What does this mean to us as Christians?  It means that when we hear something being taught or expounded by someone else we can connect to it or recognize it as coming from God.  In my own experience I find that I can hear aspects of God in a teaching but I find if it is mixed with error there is more difficulty for me to discern that the whole of the teaching is from God.

This is the deception of our current day.  God’s truth mixed with error.  This means that when we hear truth it does not mean that everything that the person says is from God or is God’s truth.   We need to discern or suss out what is God, or what is of God, in a teaching.  This is done through the Holy Spirit and by our own knowledge of the Bible.  Our personal day by day reading and slugging through books and chapters of the Bible is critical for discerning truth.  We should not miss reading a word in a book of the Bible.  We need to read it carefully and meditatively.

We need to read the full chapter or the full book to get the proper teaching.  What we read and believe the book is saying to us needs to correspond to other teachings in other books of the Bible.  It all fits together in some way.  One book will not teach one thing and be contradicted in another.  If this happens, then some part of what we believe as Christians is in error.  The Word of God is truth.  What we believe about the Word of God can have errors associated with those beliefs.

When I read the Bible I find that I am thinking one way as I’m reading it, and then if I am in error something will come up in another book that will tell me that what I had been thinking is not entirely  correct.  I adjust my thinking accordingly.  I will say to myself that what I had been thinking is not true, or what I had been thinking only has part truth to it.  I will also be corrected in my thinking by reading an article or some other material that expounds the teaching of these scriptures better.  However, I must be careful.  Lots of current Christian teaching sounds good.  The article that I read must also agree with other scriptures that the Holy Spirit will bring to my mind to help me understand truth, and the article must also agree with the overall teachings of that particular book that the article is pulling a scripture from to make it’s point.

The Bible is critical for us as believers and we must be reading it carefully and intently.  We must be searching and looking for the voice of God and allow the Holy Spirit to correct us as we go along.