Our week two guest blog post is from Amanda Taylor. Amanda lives in Richmond Virginia with her husband of six years and their cat Luci. She owns her own business Taylor Captioning Services doing closed captioning for religious broadcasts. Her passion is blogging about life, her faith, and everything in between. Recently diagnosed with a rare blood disease she took her blogging to a whole new level raising awareness about the disease and sharing her walk of faith as she fights back. She has a passion for Bible studies and hopes to do more with online Bible studies in the future. You can follow Amanda her journey on her blog at www.itsmrsthegreat.com

(Image: Unsplash)

In Week 2 of Living Beyond Yourself by Beth Moore, we learn to live by the Spirit we must first get to know the Spirit. The Holy Spirit had a hand in the Earth’s creation (Gen 1:1-2) and has been here with God since the beginning of time. We learn the Holy Spirit helped create us as individuals. (Luke 1:35)  I find it amazing that the same Spirit that helped with creating the planet and us as individuals, is the Spirit Jesus sent to us to be our comforter and friend! This week we studied some of the spirit’s different attributes and how we as believers are to be truly and utterly dependent on the Spirit.

Scripture after scripture assures us that the Holy Spirit is very important in our walk with Christ. Not only does the scripture prove this but it also proves that the Holy Spirit is a key element of the trinity of the Father himself. (Matt 28:19) In other words, the Holy Spirit plays a key role in our relationship with God our heavenly father. The seal of the Holy Spirit makes us joint-heirs with Christ. We are bought with the blood of the lamb and sealed with it by the Holy Spirit!

This week we learned to live a life FULL of the fruit of the Spirit.  As believers, we MUST make a daily choice to yield ourselves allowing Him to fill us. In the audio/video Beth talks about her morning ritual and I took this to heart. We must yield ourselves, in other words, pour ourselves out so that God can pour Himself into us. This in the end helps us to pour out His love and minister to others, living a Spirit-Filled life. Ever wondered sometimes why everything some days seems to go wrong. Work issues come up, coffee spilled on the rug, and you and your husband got into a bit of an argument. We’ve all had those days. These are signs that we’re not taking that special time even if it’s only 5 minutes in the morning for God to pour into us. Those moments are key in our spirit-filled life.

We learned we have the capability of hurting the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit has feelings. (1 Thess 5:19) (Eph 4:30) We can prevent the Holy Spirit from his fullness in our lives. We do this by resisting His authority. When God tells us to do something, do we do it? Do we say no? I had to ask myself this hard question. Have I done this? Am I doing it now? Now I don’t bring this up for anyone to condemn themselves or feel bad, because as we learned in our homework, God has a heart of forgiveness and cleanses us from these things. If you do feel that way though, take a moment to spend some time with God and talk to Him about this. I don’t know about you but I want to live a life ABLAZE with the Holy Spirit and in no way want to hinder Him in my life or my walk with Him.

No matter what we’re going through and no matter what life throws at us, if we live a life yielded to the Holy Spirit, He is right there to pick us up in weakness and enable us to do the impossible. I hope this has encouraged all of you as much as it has encouraged me!

From Christine Abraham: I love this last comment from Amanda, knowing that she sits patiently in a wheelchair, waiting for the Holy Spirit to lift her in weakness and bring healing to her body. You inspire me, Amanda, thank you for writing the post this week.

The Spirit intervenes in our weakness, but not in our avoidance. -Beth Moore

Assignment For Next Week

  • Read Week Three in the workbook
  • Listen to the Session Three Audio (optional)
  • OR…Listen to the Session Three Video (optional)

Living Beyond Yourself Bible Study