The morning Manna will be provided at 6am. Thanks.

Studying In the Crucible with Christ in the SSnet.org series Lesson 6, may the Holy Spirit be the speaker to your heart.

The Topic today is: "The Divine Human Combination in Paul's Perfection goals".

The Opening Hymn will be 229 "Spirit of the Living God"

The Sabbath School Quarterly, downloadable from SSnet.org in the Teacher's Edition is on page 74 and for the laymen edition or Standard Edition, on page 48.

The SSnet.org site allows anyone, anywhere to read the lesson in their own language. Choose your own language to see God speaking also to your heart.

---Did you see on Monday section of the lesson that they substituted "ministry" for the word "perfection" = teleion in Colossians 1:28?

---What does that mean?

---It means that Paul's ministry was to lead people to perfection, attainable, with enabling grace, transforming lives with the power of God as he said in 1:29/

---Look again in the Bible. If your translation is not using the word perfection = teleion, then select another translation. Use YLT or KJV but perfection must be there.

---How did the Sabbath School Lesson missed this word?

---For one, there is a common trend due to secularism to ignore the importance of total perfection before Jesus comes, in Scripture. After all, Jesus did require perfection in obedience and He would not ask it from us if we are not able to render it. And people did attain perfection as one can see throughout the New Testament and in references of Paul.

---But what about Romans 7, "the good that I want to do I do not"? This is the transforming Saul > Paul says old commentator Benjamin Jowitt. It is Saul not Paul says a host of scholars like Hengstenberg and the list can go on. But LaRondelle argued in his Perfection for Paul. Also that it is only fully perfect at the Second Coming of Christ. And that man is same time saint and same time sinner, an expression that Luther used, Berkhouwer his teachers and that George Knight copied from LaRondelle and Berkhouwer! But it is not used by Ellen White or our Pioneers. Sinless perfection is attainable in character before Christ comes was taught in both the Bible and Spirit of Prophecy. So some modern scholars have a mixed understanding about this issue and it pops up in the Sabbath School Lesson. That simple.

---Many of our pastors were taught by LaRondelle and they thought that he could not be wrong. But this point was his weakness and it can affect one’s whole approach and view of the Bible, in a unbiblical way of inreading, incarrying of ideas instead of reading the text.

---Lord, help us towards perfection we pray in Jesus name and following Paul in Colossians 1:28. Amen