John 14:8-11
8 And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: 9 of sin, because they do not believe in Me; 10 of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; 11 of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged.
What we do is heavily based on our convictions. A conviction is a deep belief in something or someone. What we deeply believe then determines how we live our life and what we do or don’t do. Think about this, we know many things that we have little or no conviction about, and thus we do not do them or, we struggle to do them.
The discipleship process starts from a place of submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It is at the place of submission that we can receive Instructions, on how to become like Jesus. After we have received the instruction, the Holy Spirit comes in to convict us about the instructions and the truth that we have received. For the sinner, it is the conviction that brings them to that place of submission to the Lordship of Christ. To the believer, this conviction leads us to the place of righteousness.
One of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to guide us to the truth. Once we receive the instructions from the word of God, which is our source of truth, the Holy Spirit then turns that into a real conviction in the heart and mind of a believer.
It is once we get the conviction that the instructions and direction we have received from the word of God to be the truth, then we are ready to apply that discernment in our life. When you think about it, there are some things that we read about in the Bible that we do not do because in essence we have no conviction about them.
This then leads you and me to ask ourselves what our convictions really are. Do we just read and know the word of God, or do we carry a deep conviction about what we read? The best way for each of us to answer that question is to look at how we live our life because it tells the story of our convictions.
Think of the three Hebrew boys who held such a conviction about the God they served that they were willing to be thrown in to a fiery furnace. Are your convictions that strong?
Reflections
Does your life align with what you claim to believe?
What are some of the things you are heavily convicted about that they are none negotiable and how you live life proves it?
How strong is your fellowship with the Holy Spirit, and what must you do to make it even stronger?
