Receiving and Acting on Instruction From God (BD#1)
Good morning. This is Brian Dundon and Bruce asked me to fill in for him and teach this morning since he is on the road giving another teaching, someplace in this wonderful country of ours.
[Here is a link to Bruce’s teaching: One Lord; Access to God (#979) ]
So I’ll be teaching this morning, and the subject I’m going to be covering is on receiving and acting on instruction from God. So, there are basically three steps for receiving and acting on information from God. Pretty obvious, and I had some training way back when in my military days that introduced us to two concepts; one was called the OODA loop and the other was the general description of communication.
So, first I’ll go over the OODA loop, which was developed during the Korean war shortly after the engagements with the North Korean and possibly the Chinese; or perhaps it was the Vietnam war, I’m not sure? I think it was the Korean war, but I don’t know who they were coming up against. But the American pilots seemed to be a slight disadvantage to the Russian provided MIGs in air-to-air combat, so a study was conducted and what they discovered was that the North Korean or North Vietnamese pilots, I don’t recall which it was, were better trained and equipped than the Americans and they came up with a concept called the OODA loop, which is O, O, D, A and they discovered if they could train the American pilots to get through the OODA loop faster than their opponents they would be more competitive and have a better survivability rate in the air and this was a great accomplishment because it was successful. And what it stands for is Observation, Orientation, Decision and Action. And that is the kind of process that we go through as we take in information in this world: we observe something, we may hear it, we may see it, we may feel it; we experience it in some way. We observe it, we orient it with our understanding and our learning; and for a fighter pilot, where they are spatially in space, coupled with their training. Then they make a decision, they decide how they are going to act on that information that came in, given their experiences and training. And then they act. So, Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action.
And another concept that I mentioned earlier was the definition of communication. Communication has sender, there is a receiver, there is a medium, and there is a message. Those are the four basic concepts. So the sender is somebody that is sending the message; the message obviously is the content of the message trying to be delivered to the receiver and of course there may be more than one receiver; and the medium is how that message is being conveyed. It may be spoken, it may be written, it may be displayed in way. But those are the four basic components: you have a sender, a receiver, the message and medium. And then you can have some other things that come into play like interference: something may obstruct somebody’s vision; they may have a learning disability that hinders their ability to read or understand complex or even simple concepts, there is all sorts of things; there may be prejudices that come into play, preconceived connotations. We are experience this everyday; we have somebody that says something that may not mean any offense at all, but the receiver takes offense, because, based on their understanding its offensive.
So, with those two things in mind, I want to go through some of the scriptures and take a look at some examples where believers received information from God, how they understood it, how they gained more information and what they did with that information; how they acted upon it. So, if you would, please take your Bibles and turn to II Timothy chapter 3.
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Verse Listing and Notes
II Timothy 3:16,17 All scripture given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:…
Exodus 3:1- Moses and the burning bush, God’s instructions, Moses’ questions, and his actions
Exodus 14:1 – Moses at the Red Sea, additional instructions and actions
Numbers 13 – 14 Moses and the 12 Scouting the Promised Land, going beyond the instructions and into rebellion
I Samuel 15:1 -35 Saul’s anointing, God’s directions, and Saul’s disobedience
I Samuel 16:1, 13 David’s anointing
I Samuel 17 David and Goliath, David pulling from his experience and knowing what to do
I Samuel 24:1-12 David and Saul in a cave. David’s decision
Matthew 11:1, 10:1-ff Jesus’ instructions to the 12
John 14:26 The comforter
I Cor 11:1 We are to be imitators of Christ and Paul
Summary For instruction we have the Scriptures, Holy Spirit, and the examples of Christ and Paul. God will instruct us, if we don’t understand, we can and should ask questions. Waiting is an action.
Additional verses not used during the teaching:
Proverbs 1:1-9 Instruction and the respect (fear) of the Lord being the beginning of knowledge
Psalm 25:5, 12 God’s instruction and waiting on it
Teaching
Receiving and Acting on Instruction From God (BD#1)
Receiving and Acting on Instruction From God (BD#1)
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