For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. (1 Cor. 2:11)One of the things I see often is people judging the thoughts and motives of another person with absolute certainty. To them, they are self-evident. The text I quoted is a rhetorical question. Paul is not asking for a show of hands on who knows another person’s thoughts. He is saying that we cannot know the thoughts of another person. We could know if he told us, or we could know if we had his spirit. We could also know if God revealed his thoughts to us. Until then, we must not judge the thoughts of another person. We guess! We guess wrongly and act on our guess as if we were right.
As you read through the book of Acts, look at every conversion, and see what happened right before it: what was said, who said it. The situations are the same today. A long time ago, my duty in the Officer’s Christian Fellowship was the east coast of the United States. I went to an officer’s office at Fort Lee, VA, and stayed overnight, then I went on to Norfolk and Fort Bragg. Forty years later, I was no longer on the staff of OCF, but I had to go to Denver. While I was in Denver, I checked in at the OCF offices. There was the same Air Force officer I had met in Fort Lee, retired now, a colonel. I had stayed in his house when he was a first lieutenant. He asked me, “Do you know what happened when you stayed overnight?” I said, “No, I just remember staying in your home.” He said, “You led the next-door neighbor to Christ.” I had no memory of it. Ten years after that, I was speaking at a banquet at the Hotel Salisbury, and who was th...
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