yet many things to say to you” (16:12). Throughout His ministry Jesus had been revealing new truth to His disciples. Here, on the last night before the cross, He told them that He had more to say to them. This was an intimation that His revelation to the disciples remained incomplete.
The reason it was incomplete is because the disciples were “not yet able to bear it” (16:12). They lacked some capacity for bearing up under the weight of the truth that Jesus wanted to communicate to them.
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Humility is a gift from God. We are unable to humble ourselves without the Lord’s work in our lives. If we could, we would quickly boast about it. If we recognize our dependence upon him, it is because the Holy Spirit has humbled us by bringing us to salvation. What a precious gift this is.

Pride is a form of insanity because it is not based in reality. When we grow haughty of our accomplishments, we forget who gave us the gifts we used to achieve them. We also forget who gave us our lungs and the clean air we inhaled as we succeeded. The absurdity of boasting in our might is astounding. The fact that God can humble us without any effort proves how little strength we actually possess.
King Nebuchadnezzar was a man of great power who ruled over Babylon. He even took Israel captive. However, on two occasions, all it took to make him tremble were God-given dreams. The second dream showed him as a mighty tree that was then cut down.
Shortly after this dream, he was walking on his palace roof, looking at his kingdom, and said, “Is this not great Babylon, which I have built by my own power?” At that moment, a voice fell from heaven and said, “King Nebuchadnezzar, to you, it is spoken: the kingdom has departed you, and you shall be driven away from man, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field” (Daniel 4:31-32).
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