Join Sharon Knotts as she delves deep into the essence of spiritual reflection, exploring how we often seek to absolve ourselves from blame while failing to confront our realities. Through the enchanting story of her grandson Noah, Sharon illustrates a broader truth about human nature. She deftly ties this narrative to the profound teachings of the Bible, urging listeners to remain humble and allow God’s Word to reveal and guide them toward authentic living.
00:00:05 Opening and Introduction to The Mirror of the Man
Greetings, friends and new listeners, and welcome to this program of the Archie Hardy Ministries. I’m Sharon Knotts, thanking you for joining us today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. I’ll be bringing you today’s message entitled, The Mirror of the Man. This is a subject that is near and dear to my heart because God’s word tells us to guard our hearts with all diligence because out of it comes the issues of life. And the only true mirror that we can look into and know the truth of who we are is the perfect mirror of scripture. It reads our hearts without distortion and our hearts reflect the mirror of the man. Now, I don’t know. I’m just going to follow the Lord here tonight. And I may go another way than what I have, but I’m just going to follow the Lord. But I just thought about this. My little grandson, Noah, he was in there. And, you know, I don’t get to see him very much. I only get to see him a little bit. And he’s quite rambunctious, as you probably have seen. So he’s in there, and I’m thinking, oh, I’m trying to get my thoughts together and all. And he’s in there, and he’s wanting me to fly airplanes and all this stuff. but he’s a very bright little boy. He’s very bright. I mean, I know I’m his grandmother, and I know, you know, I’m probably, you know, a little biased, but he is, when he was like five years old, six years old, he’s very bright, very verbal, and you could carry on a conversation with him like you could with an older person. And I’ll never forget, you know, in that room, that’s been the catch-all room for all the junk that you don’t know what to do with. It’s ended up in that room. And that room over the years, believe me, parts of plays, parts of this, parts of that, we don’t even know. There’s a big old brick in there. I mean, this big heavy… I mean, I don’t know. There’s been all kinds of junk. Thank God it looks a whole lot better now because Benny and Helena got in there, and they really cleaned it out. When that roof fell in, they didn’t have a choice. They had to do it. But there’s been this briefcase that’s been in there for I don’t know how many years. I’m going to assume it was one of the props for one of the plays. But it’s a nice-looking briefcase, the kind that’s got the combination locks. And it’s been sitting in there absolutely for years. And, you know, I don’t know what’s in it or whatever. And for quite a while now, I would say that this went on for about a year. Every time Noah would come and he would go over there, it would bug him to death to know what is in that briefcase. And he would say, Grandma, what’s in this briefcase? And we would go through the same thing. I don’t know, Noah. Well, whose is it? I don’t know, Noah. Well, what’s it in here for? I don’t know, Noah. And this went on, you know, every time it was like we’d never had this discussion before. And he would be trying his best to pick that lock. And he’d get, you know, he’d get pens and he’d get everything. And he’d say, Grandma, how can I get in here? Don’t you want to know what’s in here? And, you know, most of the time I would just ignore him. And so the next time we would go through this, this has been carried on over a period of months and months. And so one night he came in there and true to form, he started up the same old thing. Grandma, what’s in here? Don’t you want to know what’s in here? I said, I don’t know, Noah. I don’t know. Well, might be something money in there. I don’t know. It might be, but I don’t know whose it is. So he’s got, and he ends up breaking all my pens and breaking all my pencils because he’s determined to stick them in there and turn them and they snap and they break. So here he goes again with one of my pens. I said, Noah, you’re just going to break another pen. There’s no way you can open that with a pen. You know that by now. It’s going to take somebody strong like Papa Benny. He’s going to have to get a screwdriver. And he’d have to come in here and maybe he could get it open. But you can’t get it open. Well, that isn’t going to stop him from trying. So he’s trying and he’s trying. And finally he decides he takes the pen. And you know where the lip comes over, he starts taking the pen. Instead of trying to go in and get the lock open, he decides to go up under and push the lip. So he’s pushing it, and he’s pushing it, and pushing it, and it’s starting to give a little bit. And he’s pushing, and he’s pushing it. Finally, he busted it. The seam busted. He didn’t get it open, but he tore the seam. And when he did that, you know, just joking around, I said, oh, my goodness, you’ve done it now. Oh, boy, you broke it now. You are in trouble. He turned around and looked at me with those big eyes of his, and I said, oh, boy, you’re in trouble now. And I could just see the little wheels in his mind already turning. He says, but Grandma, but Grandma, it’s not my fault. I said, no, you’re the one who did it. But Grandma, it’s not my fault. I said, aren’t you the one? Didn’t you just sit there and break it open? He says, but Grandma, I’m not the only one to blame. I said, what do you mean? He says, Grandma, Didn’t you tell me you would like to know what’s in there? I thought, what is it? Now, he was about like, I think he was like six years old at the time, five or six. I thought to myself, if this isn’t that young, he already thought, I’m not taking the blame for this. He says, Grandma, and he said it just like that, I’m not the only one to blame. That’s what he said in those exact words. I mean, he didn’t just say it’s not my fault. He said, I’m not the only one to blame. Well, then I knew that there was somebody else to blame, and I knew it probably was me because I was the only one else in there. And I said, what do you mean? He says, Grandma, didn’t you say you wanted to know what was in there? I said, oh, I said I would like to know what’s in there, but I didn’t tell you to do that. He said, but you said you wanted to know what was in there. So the conclusion is? he was going to do what I wanted him to do, so therefore it wasn’t his fault, it was my fault. And that’s funny, but the fact is, is people take that same type of thinking, and they go through their whole life that way. And all through their life, they use that same kind of thinking. It’s, well, so-and-so said, and this one did, and for whatever reason, it’s not my fault. I’m not to blame. I’m not the one with the problem. It’s always somebody else. But you know that if we go through life that way, we’re not fooling anybody but ourselves. Now, it’s cute when you’re five years old. I mean, you know, I marvel at how bright that child was. It took a very intelligent kid to maneuver all that in his mind. So I told myself, well, he’s still little, and he’s really smart. And we’ll have to, you know, after a while, that’ll be a good way. He’ll be bright. But, you know, if you’re thinking that way later on, you know what you’re thinking. How many say amen? And so James says, when you look into this natural glass, and you look into this looking glass, and you see your natural face, and the word there is Genesis, your Genesis face, or your birth face, the face you were born with, He said, but you get up and you can’t remember. We already proved that. You can’t remember what you saw. He said, it’s the same way in the spirit. But he said, that man who leans over, leans over the looking glass, because he says, that one who begins to… that one who begins to not just hear, but the Greek word says he begins to hear into, that one who continues therein. And in the Greek, what it is saying is you have bent over, you have leaned over the mirror, or like the wise man said, you have leaned over that clear pool of water, you have leaned over the mirror of God’s word, and you are looking into it, and you are trying to see every detail that you can. And you’re peering into the Word of God so that when you get up, that you not only go your way knowing what you’ve heard, but you remember and you put it into action, you put it into operation in your life. And let me tell you, there are some things in ourselves that we’re never going to see until we stay in the Word of God. That’s why it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been saved. It doesn’t matter even if you’re a minister of the gospel and you’ve been saved 20 years or 30 years. And like myself, I’ve been saved many, many years. I got the Holy Ghost when I was seven. And I mean, that’s a long time. That’s a long time ago. But I still have got to stay in the Word of God. I’ve got to continue to look in the Word of God. I cannot afford to just think, oh, I know it all, seen it all, been there, done it all, read it all. No way. The moment I do that, there are things in me that will begin to crop up, that I will begin to see that the enemy is trying to get a foothold in my life. So you’ve got to continue to look in the Word of God because there are things that we’re never going to see outside of God’s Word. Let’s flip over to Hebrews, the fourth chapter. You know this verse, so I’ll quickly go ahead and read it. Hebrews 4, 12. For the Word of God is quick and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword. piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight, But all things are naked and opened under the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Now, we could just munch on this verse for a long time. He says the word of God is alive and powerful. The best way to say it is the Word of God is alive and active. It says quick and powerful. Let’s say alive and active. The word quick just means alive. Jesus is going to come for the quick and the dead, the quick being the living. And the Word of God is powerful. Here the Greek word is the word from which we get our word energy or energize. So here it’s talking about the Word of God gives life, the Word of God gives energy. And the Word of God produces results. And he says the Word of God is sharper than any two-edged sword. I like to think of it in modern terms of a surgeon’s scalpel. A surgeon’s scalpel is so precise. It is so sharp. And when you have a skilled surgeon using a sharp scalpel, he can just make the tiniest, most minute, till they have to use those, what they call it, microsurgery. They actually have to have, have you ever seen them when they’re operating, looking through microscopes up here and operating because what they’re doing is so small? It’s so teeny-weeny that they can’t see it with the regular glasses. They have to look, especially when they’re doing brain surgery and things like that. And that’s how the Word of God is. It can get in there real close. I mean, when you’re operating on somebody’s brain, you just don’t go in there with just, you know, some big old sloppy thing. You’ve got to be so careful. Every little movement has got to be calculated because there is so much risk. And the repercussions of doing something wrong… can be fatal. And if not fatal, they can be devastating. So the word of God is precise like that. It says it’s piercing even to. The word means it’s penetrating. God’s word can penetrate all the way down to the core of your being. All the way to the core of your soul and spirit. Not only can it penetrate down to the core of your being, it can actually divide asunder. It can differentiate between the soul and spirit. And this is very powerful because there are not many places that we read in the scriptures where we see a determination or a differentiation between soul and spirit. Most of the time we just put them together and call it our inner man. And most of the time that’s all that we need to know. The inner man is the soul and the spirit. We just clump them together and we go from there. And there’s not many places that we see them where they actually begin to be divided. But he says the word of God is that accurate. The word of God is that precise. The word of God is able to penetrate so far down that just like a surgeon’s scalpel can divide the bone from the marrow, God’s word can divide the soul and the spirit. This is how God’s Word can look into our heart and see what manner of person we really are. Now you know that we need our skeleton, our bones, is what we need to ambulate in the world. We can’t get around, we can’t manipulate. If we don’t have a skeleton, we can’t do nothing. We need our bones and our skeleton to be able to move. But it’s the marrow inside the bone that gives us life. It’s the marrow that produces the blood cells. It’s the marrow that produces the cells for our immune system. And if somebody gets a sick bone marrow, they’re not long for this world. There’s not much treatment that can be done. A lot of times when they try to take the bone marrow out of a healthy person, a healthy sibling that matches well, because when your bone marrow is sick, you’re going to die. Amen? And so God’s Word is able to divide us under the soul and the spirit just like a surgeon can do with the joints and the marrow. So God’s Word is able to get deep down inside. And as we read, there is nothing hidden. Isn’t that what it said? A lot of times we don’t bother to go on and read verse 13. There is nothing hidden with him with whom we have to do. And the Greek means under whom we have to give an account. But all things are laid open. All things are naked. All things are open. God sees everything. And God’s word sees everything. And that’s not a bad thing, saints. Don’t think that’s a bad thing. That’s a good thing. That’s why you want to run to the Word of God. Run to the Word of God. Because God’s Word can see everything. And I want God’s Word to see everything. I don’t want to gloss over. I don’t want to overlook. I don’t want to make up excuses. for bad behavior. I want God’s Word to see everything. Amen? And I know as sure as I’m born, I’m up here with this big mouth blabbing off, saying that. I know what’s up the road. It’s not too far away. Because if you get up and say it, then you’re going to have to walk it. How many say amen? So I know that. Because sometimes the devil will say, don’t preach that, and you won’t get hit with that. He will. Yes, he does. But I found out that if you speak the word of God, you’re going to have to turn around and live it. Amen? And so I want to run to God’s word. I don’t like it at the time. No, I don’t like it when God’s word’s coming and chasing me and getting on my case. I don’t like it any more than you do. But nevertheless, I know that if I will let the word of God do that, and I won’t get up and go my way and brush it off like people do, just brush it off and go their way, but I let it just come on, Lord, work on me, and I submit myself to that, and I begin to walk in it, that it’s not going to be too much longer, that when you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, then he will exalt you in due time, and oh, it feels good. It feels real good when God exalts you. You see, God is not against exaltation. And I want to be careful about this because we live in a time when I am, you know, you’re just up to here with all this man’s pride and honor me and glorify me and give me all my honor. You know, we just had it with all that. Haven’t you had it with all that stuff? You know? But God’s not against being exalted. He just wants… He’s the one that wants to exalt you. Not you exalt yourself and not men exalt you. Because that’s a… What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything to God. That means nothing. You don’t get any brownie points in heaven for that. But when God exalts you, then it’s different. Because when God exalts you, He knows you’re ready. He knows you can take it. He knows you’re going to give the glory and the honor and reflect it all on Him. So God’s not against you being exalted, only if you allow Him to do it. The only thing is, is when he does it, there’s no shortcuts. The way to be exalted is to be abased. Amen? But when God lifts you up, oh, then the joy. He says, then the end of that man. What did James say? He said the end of that man, he will be blessed indeed. Or he will be truly blessed. The real blessing of God. They ain’t gonna put blessings on you, but God’s blessings are the real thing. Amen. And those are the blessings that I want. So there’s nothing hid from God. He is able to take the word of God and differentiate between our soul and our spirit. And this is important because there are a lot of times there are things in us that we don’t know, and then there are a lot of times that we live our… I believe many people, I believe that many Christians live their whole lives mostly out of their soul, out of their soul and not their spirit. Now, they have a born-again spirit, but I’m talking about that… Most people live out of their soul instead of their spirits, and that’s why they make so many mistakes. That’s why they have so many poor choices, because they’re impetuous, because the soul is impetuous, impulsive, capricious. The soul is carried about by emotions. And the barometer of how things are is how you feel. The soul is always reacting. You know the knee-jerk thing. That’s how the soul lives its whole life. Knee-jerk reactions. There are some people that you could come to them and you could tell them something about somebody and you could get them so stirred up and so mad at that person by you just telling them a few things. They’re ready to go find that person and sock it to them. They haven’t checked out the story. They don’t know the other side of the argument. They don’t know how much of it’s true. They don’t know how much you’re exaggerating. Are you putting your own twist on it? Are you making your voice inflect something? They said. You know, they could say they said something in one tone of voice. You could say the same exact words in another tone of voice and get a whole other picture. But some people are so quick, out of their emotions, they react. And that’s why they’re always in trouble. You know what they say? He pushed my buttons. He pushed my buttons. That’s because you’re always living out of your soul. And you’re always pushing the buttons of the soul. How many say amen? Instead of living out of the Spirit. Now let’s digress for a moment. Before you got saved, when you were a sinner, your spirit was dead. I’m not going to go read all the verses because you know them. How many know that Paul said in Ephesians, the second chapter, we were dead in trespasses and sin. he said in colossians you were dead in your trespasses and sin that meant that as far as god was concerned you had no fellowship with him you were separated from god your spirit was dead and therefore you lived out of your soul your emotions everything you did as a sinner was out of your soul and out of your emotions because your spirit man was dead you didn’t have communication with god You didn’t have communication with the Holy Spirit. You didn’t read the Word of God. And let’s say one day you got the bright idea that you were going to read the Word of God. How many times have you heard people testify, I read the Bible before they got saved? And they thought, ugh, and closed it up. And that was the end of that. It made absolutely no sense to them. They thought it was the most boring thing. They thought, read the Bible? You know, what is wrong? Because they were dead. It would be just like me handing you a book in Chinese and telling you to read it and tell me what it says. You wouldn’t get very far, would you? Because you don’t know Chinese. And when you’re not saved, you don’t have the Holy Spirit. And the Bible says that it is the Spirit that receives the things of God. The natural man, the carnal man, receives nothing of God. He understands nothing. He can’t know anything. He doesn’t receive it. But the Bible says that we have the Spirit of God, that when we get saved, we get born again, and that spirit that was dead now is quickened or made alive. Now we’re in contact with God. Now we’re in contact with the Holy Spirit. Now the Bible’s not a closed book anymore. Now we can read the Word of God, and all of a sudden it’s life, it’s life, it’s life. It fills us with life and joy because that spirit that once was dead now is born again and it’s alive and it’s quickened. And now we have communication with God. And the Bible says we can compare spiritual things with spiritual things. That’s why when you try to talk to someone who’s not saved and you try to give them some deep spiritual analogy, you go over their heads and you scare them. and they don’t want to talk to you no more because you done scared them because they can’t compare spiritual things. They’re not a spiritual person. How many say amen? We found that out when Jesus talked to Nicodemus. And what did Nicodemus say? How am I going to go back into my mother’s stomach? I mean, and this man was a teacher. of the law, but spiritually there was nobody home. And Jesus said, if you can’t understand this much, and you’re supposed to be a teacher, if you can’t understand this much, how am I supposed to tell you the things of the kingdom of God and the things of heaven? So we’ve got to realize that when we were sinners before we got saved, that we were in a position where our spiritual mind was totally dead. So we lived out of our emotions. And that is where most people continue to live. After you get saved and born again, and your spirit man comes alive, and your spirit man then begins to hunger and thirst. And when you first got saved, you just couldn’t get enough. You couldn’t get enough. You were in church every time the doors were open. Every opportunity that there was to go to a Bible lesson, a Bible class, whatever it was, you were just starving because your spirit man was just wanting to catch up. For all those years you’d been dead in sin. That’s why Paul said, redeem the times. He means buy back the time. All the time you lost in sin, all the years that you were dead, you didn’t know anything about God. Now that you’re saved, you’ve got to redeem those times and buy them back. So your spirit is quickened and alive. But the problem is, is because we lived so many years out of our soul, we learned how to go with our emotions. We just flew by the seat of our pants. Wherever, anytime, anything led us, that’s where we went. And we were up, we were down, we were in, out, all around. And we just learned, we had, our barometer was by how we felt emotionally. And unfortunately, a lot of people continue to live out of their soul. Now, if you were raised around a lot of negativity, if that was what you were around growing up or out in the world, then your tendency is always going to be to fall into that negative attitude. You’re always going to be critical. You’re always going to find fault with something. You’re always going to fall into that because that’s the way you lived for so many years. That was the way you lived out of your soul that way. So when you get born again, you’ve got to make a conscious effort that you are going to discipline yourself, that you’re not going to let your soul be the boss. And let me tell you something, the soul is bossy. The soul is bossy. And he knows how to manipulate and how to get his way. We can see it in a child. We see a child when he’s learned how to manipulate his parents because he knows all he’s got to do is get that cry in that certain decibel. And when he gets up there, okay, he’s going to get what he wants. How many say you better fall out on the floor or kick up and go kick the wall a little bit until the parent says, wait a minute, you’re not getting by with that behavior anymore. This isn’t a genuine need. This is just nothing but a little bratty spat. And we’re not going to have this. You can kick all you want. I’ll put you in your room and lock the door and you can kick until you get tired and fall asleep. And then finally, after a while, he gets the message, well, you’re not going to get everything this way. This isn’t how it really works. But if you don’t do that, you’re going to have a kid who’s, you’re going to be out in the store at Walmart with some seven, eight-year-old kid that’s going to embarrass you in front of everybody and going to make you look like a fool. And don’t blame nobody but yourself because you let them act like that all that time and that’s how they know how to do it. But you’re not going to get away with that with God. He’ll let you get by with it when you’re one and two and three, but not when you’ve been saved for a long time. He’s not going to let you get away with that behavior. And if you insist on acting like that, he’ll just let you act like that, and you’re going to look like a fool in front of everybody. and you’re not going to have the blessings and the anointing upon your life. And that’s what it’s all about, right? Amen? We want to be blessed indeed. So the problem is so many people have been living out of their soul for so long that they have the barometer, they have calibrated everything by the experiences that they’ve had. Amen. I hope you’re being spiritually enlightened by our message, The Mirror of the Man. Proverbs 27, 19 says that just as a mirror reflects a person’s face, a person’s heart reflects who he really is. And the book of James is the New Testament equivalent to the book of Proverbs. and carries this metaphor over, stating that God’s Word is the perfect law of liberty, and like a mirror, it reveals the hidden man of our hearts. The problem is, James said, we’re prone to get up and go our way and forget what the Word has revealed. It is only when we continue to look into the mirror of Scripture and act on it that we are justified and blessed in all our deeds. But most people, including many Christians, play the blame game. It’s not my fault. And they conveniently suppress any pangs of conviction. for believers this is very serious because the holy spirit convicts us not to condemn us but to bring us to contrition and confession and conversion fallacious reasoning arguing beside the point open the door to self-deception and presumption And many Christians are not able to differentiate between their soul and their spirit, which can lead to natural carnal remedies that will only ultimately fail when it is the spirit that is under attack and in turmoil. When people live out of their souls instead of their spirits, they learn to calibrate everything on an emotional experience level. As believers, we must make conscious discipline not to let our souls be the boss. And as born-again, spirit-led Christians, we can. If you are a believer dealing with emotional, mental, and or spiritual issues, or if you know someone who is, you need this message in its entirety. The Mirror of the Man is available on one CD for a love gift of $10 or more for the radio ministry. Request offer SK134. That’s S as in Sharon, K as in knots, 134. Mail to R.G. Hardy, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Or go online at rghardy.org. That’s RGHardy.org. Again, our mailing address is P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Until next time, this is Sharon Ott saying, Maranatha.
Join Sharon Knotts as she delves deep into the essence of spiritual reflection, exploring how we often seek to absolve ourselves from blame while failing to confront our realities. Through the enchanting story of her grandson Noah, Sharon illustrates a broader truth about human nature. She deftly ties this narrative to the profound teachings of the Bible, urging listeners to remain humble and allow God’s Word to reveal and guide them toward authentic living.
