It was the new identity Christ accomplished for Paul that made such a great impact upon Paul, it is not striving to become a better someone, it is recognizing the someone God has already made us to be. It is understanding our new position in Christ, when we come to fully understand and appreciate that new position, the striving can end.
The law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ, if that is not a liberating truth! Paul told us there was a fixed rule in his life, a rule that he could count on no matter the circumstance, no matter the presence of indwelling sin, no matter his conduct, a rule that applies to all believers, and Paul calls that rule, the law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ.
It was not Paul’s practical walk that made him free from the law of sin and death, it was the law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ that liberated the apostle Paul, the law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ is the true liberator.
Those who are in Jesus Christ are those who place no confidence in their flesh, but understood, as Paul understood, that in people’s flesh dwells no good thing.
While no believer will be sin less, hopefully, we will all sin less, as our behavior is impacted by our transformed thinking, and that transformed thinking comes through taking in the Word of God, and having the Word do its work in our lives.
The sin nature disease called iniquity runs within the deepest recesses of the human mind, recesses beyond our conscious reasoning, God can see what people cannot see, and the disease that manifests itself in our coming short of the right thing to do all of the time, every thought, every word, and every deed, and the coming short of the measure of God’s rightness, actions in our lives are called sins.
Grace is a much greater motivator than law, conduct becoming a believer does not come through a fear of losing one’s salvation, conduct becoming a believer comes from a proper understanding of the magnitude of God’s grace, and what that grace accomplished for us.
We are not to tell the lost that God can take away their sins, we are to tell the lost God has already taken them away, so that they might believe that good news message, and be joined to the Savior.
Those who believe God’s message to us through the apostle Paul, the apostle that God appointed to relay that message to us, are now ambassadors of this wonderful news which our apostle calls the glorious gospel of the grace of God.
The fact that God is no longer imputing the sins of the world, to the world of sinners has nothing to do with the self-righteous efforts through performance of individuals, it has nothing to do with a proper approach to God, in order to get him to stop doing that which he has not been doing since his son became sin on all people’s behalf.
The issue is not that of sinners making God’s son become their Savior through the avenue of a present day forgiveness of sins, but in believing that the son of God became their Savior the day he took their sins, the entirety of that sin debt upon himself, and that is what makes a person Heaven worthy.
It is not the non-imputation of sins that makes a person Heaven ready, it is the imputation of the very righteousness that belongs to the Savior that makes us Heaven worthy.
We are justified through our sanctified position in Christ, we find the amazing and comforting truth that God’s love for those who are joined to his son, is the same unalterable and unending love God has for his son, that is how closely connected we are to Christ.
It is a past tense accomplishment that can never be revised, reduced, or retracted, God’s loving attitude towards those who are united to him by way of being in his son, nothing past, present, or future shall separate us from the love of God.
It is important we know the difference, because the old man and the sin nature are not one and the same, the old man speaks of our former identity with Adam, that identity is no longer true of believers. So, the old man is a thing of the past, having been crucified with Christ, and the new man is the new identity belonging to every believer, the sad news is that the new man continues to reside in our earthly bodies where the sin nature is ever present.
The old man has to do with identity, even though every believer has a new identity in Jesus Christ, every believer suffers the same propensity, the battle against the sin nature that the apostle Paul struggled with himself on a day-by-day basis. God’s strength is perfected, God strength is brought to a point of fullness in the life of a suffering saint during this age of grace.
God allows saints to suffer today, because God’s strength is made perfect in the life of the suffering saint, if God’s strength was made perfect in fixing the saint, Paul would be telling us to pray for the fix, but Paul is filling us in on a secret that Jesus Christ revealed to him. God expects us to make the right use of our minds in light of the doctrine he’s given us through the ministry of the apostle Paul.
We should no longer be in need of someone to turn our heads, and tell us what to do, and which direction we are to take, will we always make the right decisions, NO, but we can certainly learn from the decisions we make, so that we can make better decisions the next time around.
Choices always bring along with those choices consequences, the choices have been given us to make, as well as the consequences to reap for the choices we make.
All believers, during this age of grace, are adopted sons, but we are the children of God, as Paul will go on to say, but in what sense are we the children of God? The Galatian saints had begun following the Judaizers, but under what gospel had they been saved in the first place, Paul’s gospel!
Paul had begotten them by his gospel, they had their new creation, because of believing the good news Paul presented them. Paul is the one who had led these saints to a saving knowledge of the justice resolving accomplishment of Jesus Christ on their behalf, Paul gave birth to these saints in the sense of bringing them to a saving knowledge of Christ.
Unfortunately, we continue to sin, even though our sins have been paid for, and we will continue to sin, as long as we remain in our earthly bodies with the indwelling sin nature we inherited from Adam, God’s justice has been satisfied, but sin will remain a part of our earthly existence.
Yet, Satan’s ministers of righteousness are busy at work within the righteous structure called religion, in order to keep the meaning of Paul’s good news hidden, to keep people’s eyes blinded to the truth of what Christ really accomplished.
The sin issue, became a son issue, and we need to see ourselves properly, apart from faith in the One who is faithful on our behalf, in seeing ourselves properly, when it comes to how we view other people, because they have the same brokenness that we have.
But, God knew what it would take to save us, he knew what it would take to have us dwell with him through eternity future, and that dwelling with him would require that we would measure up to his degree of rightness, and measuring up to his degree of rightness would only come one way.
We need a justifier who would justify the ungodly by faith, what a marvelous thing God has done, and who would have thought of a salvation in that sense, that God’s plan would call for him to join us to his son, therefore, what belongs to the son, now belongs to us, who have been joined to God’s son.
The law was never given as a standard by which a person could live their life and achieve righteousness, it was given to be a mirror, so that those who were placed under that law might gain a better glimpse of themselves. Paul did not say the law was written in our hearts, he said the works of the law are written in the hearts of the Gentiles.
God knows whether or not a person has placed their faith in what his son’s faith accomplished for them, or whether that person is still holding onto the notion that their good works will somehow merit them a position of righteousness in the eyes of God, God knows the motivation that resides in the human heart that underlies all the works that we call good.
Any kind of works at all, even if they appear to be good works in our mind, that are done for the purpose of attaining salvation or for the purpose of maintaining salvation, even for the purpose of proving one’s salvation is a slap in the face of God, who had to provide the gift of salvation, because people’s righteousness would be totally incapable of meriting it.
Our good works must be done solely out of appreciation for what God has already accomplished, we place our faith in Christ’s faithfulness, and that alone.
God never intended subjective feelings to be a replacement for objective truth, that is why he has given us his Word, only when inner peace lines up with the written Word of God, are we headed in the proper direction.
We not only have peace with God, we can enjoy the peace of God, who shall keep our hearts and minds through Jesus Christ in every circumstance that we face, we should not take any course of action that we do not have peace about, but is an inner sense of peace about something a sure fire fail safe system when it comes to choosing a direction to take in our lives?
There are multitudes who are putting faith in their feelings, but we often connect our emotions to our prayer life, and thus we further validate in our minds the course of action we were bent toward taking in the first place, if things go right in our eyes, all is well and good, we have not only affirmed ourselves, we have affirmed our Savior.
If things go topsy-turvy, perhaps the devil got involved in the details, but can feelings, even a sense of inner peace, always be trusted as a fail safe method to always point us in the proper direction, when it comes to the contentment or peace department, God through his power from on high, does not lead independently of his Word.
The only ones who can take up any piece of God’s armor, and the only ones who are involved in this struggle against Satan and his forces, are those who have been placed into Christ. The fact that the helmet is related to salvation indicates that their blows are directed at the believer’s security and assurance of being placed into Christ.
This helmet covers our mind, intellect or reasoning. The two dangerous edges of Satan and his forces broadsword are discouragement and doubt. We did not receive our righteous standing before God by the things we have done in the past that we might consider to be righteous.
We certainly do not maintain it by the things we continue to do or what we promise God that we will do that we might consider to be righteous. Our justification was something accomplished for us by God’s grace. God has already set everyone in Christ apart as holy.
Everyone who is in Christ stands perfectly righteous or perfectly holy, justified according to God’s gift declaration of righteousness. We that believed Paul’s gospel, we have the very righteousness of Jesus Christ himself credited to our account. Our being set apart is not contingent upon the degree to which we set ourselves apart.
We can become vulnerable to Satan and his forces deception in this area if we fail to daily put on this helmet of salvation. They are committed to fouling up our life through their deception that nothing really happened when we were born anew.
They may disrupt our daily victory, but they can do nothing to disrupt our new identity in Christ. However, if they can get us to believe that we are not in Christ, we will live as though we are not in Christ, even though we are secure in him.
Religion is Satan’s invention and many people involved in religion’s domain are dealing with God on the basis of probation, rather than salvation. Then God must make a decision in their minds, whether or not to save that individual.
If they will simply dedicate themselves to no longer sin, that is the idea promoted by Satan’s ministers of righteousness, their suitability for heaven depends upon their turning away from all of their sins. God testing over and over again the validity of that dedication, then God will knew if they are truly devoted to him, then God will be able to finally make a decision as to whether or not they are heaven worthy.
Then there are people who believe that God’s grace as it relates to salvation is something that has to be tapped into, new sins requiring new grace and new forgiveness. Satan’s purpose in this age of grace is to confuse Paul’s gospel with a gospel so nearly to it.
We can be sure that confusion concerning that gospel through the use of a counterfeit gospel; a gospel that looks so much like Paul’s gospel that we would not know the difference, if we did not clearly know Paul’s gospel, will be Satan and his forces focus in this age of grace.
Putting this helmet on daily is important, God has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation, to tell the world God is not imputing their trespasses unto them; so we see the world still thinks he is. This ministry of reconciliation is not to the saved, we know we are reconciled, but now all have access to God, a change in status for the entire world.
Does this mean the entire world is save? No. We have to have an individual change of status and that takes place when we accept what God’s son accomplished for us. The issue with God is what his son accomplished, not sin. What is the world going to believe about what God’s son accomplished, or do they still think God is counting those sins against them and God is coming back to haunt them at some point in time.
We need to put that helmet of salvation on daily, because when Paul talks about a new creature; old things are passed away, behold all things are become new, he is not talking about sin in an individual’s life, he is talking about the identity we once were in Adam prior to salvation. We have a new identity in the second Adam, God has sealed us in Christ.
Do we not know that God has held back the wrath we so justly deserve, but do we not know that he has been good to us in holding back that wrath, he has not held back his wrath, because he is happy with who we think we are, or because he is satisfied with who we are trying to become.
God has been long-suffering in holding back his wrath, because he hopes that we will consider his goodness through is son, our Savior Jesus Christ, and flee to his grace, God wants us to change our mind about who we are from fleshly perspective, apart from Christ.
It is the goodness of God, that leads a person to a change of thinking, that draws that person to adopt what God has said is true in his Word. God is not patiently waiting for us to change our mind about what we do, many have done that thinking it gains salvation, the self-righteous moralizer looks in their self-righteous mirror, and they think God must be satisfied, a prize package.
All people should change their minds about the way that God has provided, and what his son accomplished where their sins are concerned, because not all people believe that those sins were done away with Christ’s payment.
When peace of mind is based solely on circumstances, depression is the ultimate end for all, because we live in a sin cursed world, physical death is on it’s way for each of us, timing of that being the only uncertainty of that reality.
Sin brings death, insecurity is the ultimate mind set for all who’s mind are focused on earthly things, which is precisely why Paul is directing believers to a refocus of thinking, God provides a way for believers to have joy, even in the midst of unhappy circumstances.
Understanding peace with God, appreciating peace with God is that which allows the peace of God to rule our minds, govern our emotions, grace is the fountain head of joy.
God has manifested his grace to us through the accomplishments of his son, each and every blessings is to provide for us a place of security and a place of specialness that we know that is there for us in the mind of God, we are secure and we are special, the result of that grace, peace.
Most of Paul’s pain and suffering came from making the right decisions, Paul desired to be found in Christ, not with a righteous record that could be gauged as having come from Paul as the source, but a mind set of glorious joy can only begin with a proper understanding of God’s glorious grace.
Is it not interesting that the Gentiles had been considered dogs, but Paul speaking to the saints in Philippi, and it is the unbelieving Israelites who are considered dogs.
Paul is simply drawing a contrast between those who were relying upon ritual for righteousness, and those who place no confidence whatsoever in their flesh for a right standing before God, and those false teachers who thought that ritual could do something, and the ritual was circumcision.
Paul’s point in this age of grace, is circumcision apart from faith is nothing more than concision, it is nothing more than mutilation, Paul had more reason to boast if that is the way God values righteousness, if he values it through our performance.
Paul was not a Gentile converted, then circumcised as a proselyte to the Race of Israel, he was not a Gentile taking hold of Israel’s covenant and being circumcised, he was born into a Israelite family, Abraham’s blood flowed in his veins.
Paul was answering a group of people in his day (Philippians 3:9), in fact they were bragging, they were boasting about their achievements as though God could do nothing other than to declare them righteous, because they deserved just such a declaration.
Paul warned us to guard against those who would promote a righteousness through performance idea, “Beware of Dogs, Beware of Evil Workers, Beware of the Concision.”
There is no scale in God’s mind other than Christ’s righteousness, righteousness that has been credited freely without any cause in us, to our account, there can be no further payment for sin, as that payment was made by Jesus Christ.
We are struggling with the belief aspect of our growth, because we are still struggling with the belief aspect of our growth: who we are in Christ. With the helmet of salvation firmly on, we see ourselves for who we really are, it is imperative to our growth and maturity in our ministry of reconciliation.
God’s basic goal for our life is character development, but there certainly are a lot of distractions, diversions, disappointments, trials and traumas which come along to disrupt the process. Paul reminds us that the tribulations we face are actually a means of achieving our supreme goal of maturity.
People tend to look for quick-fix solutions to difficult situations, but God’s plan is for us to hang in there and grow up. We need occasional mountaintop experiences, but the fertile soil for growth is always down in the valleys of tribulation, not on the mountaintops.
When we stop believing that God is in control; that he is working everything out for our good; that whatever happens is for the ultimate best of everyone involved, however little it seems to be that way. The more time and energy we invest in contemplating our own plans on how to live our life, the less time and energy we have to seek God’s plan for our ministry of reconciliation.
When our faith in God’s omnipotence and care is strong, it is impossible for Satan and his forces to break through our shield of faith and land an attack. Satan and his forces are actively involved in trying to distract us by peppering our mind with their thoughts and ideas.
The first thing we need to understand about the battle for our mind, the main targets which must be destroyed, are the strongholds. Strongholds are negative patterns of thought, which are burned into our minds either through repetition over time or through one-time traumatic experiences.
Before we were born anew, all our stimulation came from the environment of this hostile world. Every day we lived in this environment we were influenced by it and preconditioned to conform to it. The worldly stimulation we were exposed to was both brief and prevailing.
Brief stimulation includes individual events, situations, places and personal encounters we experienced. We were influenced by books, movies, music and traumatic events we experienced or witnessed. We learned a way to cope with these experiences and resolve the conflicts they produced.
Prevailing stimulation consists of long-term exposure to our environment, the influence of our family and friends, our neighborhood or our jobs. We developed a philosophy about how to survive, cope and succeed in this world apart from God. Once a stronghold of thought and response is entrenched in our mind, our ability to choose and act contrary to that pattern is virtually nonexistent.
That is why Paul insists that we be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Strongholds in our mind are the result of conditioning; we can be reconditioned by the renewing of our mind, anything that has been learned can be unlearned.
Satan and his forces have no power over us except what we give them by failing to take every thought captive and thus being deceived into believing their lies. If Satan and his forces can get us to believe a lie, they can control our life. If we fail to take a thought captive to the obedience of Christ, but believe it, they will control us.
Since Satan and his forces primary weapon is the lie, our defense against them is the truth. Dealing with Satan and his forces is not a power encounter; it is a truth encounter. Satan and his forces know just what buttons to push to tempt us.
They have observed our behavior over the years and they know where we are vulnerable, and that is where they will attack. Our temptations will be unique to our area of vulnerability. The moment we are tempted, we are at the threshold of a decision, and if we do not immediately choose to take that thought captive, we will begin to consider it as an option.
If we begin to mull it over in our mind, immediately our emotions will be affected and the likelihood of yielding to that temptation is increased. We need to take every thought captive by practicing first-frame thinking, evaluate every thought by the truth and do not give place to the lie.
Our emotions play a major role in the process of renewing our mind, our emotions reveal our perceptions and here is where the shield of faith comes into play. Our emotions are a product of our thought life, and if we are not thinking right, if our mind is not being renewed, if we are not perceiving God and his word properly, it will show up in our emotional life.
If we fail to acknowledge our emotions, we may make ourselves a slow-moving target for Satan and his forces. We are not shaped as much by our environment as we are by our perception of our environment. Life’s events do not determine who we are; God has determined who we are, and our interpretation of life’s events determines how well we will handle the pressures of life.
In reality, we have very little control over our emotions, but we do have control over our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our feelings and our responses. If what we believe does not reflect truth, then what we feel does not reflect reality. When we believe what we feel instead of the truth, how will our ministry of reconciliation be? As inconsistent as our feelings.
The important process of renewing our mind includes managing our emotions by managing our thoughts and perceptions. Satan and his forces are always hurling their fiery darts of fear, doubt and worry in our direction, but the only time they can hit us is when we let our shield of faith down.
A shield deflects; it keeps the darts of the enemy away from our mind, the shield moves with the attack. When we allow doubt to creep in, an actively raised shield of faith prevents this otherwise inhibiting fatigue, so the shield is the first line of defense, the enemy has to get past the shield first.
Our only boast is in Jesus Christ, none of us can boast in ourselves, there will be no body in heaven wearing a merit badge based on fleshly achievement, no one there will be introduced as super saint.
Our reconciliation is of God, he designed it, he provided the means by which it could be accomplished, but people continue to operate today in their thinking, nothings really changed, under the assumption that their sin is separating them from God.
If an ounce of new reconciliation in this Age of Grace could be restored for anyone, when it comes to the issue of their sins, then the degree of forgiveness that must be obtained in order to restore the reconciliation is the very degree to which that individual refuses to believe what Christ accomplished, he accomplished it all.
The truth is, a person could not obtain an ounce of forgiveness if they tried, because God has already forgiven us all, that is why Christ’s ambassadors have the responsibility and privilege of making the reality of the reconciliation Christ has already accomplished, known to those who know nothing of it.
We can look at others through new perspective, because we serve others today, motivated by appreciation in the fact that God loves them, Christ died for them, we are intricately joined to them, just as we are joined to Christ, the very instance they believe the good news that Paul proclaimed.
Love has much more to do with attitude in action, than it has to do with emotions, direction that does what is in the best interest of another individual, this is a work of righteousness. The law had apprehension as a motivation factor, our labor of love under the Age of Grace has had the apprehension aspect removed entirely.
Israel’s labour of love under the law contract was a system of performance according to demand, they had to deal with their neighbors according to a strict system of rules and regulations, the law told them how to deal with one another.
We are to serve others today, based on how God expressed his love to others through Christ, and what he accomplished for them, who he made them and us to be in our savior, by joining us to our savior.
We should be extremely relieved to know that God’s not using our works of faith, he is not even using out labour of love to determine our worthiness for heaven, we know sins have been taken off the table.
God uses Christ’s labour of love, as expressed through what Christ accomplished on our behalf, and our trust in what Christ accomplished where our sins are concerned, as his criteria for our heaven worthiness, we can rejoice that it’s Christ’s faithfulness, not our faithfulness.
When the circumstance of the moment is a happy circumstance, when everything is well on the home front, that is when we can say a person might very well be happy, but circumstances can go south, if joy were dependent upon the situation at hand, it would be uncertain as a match lit on a windy day.
Joy is a trust issue, joy for a believer is a state of mind, independent of surrounding circumstances, rejoicing is the exhibit of that inter-state of mind, the joy Paul is talking about has no relationship to the transient nature of life, so the believers attitude need not to be come victim to uncertainty or adversity.
What a marvelous plan God had for us! God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off of the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. The greatest determinant of our mental health and freedom is a true understanding of God’s reconciliation.
The insidious reality of Satan and his forces relentless assault of deception on our mind can keep us from experiencing maturity and freedom, because our past has shaped our present belief system and will determine our future unless it is dealt with. We have been tricked into believing that what we do makes us what we are.
We fail, so we see ourselves as failures, which only causes us to fail more. We sin, so we see ourselves as sinners, which only causes us to sin more. We have been sucked into Satan and his forces futile equation, and that false belief sends us into a tailspin of hopelessness and defeat.
It is absolutely vital that we put on the breastplate of righteousness, so that we can resist the persistent accusations of Satan and his forces, they never give up trying to get us down and keep us down by hurling one false accusation after another. Wholeness and meaning in life are not the products of what we have or do not have, what we have done or have not done, we are already a whole person and possess a life of infinite meaning and purpose because of who we are in Christ.
Our understanding of the identity that Adam had before the fall, that identity has been restored to us, that restored identity is the critical foundation for our belief structure and our behavior patterns. Many people that are of the body of Christ have obsessive-compulsive behaviors because of this relentless battle for their minds, and the battle for our mind can only be won as we personally choose truth.
A mentally healthy person is one who is in touch with reality and relatively free of anxiety. Rejoice in Christ always, in our minds is what this is all about, everything whether good or evil begins in the arena of our minds. Joy is a trust issue; joy in Christ for a believer is that of a state of mind independent of surrounding circumstances.
Rejoicing is the exhibit of that interstate of mind, because no longer do we have to strive to attain and maintain God’s acceptance on the basis of who we are and what we can do, no longer are our sins held against us, no longer does the death penalty for sin hang over us. Joy comes from an understanding of the grace of God, an understanding and appreciation of the resultant peace with God that we now have because of God’s grace.
Paul wants us to know at one point in time something was true, but now something else is true. Paul presented the evidence that all people of all time justly deserve the wrath of a perfectly just God, because people glorifies themselves by filtering everything they say and everything they do through that screen of self-protection, self-elevation, and self-gratification.
But now, as far as God is concerned, he loved mankind so much that he was willing to let his own son die for sinful people, and have his son pay all the penalties of their sins, forget their rebelliousness and overlook their hostility, while they were still sinners, still rebellious, and still hostile. God made up his mind to become completely reconciled to mankind before people made any signs of making peace with God.
God has one-sidedly reconciled himself to mankind through what the death of his son accomplished; all sins and hostility are paid for as far as God is concerned. By removing the sin issue from the table of God’s justice, God effectively canceled Satan’s ownership of all mankind.
Those who put on the breastplate of righteousness know that we have peace with God, for a person to have to make their own peace with God would be nothing more than an exercise in futility, it could never be done. We could not make peace with God, to say that anyone could make peace with God, would be to limit God to his mercy, because grace is the foundation on which Paul’s entire ministry was built.
There is a glory that belongs to God’s grace, and it is to be praised on the bases on what God’s grace has accomplished.
If a person is holding on to the law today, in order to keep their salvation, they do not understand Paul’s good news at all! It is a dangerous thing to attribute righteousness to law keeping today, because keeping the law prior to salvation would not get a person saved, and keeping the law after salvation will not keep a person saved.
It does no good for ministers of righteousness to replace the word salvation with fellowship, because that is just as damning an idea! If fellowship is not based on performance, but based on position as Paul tells us it is, to suppose a person can lose their fellowship with God based on their performance, is not to understand what Christ accomplished where their sins are concerned.
This is the hiding of the truth, and the stealing of the truth away from people that ministers of righteousness involve themselves every week, they steal the truth, they hide salvation by grace alone through faith alone in their cross work ideal of Christ alone, in their effort to stick with tradition, rather than slick with truth, so they follow the tradition of men, because people are resting in the law today.
What does it mean to walk in the spirit, should not the word spirit, be new nature? Galatians 5:16-18 - This I say then, walk in the new nature, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusts against the new nature, and the new new nature against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would, but if you be led of the new nature, you are not under the law.
Paul talks about a battle going on in the mind of every believer, a struggle taking place between the new nature and the flesh, a struggle taking place between the ears of the believer. The flesh, Paul’s talking about all that we once were in Adam, prior to salvation, but once saved, we are no longer in Adam, at the very point of our believe, we are that instant in Christ, having been forever joined to our savior, the new nature.
Our pride is such, that we will always have that tendency to think more highly of ourselves then we ought, everything we say and everything we do is filtered through that sieve of self, it is just our sin nature.
Paul’s great desire was to know Jesus Christ in his resurrection power, because that same power that raised Christ from among the dead was energizing in Paul, and it is energizing in us.
There are believers out there who know Christ in his resurrection power, because they are acquainted to one degree or another with the fellowship of his sufferings, one does not come apart from the other.
Religion is fill with lots of people who would rather beg God to fix their suffering circumstances, rather than to thank God for his enabling grace that is sufficient for every suffering saint, that energizing power, most of Paul’s pain and suffering came from making the right decisions.
Paul was striving to know Christ, and know him intimately in the power of his resurrection, and in the fellowship of his suffering, Paul wanted Christ’s life to be manifest in his own life.
We are more vulnerable to Satan and his forces deception than to any of their other schemes, because when they tempt us or accuse us, we can recognize it, but when they deceive us, we do not always know it, that is their strategy, to keep us in the dark.
We cannot expose their deception by human reasoning; we can only do it by the light of the truth, it is the only valid piece of the armor against the darkness of deception. It is critical that when we put on the armor of God, we start with the belt of truth, because the only thing big about Satan and his forces are their mouth, they are habitual liars.
When we put on the armor of God we are really putting on Christ, and when we put on Christ, we take ourselves out of the realm of the flesh, where we are vulnerable to attack, it is not wise for us to live on Satan and his forces level. Since their primary weapon is the lie, our belt of truth is continually being attacked.
If they can disable us in the area of truth, we become an easy target for their other attacks. We stand firm in the truth by relating everything we do to the truth of God’s word, and when we learn to live in the truth on a daily basis, we will grow to love the truth because we will have nothing to hide.
If Satan and his forces can deceive us into believing a lie, they can control our life in that area. God’s protection is that our role is not passive, God requires us to be active participants in the defense that he has provided for us.
The belt of truth challenges us to be mentally active, not passive, because unlike our day-to-day emotions, which are the product of our day-to-day thought life, the emotional baggage from the past is always there. Years of exposure and experience in life have etched emotional grooves inside us, which produce a decided reaction when a certain topic is introduced.
We may have grown up with a physically, emotionally or sexually abusive parent. We may have suffered through a painful relationship in the past: a broken friendship, the untimely death of a loved one, a divorce. When a present event activates one of those emotional grooves, we believe what we feel instead of believing what is true.
Perceiving those events from the perspective of our new identity, which God sealed in Christ, is what starts the process of healing those damaged emotions, because we have the privilege of evaluating our past experience in the light of who we are now, as opposed to who we were then.
We must learn how to resolve previous conflicts or the emotional baggage will accumulate as we continue to withdraw from life, the past will control our life as our options for handing it continue to decrease. Those who have had major traumas and have learned to resolve them by wearing the belt of truth know how devastating the past can be to present reality.
When we do not understand the doctrinal truths Paul taught pertaining to our sealed position in Christ, we have no ground for success in the practical arena. When we get our eyes off our new identity, and try to produce in our daily experience the acceptance God has already extended to us, we will struggle, because Satan and his forces will try to convince us that we are an unworthy, unacceptable, sin-sick person who will never amount to anything in God’s eyes.
We are saints whom God has declared righteous, believing their lie will lock us into a defeated, fruitless life, but believing God’s truth about who we are will set us free. It is imperative to our growth and maturity that we believe God’s truth about who we are.
Our old pattern for thinking and responding to our sin-trained flesh must be transformed by the renewing of our mind, it is our responsibility to change our behavior by putting to death the deeds of the body. The battleground we face is in our mind, and Satan and his forces are at the heart of all sin, and deceive people into believing a lie.
The most dangerous and harmful detriments to our growth is passivity, putting our mind in neutral and coasting, sitting back and waiting for God to do everything is not God’s way to maturity.
We would rather be the blamer than the one being blamed, excepting blame means we have got a crack in that perfect persona of ours, the blame game is the battle that no one wants to lose.
Rather than recognizing the unworthiness of the flesh, and the imputed worthiness of the new nature, we spend our lives trying to convince ourselves and others of our value, one of the ways we do it is by elevating self through the denigration of someone else.
The unseen put down, that is a major tool in our ego preservation tool box, being critical of others is an intricate part of maintaining that fantasy that we are perfect and others are somewhere a bit beneath us, that is why we are immediate in our defense of self, a wiliness to aggressively find fault with others, a way to be superior, to feel safe.
Thank God that our destiny, our blessings are not dependent on our serving, because Christ did the serving for us, he did it faithfully, as well as it could be done, he is our righteousness, but every believer is promised reward at the Judgment Seat of Christ, a judgment all believers must under go, and the issue there will be rewards or lost of rewards for how we served the Body of Christ.
Paul wants us to recognize that Justification and Sanctification are not based upon feelings at all, they have nothing to do with feelings or emotions, they are not based on sensation in any sense. In fact, they are not based upon the capacity or the production of the flesh in any sense at all, because all now have equal access to God today.
According to Paul, God had given up on dealing with the Gentiles, and he called out one man, Abram, through who would come that special nation, that special people Israel. God belongs to Israel and Israel belongs to God, they are called the children of God, God’s espoused wife no less, but the blessing of reconciliation changed all that.
Reconciliation simply means a change in status, a change in status for true entire world, does that mean the entire world is saved? No! We have to have an individual change of status, and that takes place when we accept what the son accomplished for us, our sin debt being forever settled.
Now all have access to God, sin is no longer the issue with God, the issue with God today is his son, will we accept what Jesus Christ accomplished, our sin debt pain in full, or will we reject it?
All the different churches of our day is best described as the Corinthians epistle, equally the Galatians epistle, the same mind set that led to the judgment Isaiah warned Israel about, continues to operate within society today.
It never went away, the same inner mind set, that same sin nature at work in people throughout history, the more things change, the more they stay the same. They are marked by divisions, they have divided into little factions, into little groups and little cliques, separating one from another over who is more important than the other person, minds bent on serving only self.
Only when we come to see ourselves as God sees us, and are able to fully appreciate and understand who God has already made us to be, and who he has made us to be in Christ, can we become in our behavior, what he wants us to be in that aspect of our lives.
As Paul’s sound doctrine is taken in and fully appreciated, the believer who takes that doctrine in, and appreciates it, and applies it, begins to grow and mature in what they believe, that believer’s mind is being transformed in the process.
As we understand what God accomplished through his son for us, and build upon that foundation the truths of who he has made us to be by placing us into his son, we begin to view ourselves as God views us, and that is great security to be found in doing so.
The person who does not know what death is does not know either what resurrection is. In order to take the resurrection seriously, we must also take death seriously. The Christian belief in the resurrection of the body did not arise from philosophical speculations or wishful thinking like the notion of the immortality of the soul.
It arose from the conviction that such an event had actually already taken place with the resurrection of Jesus from among the dead. The resurrection is proof that Jesus is who he claimed to be, and that his sacrifice was pleasing to God. As long as Jesus lay in the tomb, he was just another tragic religious figure who suffered a martyr’s death.
In fact, Paul tells us that the resurrection is the greatest display of God’s power ever to be demonstrated, nor can it ever be surpassed. Our decree of judicial perfection in the eyes of God comes not through Jesus’ death for our sins, but through our union with Jesus’ resurrection life.
Paul’s statement that Jesus’ resurrection was “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep,” the expression “first fruits” has little meaning for today’s urban dwellers. In Bible times, it had a rich meaning because it referred to the first produce of the harvest, which was offered in sacrifice to God to express gratitude for granting a new harvest.
Thus, the first fruits, which were brought to the Temple, were seen not as mere hope of a new harvest, but as its actual beginning. Jesus’ resurrection, then, is “the first fruits” in the sense that it has made the resurrection of believers not a mere possibility, but a certainty.
God planned that his son become sin for the world which his son did indeed become, but when it comes to being made the righteousness of God IN Christ, what response is necessary in order for a person to be made the righteousness of God by being placed INTO CHRIST? BELIEF in what God’s son accomplished where sins are concerned is that required response, it is very simple when we understand the difference in Reconciliation and Righteousness.
Not everyone has been baptized into Christ even though Christ, by himself, purged his or her sins when his blood dripped on God’s Ark. If Christ purged only the sins of believers, then Christ did not become a ransom for all, faith in what Christ accomplished where your sins are concerned is the requirement to be placed into Christ and have Christ’s test score placed on your paper.
Paul wanted to be found clothed in the righteousness that comes from being placed INTO Jesus Christ rather than to be found wearing the righteousness that came from his performance. Paul knew that the righteousness related to his performance would never measure up to the level of God’s righteousness.
The reality of reconciliation is the good news that Satan would gladly give up his pitchfork to keep people from believing today, and he has been very successful through what Paul calls “ministers of righteousness” in doing that very thing.
Satan only needs to focus on today to keep people in a lost condition is The Reality of Reconciliation, he does not need to go any further than that. If Satan can keep that glorious truth hidden by blinding people's eyes to it through a message that keeps sin on the table of God’s justice where that sin has already been put away, that turns Paul’s glorious gospel into a not so glorious gospel after all! Many people are living in their minds today with probation rather than salvation.
Illustrations of the diversities of early Christianity are many, which are called Christologies. Christologies is what do you believe about Christ: what kind of nature is Jesus Christ?
We can map out all these differences; when did Jesus become divine according to the gospel of John? He always was. He was with God from the very beginning. Everything was created through him. The beginning of the gospel of John ends up having the Christology that now become Orthodox Christianity.
Before Jesus was executed, he was recognized as a prophet, he seems to accept himself as a prophet, and it may be that he claimed to be a king or a messiah, but certainly by the time of his execution, some people thought he was a king, because that is the charge on which he was executed.
The Romans executed Jesus, because at least either he or other people were claiming that he was a king. He is a prophet and he is a king, but does that mean Jesus is divine? No, of course not.
The Israelites had lots of kings that were not divine. The Israelites had lots of prophets that were not divine. Many modern people get the idea that the word “Christ” or “Messiah” in itself signifies divinity, but it doesn’t. The “Messiah” in Jesus’ day was simply some Israelite figure who would rise up and take over the throne of David and reestablish the kingdom of Israel.
Calling someone the messiah in the ancient world did not mean that he was divine. Jesus is a prophet; he is even considered the messiah, but that does not make him divine. Some Christians therefore have to make a decision. Is Jesus human and only human? Is Jesus human and divine?
Jesus being human and divine is the take most followers of Jesus end up taking, although there are some followers today of Jesus who believed he was purely human. Those who believe Jesus was purely human tended to understand the Israelites history and they even accept him as a messiah, but that does not mean they think he was God.
They know the monotheism of Israel does not and cannot evolve from polytheism, because the two are based on radically divergent world-views, radically divergent intuitions about reality. The monotheism of Israel was not, it could not be the natural outgrowth of the polytheism of an earlier age, it was a radical break with it.
Monotheism was a revolution, not an evolution. Therefore, they say, no, Jesus cannot be divine. The early Christians who chose the human and divine route, though they had to spilt this up. Some believed Jesus was always divine; others believed Jesus became divine.
If Jesus became divine, then when did he become divine, at his birth, at his baptism, or at his resurrection? Other Christians say, no, he always was divine, but even they believed in different choices too, because some believed Jesus was divine but also fully human.
Other Christians believed Jesus was fully divine but not fully human. They believed Jesus was so divine he was God, so that when Jesus walked along on wet sand on the beach, his feet did not leave footprints, that is how divine he was, but this belief became declared as a heresy.
Out of all these choices, only one of them is considered Orthodox by the later church, so that what Christians end up with is the Nicene Creed, or the Creed of Chalcedon, which is what Christians came to believe? There were lots of complexities in early Christianity that finally got whittled down into a more united consensus view on Christology.
It is God’s sovereign right to choose the criteria and he chose to use the criteria of belief. God has always used faith in every age; God has always used faith, or what a person believes, as the criteria necessary to effect salvation for humankind.
Our faith in the good news of Christ given to Paul enables God to impute us with the faith of his son. Once we believe, and are sealed, it is not about us; our faith, but Christ’s faith. If you want God to view you today, you got to be in his son.
For any one to think they are just before God through their performance; to think that they have perfected themselves with God through their behavior proves that man is a liar and the truth is not in them. One who puts their faith in the Nicene Creed or any Creed, has not met the criteria that God requires, and living up to a Creed is based upon performance.
Ministers of righteousness have a lot of fun with these Creeds controlling people! How can you get into his son, and have all of his righteousness freely imputed to your account? By simply taking God at his word, concerning what his son accomplished for you.
This one-sided reconciliation on God’s part is self-evident proof of God’s superabundant love to man. As far as God is concerned, he loved us so much that he was willing to let his own son die for sinful man, and have his son pay all the penalties for their sins, forget their rebelliousness and overlook their hostility, while they were still sinners, still rebellious, and still hostile.
God made up his mind to become completely reconciled to mankind before man made any signs of making peace with God. God has told the world through Paul’s teaching’s (not through Creeds), that he has reconciled himself to them because of his love for them, and it was God alone who did this harmonious act; we have had nothing to do with it, all we have had to do is to receive the reconciliation that God has made with mankind.
God has one-sidedly reconciled himself to mankind through what the death of his son accomplished; all sins and hostility are paid for as far as God is concerned, and it is time all people begin to believe it. This three-in-one god concept has its roots from polytheism; monotheism was a revolution, it was a radical brake from polytheism, not an evolution of polytheism!
If you want to believe Jesus is God, whatever. God has reconciled himself to man, before man wrote those Creeds?
Reconciliation and sanctification, two different judicial transactions, God is no longer imputing the sins of the world, unto the world, because he imputed those sins to his son. God has reconciled the entire world; believers and non-believers alike to himself through what his son accomplished.
Now, we need to be placed into God’s son, so that we can have his son’s righteousness attributed freely to our account. Total abandonment of any notion that our performance is connected by any means or in any manner to our righteous standing IN Christ.
Our performance would never cut it, not before we were born anew, and not after, we need to allow God’s power to take up residence with us, but we do not control this power, as if it were some universal force; rather, we have access to this power that is dwelling within us.
We need to cease attributing our righteous standing before God to our performance and keep our mind focused solely on how God views us IN Christ, that is what grace-life is all about, and we will be victorious in that God’s power can now produce it’s fruit in our life. When God raised Jesus from among the dead, it was God’s stamp of “pain in full” on the invoice of our sin debt.
We could not get right with God in a million life times of trial and error, we could never make ourselves right with God; God had to do what we could not do. Now believing sinners can be certain that in Christ, they are justified. The simple message of Paul’s gospel is total payment for sin, accomplished by Christ’s total sacrifice.
According to Paul, we have how much forgiveness, total forgiveness! If we want God to view us today, we got to be in his son. How can we get into his son, and have all of his righteousness freely imputed to our account? By simply taking God at his word concerning what his son accomplished for us, it is as simply as that.
When God says he is satisfied with what Christ did for our sins, when Christ died for them, all our sins were all future. It is a son issue on our part, not a sin issue, in order to receive the gift of salivation. The resurrection of Christ is not only a historical event that we look back to with satisfaction and joy; it is the greatest event in history.
One of the most disturbing things is someone unable to express confidence about whether they can know if they will have eternal life or not. The very power that raised Jesus from among the dead is available to us; we were baptized into Jesus Christ with this power. Faith is taking God at his word concerning what his son accomplished on our behalf.
God did all the giving; we do only all the receiving. God knows what his son accomplished on our behalf where all of our sin debt is concerned and he is satisfied that all of that sin has already been judged on his son, leaving no judgment for us where our sin is concerned.
Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness. Justification is not a process, but is a one-time act, complete and definitive. Justification is a legal term which changes the believing sinner’s standing before God, declaring us acquitted and accepted by God, with the guilt and penalty of our sins put away forever.
In our position in Christ, now we can bear fruit unto God, but it is only in our position in Christ, not through this fleshly body in which we dwell. Only when we come to see ourselves as God sees us and are able to fully appreciate and understand who God has already made us to be and who he’s made us to be in Christ, can we become in our behavior what he wants us to be in that aspect of our lives.
We need to be less interested in trying to become something, or trying to do something, and we need to become a whole lot more interested in learning about who we already are, that is the key.
What a wonderful blessings is this blessing of sainthood, and it is ours this very instance, because saint has been our moniker in heaven, it is this very moment and has been so since we first trusted Jesus Christ.
Being made the righteousness of God himself in our union with a perfectly righteous savior, then being hid with Christ in God gives us a tremendously safe and special place, because what child does God see, when he deals with us, God sees his son, Jesus Christ.
We have been given new motivation to serve, but thank God that our destiny, our blessings are not dependent on our serving, Christ did the serving for us, he did it faithfully as well as it could be done, he is our righteousness.
When we get our eyes off our new identity, and try to produce in our daily experience the acceptance God has already extended to us, we will struggle, because the enemy will try to convince us that we are an unworthy, unacceptable, sin-sick person who will never amount to anything in God’s eyes.
We are saints whom God has declared righteous, believing the enemies lie will lock us into a defeated, fruitless life, but believing God’s truth about who we are, will set us free. It is imperative to our growth and maturity that we believe God’s truth about who we are in Christ.
If Satan cannot touch the body of Christ, then why did Paul instruct us to put on the armor of God, to resist the devil, to stand firm, and to be alert? If we are not susceptible to being wounded or trapped by Satan, why does Paul describe our relationship to the powers of darkness as a wrestling match?
Those who deny the enemy’s potential for destruction are the most vulnerable to it. Even though our eternal destiny is secure and the armor of God is readily available, we are still vulnerable to Satan’s accusations and temptations. If we give into these, we can be influenced by Satan, and if we remain under his influence long enough, we can lose control, if we fail to stand against him.
Ownership is never at stake, Satan cannot touch our new identity, but as long as we are living in this fleshly body, we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable targets to all Satan’s fiery darts. How do you think Satan carries on his worldwide ministry of evil and deception?
He is a created being; he is not omnipresent, omniscient, or omnipotent. He cannot be everywhere in the world tempting and deceiving millions of people at the same moment. He does so through an army of emissaries “fallen angels called evil spirits” who propagate his plan of rebellion around the world.
The Bible does not attempt to prove the existence of evil spirits any more than it attempts to prove the existence of God, it simply reports on their activities. If these evil spirits can get us to listen to the thoughts, they plant in our mind, they can influence us, and if we allow them to influence us long enough through temptation and accusation, they can control our ability to carry out our ministry of reconciliation.
Bad habits and sinful thought patterns were established when we learned to live our life independently of God before we were born anew. Our environment taught us to think about and respond to life, and those patterns and responses were ingrained in our mind as strongholds.
These evil spirits perpetual aim is to infiltrate our thoughts with their thoughts; they know if they can control our thoughts, they can control our behavior. They can introduce their thoughts, tempting us to act independently of our ministry of reconciliation, as if they were our own thoughts or even God’s thoughts.
These evil spirits can put thoughts in our mind even as Satan did with David (1 Chronicles 21:1). If we do not conquer their tempting thoughts right at the threshold of our mind, we will begin to mull their thought over, consider them an option, and eventually choose to act them out.
Repeated acts form a habit, and if we exercise a sinful habit long enough, a stronghold will be established in our mind. Once a stronghold is established, we can lose the ability to control our behavior in that area. Next to temptation, perhaps the most frequent and insistent attack from these evil spirits to which we are vulnerable is accusation.
Accusation is a deep-seated sense of self-deprecation; I am not important, I am not qualified, I am no good. We become paralyzed in our witness and productivity in our ministry of reconciliation by thoughts and feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.
These evil spirits often use temptation and accusation as a brutal one-two punch. They come along and say, “Why don’t you try it? Everybody does it.” Then as soon as we fall for their temping line, they change their tune to accusation: “What kind of believer are you to do such a thing? You are a pitiful excuse for a child of God.”
Many believers are perpetually discouraged and defeated because they believe their persistent lies about them. When we leave a door open for these evil spirits by not resisting temptation and accusation, they will enter it. If we continue to allow them access to that area, they will eventually control it.
Many believers today who cannot control their lives in some area wallow in self-blame instead of acting responsibly to solve the problem. They berate themselves and punish themselves for not having the willpower to break a bad habit.
God justifies those who take him at his word concerning what his son accomplished; something for nothing! Being declared righteous is God’s gift to the believing sinner and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sinner himself doing anything to deserve or merit that righteous standing.
The righteousness God credits to the account of the believer is a righteousness that comes without a cause in the one being declared so. We have to admit, that is difficult for people imbued with the pride of life to imagine. It is difficult to accept because it does not seem fair to the human mind, especially to the religiously minded.
It does not seem quite right that God could consider someone righteous, especially if that person is not expending the same amount of effort or attention that they are to become righteous by way of his or her practice. One can see why some have called this justification of God; cheap justification, one can see where the pride of life comes up with that notion.
If it is that easy, (is the idea) if you can obtain righteousness without doing something, or even trying to do something (or at the very least, promising to do something) in order to gain it-why, that would be too easy and that would make it cheap. It is absolutely free, but it was certainly not cheap, it came at tremendous cost.
Do you believe it was an all-sufficient reconciliation where the entirety of the world’s sin debt was concerned, or do you believe that you must obtain a new measure of reconciliation every time you sin? Yes, Christ died for everyone’s sins, but only those who believe and trust Paul’s message of the grace of God will have their sins actually paid for.
There are many who refuse to believe in what Christ actually accomplished, they fail to understand what the ‘for my sins’ part of Paul’s message of the grace of God is all about. They refuse to acknowledge that Christ’s death actually resolved God’s justice where the sins Christ died for are concerned and they continue to hang on the notion that God is hanging on to their sins.
This renders Christ’s payment for sin a partial payment, or a down payment, or a future payment at best, rather than a completed and satisfactory payment. God never collects a debt twice, Christ paid for your sins, this should motivate us all the more to love him and to serve him by serving others.
Our labor of love is all about transformation, it is not about reformation, and Paul’s message of the grace of God is able to transform our thinking, such that transformed thinking begins to manifest itself through transformed relation. It becomes more about who we have become, rather than about who we are trying to be.
The more we know about who we were apart from Christ, and who God made us to be in Christ, the more we see our own human sin-nature bent. Thus, the more we can see why people who have not believed Paul’s message of the grace of God are functioning in the manner they are.
Dying to self, is never portrayed as something optional, it is the reality of being born anew, God wants us to stop putting our faith in ourselves, he wants us to actually come to the place where we literally have no confidence in the flesh, but have full reliance in Christ alone.
We must come to the place of utter weakness, be stripped of all confidence in ourselves, unless we are willing to see our old lives crucified with Christ, and begin to live anew in obedience to him and then we will find our true self in Jesus. Not some depressing ‘down-on-self’ condition, but a return to God’s original pattern for man: free of obsession with self, and focused upon God.
It is not normal to have high self-esteem or low self-esteem; both are a focus on self, but to leave self alone and to be absorbed with Jesus Christ, weak in ourselves, but fully reliant upon Christ in every way. This is why God allows all kinds of things into our lives, which he uses to strip us of our personal sense of worth.
God is making us conformable to the death of Christ, so that in living experience, we might become conformed in his resurrection. This does not mean that when we die to self we become inactive or insensible, nor do we feel ourselves to be dead. Rather, dying to self means that the things of the old life are put to death, most especially the sinful ways and lifestyles we once engaged in.
The entire concept seems a bit strange to our natural eyes. Dying to self is something you can take very literal; you will die in every way possible in order to be someone you are not. Dying to self is not fun or easy, but what is particularly difficult about fighting this tendency is that it is not exactly a behavior or action.
It can certainly manifest itself in those forms, but underneath them is an attitude, a real change of mind and attitude towards sin itself and the cause of it, a change in our principle action from what is by nature the exact opposite. The answer to that sin has nothing to do with our desire to do it.
The fact is that it is grievous to God, and we do not answer that by saying that we are going to stop doing it, or we are no longer going to desire to do it, it is not our ability to stop it. The answer to the fact that we all have this sin nature lies solely in the fact that Christ paid for it, but Christ did not clean-up the sin nature.
His effort was not to take the old man and fix him up, dress him up, and make a Christian out of the old man. Christ crucified the old man, and we are called upon simply to believe what Paul tells us Christ did where that shortcoming in us is concerned. Being saved is not something that God has to do, something that God has to make a decision about doing.
Being saved is about man accepting the gift that has already been purchased, and there is no saving work to be done by Jesus, because it has all been done, it has been accomplished.
Yes, I do believe in an all sufficient reconcillitation - Jesus took care of that. What I still question is the act of works.
I do good works, not for redemption or paying for sins but to gain more rewards in the Kingdom.
Either way you look at it, I do those works knowlingly or unknowingly.
It's often after the work that I realize it is added to my account when appearing in front of the bema.
I got this strange thing in my head that if I do a good work because I know it adds to my account then it's not worth as much but a random work (without thinking about it) has more worth.
Is it about motive and recollection as to the why for the work?
Maybe the best thing is to be ignorant but knowing causes questions.
So, teachmevp, drop a bit of insights, you have tons of words to enlighten the masses.
Would much appreciate other posts to this.
Either way, I will just keep on going and praying for a bit less insight - sounds a bit strange.
Yes, I do believe in an all sufficient reconcillitation - Jesus took care of that. What I still question is the act of works.
I do good works, not for redemption or paying for sins but to gain more rewards in the Kingdom.
Either way you look at it, I do those works knowlingly or unknowingly.
It's often after the work that I realize it is added to my account when appearing in front of the bema.
I got this strange thing in my head that if I do a good work because I know it adds to my account then it's not worth as much but a random work (without thinking about it) has more worth.
Is it about motive and recollection as to the why for the work?
Maybe the best thing is to be ignorant but knowing causes questions.
So, teachmevp, drop a bit of insights, you have tons of words to enlighten the masses.
Would much appreciate other posts to this.
Either way, I will just keep on going and praying for a bit less insight - sounds a bit strange.
It is an amazing thing that for believers and that is the only people to whom Paul is writing, there is a Bema Seat of Christ Judgment that husbands will not be judged by how well their wives responded, it will be how well they led, and wives will not be judged as to whether their husbands were leading correctly, but in their role in serving the husband.
Paul’s not saying, walk worthy in order to gain our calling, or walk worthy in order to keep our calling, but walk worthy of the calling that belongs to us, because God has freely given it to us. How can we who have been justified freely, sanctified in Christ, how should we be conducting ourselves, we should conduct ourselves in a manner conducive to the job that God’s given us.
We should conduct ourselves in a manner that goes sides by side or that goes in hand with what God’s already called us to do, that job is our ambassadorship. It is our ambassadorship of the message of reconciliation, how our we to conduct ourself given our ambassadorship, we are called to peace, this is how believer’s are to relate to other believers. Sorry buddy, somehow my morning post got mixed up with my answer to you.
As believers, we do not possess the life that Jesus got when God raised him from among the dead as an inherent quality any more than we possess God’s righteousness as a property in our own nature. Just as in the midst of our sinfulness, we are righteous, so in the midst of our self-evident mortality, we are going to get the life God gave to Jesus.
In John 5:26, Jesus was “to have” that life that God has within himself, Jesus never had that kind of life before, he was to have it. In 1 John 1:1-5, Jesus indeed got that life, his disciples testify he got that life he was telling them he was going to get.
As a result of our being sealed in Christ, we are what we are not. In ourselves, we are not righteous and not immortal, but in Christ, we are both righteous and immortal. The fact that the living saints will meet with Christ at the same time as the sleeping saints indicates that the latter have not yet been united with Christ in heaven.
Paul was not concerned about a ‘state’ which exists between death and resurrection, but for a relationship that exists between the believer and Christ through death. This relationship of being with Christ is not interrupted by death, because the believer who sleeps in Christ has no awareness of the passing of time.
Paul did not think the question of the status of the person between death and resurrection was a question that needed to be considered. The reason is that for Paul, those who die in Christ, their relationship with Christ is one of immediacy, because they have no awareness of the passing of time between their death and resurrection.
Paul explains that both the sleeping and living believers will be united with Christ, not at death, but at his coming for his body of believers in this age of Grace. Paul never alluded to the conscious survival of the soul and its reattachment to the body at the resurrection, that is a notion totally foreign to Paul and to Scripture as a whole.
Salvation is not doing; it is believing! It is counting what God believes to be true for you and about you as true for you and about you. Our performance is not the source of our righteousness before God; the only righteousness God can recognize is our position in Jesus Christ when it comes to mankind and mankind’s indwelling sin nature in the flesh.
To believe that what you are doing and what you are restraining yourselves from doing is the way you are earning your righteous standing with God, you have got to put a lot of confidence in your flesh to do that; religiondumb is doing that! Those who are IN Jesus Christ are those who are NOT walking after the faulty assumption that their righteousness is related to their performance, that was Israel’s problem.
Those who are IN Jesus Christ are those who place no confidence in their flesh, but understand, as Paul understood, that in their flesh dwells no good thing. The sanctification that comes by way of being placed INTO Christ - joined to Christ - is positional truth. A sanctified position IN Christ comes not as a result of behavior, it comes as a result of belief! God is not looking at how well we adhere to any standard.
God is not looking at our production. God is not looking at our behavior in order to view us as being in favor with him. What a marvelous plan God had for us! God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off of the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. God’s reconciliation to man is from God’s side only.
God alone decided to make peace with man, while man is still very much ungodly, a sinner, and while man is an active enemy to God. This one-sided reconciliation on God’s part is self-evident proof of God’s superabundant love to man.
As far as God is concerned, he loved man so much that he was willing to let his own son die for sinful man, and have his son pay all the penalties of their sins, forget their rebelliousness and overlook their hostility, while they were still sinners, still rebellious, and still hostile. God made up his mind to become completely reconciled to mankind before man made any signs of making peace with God.
God has told the world through Paul’s teaching’s, that he has reconciled himself to them because of his love for them, and it was God alone who did this harmonious act; they have had nothing to do with it, all they have had to do is to receive the reconciliation that God has made with mankind. God has one-sidedly reconciled himself to mankind through what the death of his son accomplished; all sins and hostility are paid for as far as God is concerned.
Many people involved in religion’s domain are dealing with God on the basis of probation, rather than salvation. Then God must make a decision in their minds, whether or not to save that individual. Their suitability for heaven depends upon their turning away from all of their sins.
If they will simply dedicate themselves to no longer to sin, that is the idea. God testing over and over again the validity of that dedication. Then God will know if they are truly devoted to him, then he will be able to finally make a decision as to whether or not they are heaven worthy. That is the idea in and in most people’s minds; it is the idea being promoted by ministers of righteousness.
That is probation, not salvation. God is not testing or proving people today, in order to make a final decision as to whether or not to save them, or to keep them saved. All the saving work that God could possibly do, he has already done through Christ. God now holds forth the reconciliation that Christ has accomplished, in his mind, offering man the choice to either accept or reject that gift of salvation.
Appreciation based on the reality of salvation, not apprehension based on religion’s message of probation. If Satan can keep that glorious message of Paul hidden by blinding people’s eyes to the reality of reconciliation through a message that keeps sin on the table of God’s justice where that sin has already been put away.
Many people are living in their minds today with probation rather than salvation. With Israel's earthly program being set aside, during this age of grace, no nationality enjoys special favor in the eyes of God; all must come alike to God today. God did not lift up the Gentiles, who had been without God, and put them on an equal or higher plain, than belonged to Israel.
He concluded Israel in unbelief, as he had previously concluded the Gentiles in unbelief, both of them down on the same level, so that he might have mercy on all, and that is where it is today, according to Paul. It is man who needs to be reconciled to God, not the other way around.
God is already reconciled to us, where our sins are concerned. It is not a sin issue, it is a son issue. What a marvelous plan Gods for us! God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off of the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. Understanding the grace of God is an intricate part of the joy that should really be a part of every believer’s life.
The grace of God has brought peace with God, is the foundation of every believer’s joy in this age. Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness. Justification is not a process, but is a one-time act, complete and definitive.
Justification is a legal term which changes the believing sinner’s standing before God, declaring us acquitted and accepted by God, with the guilt and penalty of our sins put away forever. Christ did not die to give us a reprieve, he did not die to give us temporary relief.
The only reason God could say through Paul, “Grace and peace be unto you“ is because his son fully paid the price. So in the midst of Paul’s troubling circumstances, he is thanking God, he is thinking what God accomplished for him through Christ.
It is simply been given to man to either accept or reject what Christ has already accomplished in this age of grace. The believer today then, is to be based upon appreciation of what Christ has already done, and the security that we have in him, rather than apprehension based upon a supposition of what God may or may not do in the future for us.
Many people involved in religion’s domain are dealing with God on the basis of probation, rather than salvation. Then God must make a decision in their minds, whether or not to save that individual. Their suitability for heaven depends upon their turning away from all of their sins.
If they will simply dedicate themselves to no longer to sin, that is the idea. God testing over and over again the validity of that dedication. Then God will know if they are truly devoted to him, then he will be able to finally make a decision as to whether or not they are heaven worthy.
That is the idea in and in most people’s minds; it is the idea being promoted by ministers of righteousness. That is probation, not salvation. God is not testing or proving people today, in order to make a final decision as to whether or not to save them, or to keep them saved.
All the saving work that God could possibly do, he has already done through Christ. God now holds forth the reconciliation that Christ has accomplished, in his mind, offering man the choice to either accept or reject that gift of salvation. Appreciation based on the reality of salvation, not apprehension based on religion’s message of probation.
God has a plan for heaven that pertains to you and I. That pertains to people today who will take God at his message through the apostle of the Gentiles, the apostle Paul. Satan and his forces are so obsessed with stealing Paul’s gospel, obsessed with keeping it hidden so people do not discover it.
As long as people do not discover Paul’s gospel, as long as they are steered away from the true gospel they cannot believe Paul’s gospel. Satan and his forces are playing a cover up game with Paul’s gospel, because they have a desire to keep people lost.
For example, Satan and his forces have deceived a great many people into believing a negative view of the body in contrast to the soul, and a concept of salvation as interior experience rather than total transformation. A great many people have been deceived into believing that their nature is dualistic, that is, consisting of a material, mortal body and a spiritual, immortal soul.
They generally envision a destiny where their immortal souls will survive the death of their body and will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven or in the torment of hell. These people have been taught that death is the separation of the immortal soul from the mortal body, so that the soul survives the body in a disembodied state.
By death, the soul is separated from the body, but a resurrection God will give incorruptible life to the body, transformed by reunion with the soul. Worst of all, dualism has given rise to the sadistic teaching that God makes the wicked suffer unending conscious torment in hell, which has been such a burden to the Christian conscience and such unnecessary offense to many seekers.
Dualism has done such a serious harm in weakening our blessed hope of Christ ‘s appearing and in distorting our understanding of our citizenship in heaven. The Bible never sees the flesh and the soul as two different forms of existence. Rather, they are manifestations of the same person, the ancient Hebrews could not conceive of one without the other.
The two are indissolubly connected because the body is the outward form of the soul and the soul the inward life of the body. The body and soul are an indivisible unity; people are seen from two different perspectives. The body is the physical reality of human existence; the soul is the vitality and personality of human existence.
“For the soul of every creature is the blood of it,” the phrase “every creature” suggests that the reference to blood apply to both humans and animals. We have here a most important insight revealed into the essence of human nature; soul and blood are identical.
The fact that a person consists of various parts which are integrated, interrelated and functionally united, leaves no room for the notion of the soul being distinct from the body and thus removing the basis for the belief in the survival of the soul at the death of the body. The first death is a temporary sleep because it is followed by a resurrection. The second death is permanent and irreversible extinction because there is no awakening.
Some people are extremely proud of their humility, there are those who put on a show humility for the sake of elevating self. The selflessness Paul has in mind in his epistles does not point to itself, it does not tell others how selfness it is in order to call attention to it’s self, it does not seek a response from others, it does not have to make an appeal to the emotions of others for the purpose of calling attention to it’s self, true selflessness would point to the selflessness of someone else, rather than it’s self.
One serving of self, leads to another serving of self, words spoken in haste, lead to other words spoken in haste, harmful words to further harmful words, we serve the sin nature rather than our Savior, as we serve self, rather than the Body of saints to whom we are as equally and intimately joined, as we are joined to our Savior.
Apart from trusting Jesus Christ as Savior, human righteousness comes from self-interest-motivation, it is self-glorifying, and while it may be of earthly benefit, that will not cut it when it comes to meeting the demands of God’s perfect justice. We cannot use experience to prove the validity of our doctrinal position, we must always use doctrine to prove the validity of our experience.
Emotion can lead us down the path, and will oftentimes, most likely lead us down the wrong path, when emotion becomes the governor of our intellect, rather than the doctrinally governed intellect becoming the ruler of our emotions. Emotion should never be the fuel, we should never be emotionally driven, but doctrinally driven.
Unbelievers and believers alike struggle with the innate sense of right and wrong, and they are drawn toward that desire to fulfill the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, that is the sin nature working in opposition to the conscience, to have a person go in a direction contrary to that inner sense of right and wrong that is common to all humankind.
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teachmevp
I like to reason out of the word, the way and their chapter and verse attitude was a stubbling block for me, how does one chapter and verses a figure of speech. These posts are just thoughts.
Tzaia
Definitely an improvement over what it was. Thanks to Raf for the suggestion. Thanks to TeachmeVP for being nice enough to comply. The achingly hard to read part stems from the content, not the format
teachmevp
The only ones who can take up any piece of God’s armor, and the only ones who are involved in this struggle against Satan and his forces, are those who have been placed into Christ. The fact that the
teachmevp
It was the new identity Christ accomplished for Paul that made such a great impact upon Paul, it is not striving to become a better someone, it is recognizing the someone God has already made us to be. It is understanding our new position in Christ, when we come to fully understand and appreciate that new position, the striving can end.
The law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ, if that is not a liberating truth! Paul told us there was a fixed rule in his life, a rule that he could count on no matter the circumstance, no matter the presence of indwelling sin, no matter his conduct, a rule that applies to all believers, and Paul calls that rule, the law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ.
It was not Paul’s practical walk that made him free from the law of sin and death, it was the law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ that liberated the apostle Paul, the law of the new nature of life in Jesus Christ is the true liberator.
Those who are in Jesus Christ are those who place no confidence in their flesh, but understood, as Paul understood, that in people’s flesh dwells no good thing.
While no believer will be sin less, hopefully, we will all sin less, as our behavior is impacted by our transformed thinking, and that transformed thinking comes through taking in the Word of God, and having the Word do its work in our lives.
The sin nature disease called iniquity runs within the deepest recesses of the human mind, recesses beyond our conscious reasoning, God can see what people cannot see, and the disease that manifests itself in our coming short of the right thing to do all of the time, every thought, every word, and every deed, and the coming short of the measure of God’s rightness, actions in our lives are called sins.
Grace is a much greater motivator than law, conduct becoming a believer does not come through a fear of losing one’s salvation, conduct becoming a believer comes from a proper understanding of the magnitude of God’s grace, and what that grace accomplished for us.
We are not to tell the lost that God can take away their sins, we are to tell the lost God has already taken them away, so that they might believe that good news message, and be joined to the Savior.
Those who believe God’s message to us through the apostle Paul, the apostle that God appointed to relay that message to us, are now ambassadors of this wonderful news which our apostle calls the glorious gospel of the grace of God.
The fact that God is no longer imputing the sins of the world, to the world of sinners has nothing to do with the self-righteous efforts through performance of individuals, it has nothing to do with a proper approach to God, in order to get him to stop doing that which he has not been doing since his son became sin on all people’s behalf.
The issue is not that of sinners making God’s son become their Savior through the avenue of a present day forgiveness of sins, but in believing that the son of God became their Savior the day he took their sins, the entirety of that sin debt upon himself, and that is what makes a person Heaven worthy.
It is not the non-imputation of sins that makes a person Heaven ready, it is the imputation of the very righteousness that belongs to the Savior that makes us Heaven worthy.
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teachmevp
We are justified through our sanctified position in Christ, we find the amazing and comforting truth that God’s love for those who are joined to his son, is the same unalterable and unending love God has for his son, that is how closely connected we are to Christ.
It is a past tense accomplishment that can never be revised, reduced, or retracted, God’s loving attitude towards those who are united to him by way of being in his son, nothing past, present, or future shall separate us from the love of God.
It is important we know the difference, because the old man and the sin nature are not one and the same, the old man speaks of our former identity with Adam, that identity is no longer true of believers. So, the old man is a thing of the past, having been crucified with Christ, and the new man is the new identity belonging to every believer, the sad news is that the new man continues to reside in our earthly bodies where the sin nature is ever present.
The old man has to do with identity, even though every believer has a new identity in Jesus Christ, every believer suffers the same propensity, the battle against the sin nature that the apostle Paul struggled with himself on a day-by-day basis. God’s strength is perfected, God strength is brought to a point of fullness in the life of a suffering saint during this age of grace.
God allows saints to suffer today, because God’s strength is made perfect in the life of the suffering saint, if God’s strength was made perfect in fixing the saint, Paul would be telling us to pray for the fix, but Paul is filling us in on a secret that Jesus Christ revealed to him. God expects us to make the right use of our minds in light of the doctrine he’s given us through the ministry of the apostle Paul.
We should no longer be in need of someone to turn our heads, and tell us what to do, and which direction we are to take, will we always make the right decisions, NO, but we can certainly learn from the decisions we make, so that we can make better decisions the next time around.
Choices always bring along with those choices consequences, the choices have been given us to make, as well as the consequences to reap for the choices we make.
All believers, during this age of grace, are adopted sons, but we are the children of God, as Paul will go on to say, but in what sense are we the children of God? The Galatian saints had begun following the Judaizers, but under what gospel had they been saved in the first place, Paul’s gospel!
Paul had begotten them by his gospel, they had their new creation, because of believing the good news Paul presented them. Paul is the one who had led these saints to a saving knowledge of the justice resolving accomplishment of Jesus Christ on their behalf, Paul gave birth to these saints in the sense of bringing them to a saving knowledge of Christ.
Unfortunately, we continue to sin, even though our sins have been paid for, and we will continue to sin, as long as we remain in our earthly bodies with the indwelling sin nature we inherited from Adam, God’s justice has been satisfied, but sin will remain a part of our earthly existence.
Yet, Satan’s ministers of righteousness are busy at work within the righteous structure called religion, in order to keep the meaning of Paul’s good news hidden, to keep people’s eyes blinded to the truth of what Christ really accomplished.
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teachmevp
The sin issue, became a son issue, and we need to see ourselves properly, apart from faith in the One who is faithful on our behalf, in seeing ourselves properly, when it comes to how we view other people, because they have the same brokenness that we have.
But, God knew what it would take to save us, he knew what it would take to have us dwell with him through eternity future, and that dwelling with him would require that we would measure up to his degree of rightness, and measuring up to his degree of rightness would only come one way.
We need a justifier who would justify the ungodly by faith, what a marvelous thing God has done, and who would have thought of a salvation in that sense, that God’s plan would call for him to join us to his son, therefore, what belongs to the son, now belongs to us, who have been joined to God’s son.
The law was never given as a standard by which a person could live their life and achieve righteousness, it was given to be a mirror, so that those who were placed under that law might gain a better glimpse of themselves. Paul did not say the law was written in our hearts, he said the works of the law are written in the hearts of the Gentiles.
God knows whether or not a person has placed their faith in what his son’s faith accomplished for them, or whether that person is still holding onto the notion that their good works will somehow merit them a position of righteousness in the eyes of God, God knows the motivation that resides in the human heart that underlies all the works that we call good.
Any kind of works at all, even if they appear to be good works in our mind, that are done for the purpose of attaining salvation or for the purpose of maintaining salvation, even for the purpose of proving one’s salvation is a slap in the face of God, who had to provide the gift of salvation, because people’s righteousness would be totally incapable of meriting it.
Our good works must be done solely out of appreciation for what God has already accomplished, we place our faith in Christ’s faithfulness, and that alone.
God never intended subjective feelings to be a replacement for objective truth, that is why he has given us his Word, only when inner peace lines up with the written Word of God, are we headed in the proper direction.
We not only have peace with God, we can enjoy the peace of God, who shall keep our hearts and minds through Jesus Christ in every circumstance that we face, we should not take any course of action that we do not have peace about, but is an inner sense of peace about something a sure fire fail safe system when it comes to choosing a direction to take in our lives?
There are multitudes who are putting faith in their feelings, but we often connect our emotions to our prayer life, and thus we further validate in our minds the course of action we were bent toward taking in the first place, if things go right in our eyes, all is well and good, we have not only affirmed ourselves, we have affirmed our Savior.
If things go topsy-turvy, perhaps the devil got involved in the details, but can feelings, even a sense of inner peace, always be trusted as a fail safe method to always point us in the proper direction, when it comes to the contentment or peace department, God through his power from on high, does not lead independently of his Word.
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teachmevp
The only ones who can take up any piece of God’s armor, and the only ones who are involved in this struggle against Satan and his forces, are those who have been placed into Christ. The fact that the helmet is related to salvation indicates that their blows are directed at the believer’s security and assurance of being placed into Christ.
This helmet covers our mind, intellect or reasoning. The two dangerous edges of Satan and his forces broadsword are discouragement and doubt. We did not receive our righteous standing before God by the things we have done in the past that we might consider to be righteous.
We certainly do not maintain it by the things we continue to do or what we promise God that we will do that we might consider to be righteous. Our justification was something accomplished for us by God’s grace. God has already set everyone in Christ apart as holy.
Everyone who is in Christ stands perfectly righteous or perfectly holy, justified according to God’s gift declaration of righteousness. We that believed Paul’s gospel, we have the very righteousness of Jesus Christ himself credited to our account. Our being set apart is not contingent upon the degree to which we set ourselves apart.
We can become vulnerable to Satan and his forces deception in this area if we fail to daily put on this helmet of salvation. They are committed to fouling up our life through their deception that nothing really happened when we were born anew.
They may disrupt our daily victory, but they can do nothing to disrupt our new identity in Christ. However, if they can get us to believe that we are not in Christ, we will live as though we are not in Christ, even though we are secure in him.
Religion is Satan’s invention and many people involved in religion’s domain are dealing with God on the basis of probation, rather than salvation. Then God must make a decision in their minds, whether or not to save that individual.
If they will simply dedicate themselves to no longer sin, that is the idea promoted by Satan’s ministers of righteousness, their suitability for heaven depends upon their turning away from all of their sins. God testing over and over again the validity of that dedication, then God will knew if they are truly devoted to him, then God will be able to finally make a decision as to whether or not they are heaven worthy.
Then there are people who believe that God’s grace as it relates to salvation is something that has to be tapped into, new sins requiring new grace and new forgiveness. Satan’s purpose in this age of grace is to confuse Paul’s gospel with a gospel so nearly to it.
We can be sure that confusion concerning that gospel through the use of a counterfeit gospel; a gospel that looks so much like Paul’s gospel that we would not know the difference, if we did not clearly know Paul’s gospel, will be Satan and his forces focus in this age of grace.
Putting this helmet on daily is important, God has committed to us the ministry of reconciliation, to tell the world God is not imputing their trespasses unto them; so we see the world still thinks he is. This ministry of reconciliation is not to the saved, we know we are reconciled, but now all have access to God, a change in status for the entire world.
Does this mean the entire world is save? No. We have to have an individual change of status and that takes place when we accept what God’s son accomplished for us. The issue with God is what his son accomplished, not sin. What is the world going to believe about what God’s son accomplished, or do they still think God is counting those sins against them and God is coming back to haunt them at some point in time.
We need to put that helmet of salvation on daily, because when Paul talks about a new creature; old things are passed away, behold all things are become new, he is not talking about sin in an individual’s life, he is talking about the identity we once were in Adam prior to salvation. We have a new identity in the second Adam, God has sealed us in Christ.
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teachmevp
Do we not know that God has held back the wrath we so justly deserve, but do we not know that he has been good to us in holding back that wrath, he has not held back his wrath, because he is happy with who we think we are, or because he is satisfied with who we are trying to become.
God has been long-suffering in holding back his wrath, because he hopes that we will consider his goodness through is son, our Savior Jesus Christ, and flee to his grace, God wants us to change our mind about who we are from fleshly perspective, apart from Christ.
It is the goodness of God, that leads a person to a change of thinking, that draws that person to adopt what God has said is true in his Word. God is not patiently waiting for us to change our mind about what we do, many have done that thinking it gains salvation, the self-righteous moralizer looks in their self-righteous mirror, and they think God must be satisfied, a prize package.
All people should change their minds about the way that God has provided, and what his son accomplished where their sins are concerned, because not all people believe that those sins were done away with Christ’s payment.
When peace of mind is based solely on circumstances, depression is the ultimate end for all, because we live in a sin cursed world, physical death is on it’s way for each of us, timing of that being the only uncertainty of that reality.
Sin brings death, insecurity is the ultimate mind set for all who’s mind are focused on earthly things, which is precisely why Paul is directing believers to a refocus of thinking, God provides a way for believers to have joy, even in the midst of unhappy circumstances.
Understanding peace with God, appreciating peace with God is that which allows the peace of God to rule our minds, govern our emotions, grace is the fountain head of joy.
God has manifested his grace to us through the accomplishments of his son, each and every blessings is to provide for us a place of security and a place of specialness that we know that is there for us in the mind of God, we are secure and we are special, the result of that grace, peace.
Most of Paul’s pain and suffering came from making the right decisions, Paul desired to be found in Christ, not with a righteous record that could be gauged as having come from Paul as the source, but a mind set of glorious joy can only begin with a proper understanding of God’s glorious grace.
Is it not interesting that the Gentiles had been considered dogs, but Paul speaking to the saints in Philippi, and it is the unbelieving Israelites who are considered dogs.
Paul is simply drawing a contrast between those who were relying upon ritual for righteousness, and those who place no confidence whatsoever in their flesh for a right standing before God, and those false teachers who thought that ritual could do something, and the ritual was circumcision.
Paul’s point in this age of grace, is circumcision apart from faith is nothing more than concision, it is nothing more than mutilation, Paul had more reason to boast if that is the way God values righteousness, if he values it through our performance.
Paul was not a Gentile converted, then circumcised as a proselyte to the Race of Israel, he was not a Gentile taking hold of Israel’s covenant and being circumcised, he was born into a Israelite family, Abraham’s blood flowed in his veins.
Paul was answering a group of people in his day (Philippians 3:9), in fact they were bragging, they were boasting about their achievements as though God could do nothing other than to declare them righteous, because they deserved just such a declaration.
Paul warned us to guard against those who would promote a righteousness through performance idea, “Beware of Dogs, Beware of Evil Workers, Beware of the Concision.”
There is no scale in God’s mind other than Christ’s righteousness, righteousness that has been credited freely without any cause in us, to our account, there can be no further payment for sin, as that payment was made by Jesus Christ.
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teachmevp
We are struggling with the belief aspect of our growth, because we are still struggling with the belief aspect of our growth: who we are in Christ. With the helmet of salvation firmly on, we see ourselves for who we really are, it is imperative to our growth and maturity in our ministry of reconciliation.
God’s basic goal for our life is character development, but there certainly are a lot of distractions, diversions, disappointments, trials and traumas which come along to disrupt the process. Paul reminds us that the tribulations we face are actually a means of achieving our supreme goal of maturity.
People tend to look for quick-fix solutions to difficult situations, but God’s plan is for us to hang in there and grow up. We need occasional mountaintop experiences, but the fertile soil for growth is always down in the valleys of tribulation, not on the mountaintops.
When we stop believing that God is in control; that he is working everything out for our good; that whatever happens is for the ultimate best of everyone involved, however little it seems to be that way. The more time and energy we invest in contemplating our own plans on how to live our life, the less time and energy we have to seek God’s plan for our ministry of reconciliation.
When our faith in God’s omnipotence and care is strong, it is impossible for Satan and his forces to break through our shield of faith and land an attack. Satan and his forces are actively involved in trying to distract us by peppering our mind with their thoughts and ideas.
The first thing we need to understand about the battle for our mind, the main targets which must be destroyed, are the strongholds. Strongholds are negative patterns of thought, which are burned into our minds either through repetition over time or through one-time traumatic experiences.
Before we were born anew, all our stimulation came from the environment of this hostile world. Every day we lived in this environment we were influenced by it and preconditioned to conform to it. The worldly stimulation we were exposed to was both brief and prevailing.
Brief stimulation includes individual events, situations, places and personal encounters we experienced. We were influenced by books, movies, music and traumatic events we experienced or witnessed. We learned a way to cope with these experiences and resolve the conflicts they produced.
Prevailing stimulation consists of long-term exposure to our environment, the influence of our family and friends, our neighborhood or our jobs. We developed a philosophy about how to survive, cope and succeed in this world apart from God. Once a stronghold of thought and response is entrenched in our mind, our ability to choose and act contrary to that pattern is virtually nonexistent.
That is why Paul insists that we be transformed by the renewing of our minds. Strongholds in our mind are the result of conditioning; we can be reconditioned by the renewing of our mind, anything that has been learned can be unlearned.
Satan and his forces have no power over us except what we give them by failing to take every thought captive and thus being deceived into believing their lies. If Satan and his forces can get us to believe a lie, they can control our life. If we fail to take a thought captive to the obedience of Christ, but believe it, they will control us.
Since Satan and his forces primary weapon is the lie, our defense against them is the truth. Dealing with Satan and his forces is not a power encounter; it is a truth encounter. Satan and his forces know just what buttons to push to tempt us.
They have observed our behavior over the years and they know where we are vulnerable, and that is where they will attack. Our temptations will be unique to our area of vulnerability. The moment we are tempted, we are at the threshold of a decision, and if we do not immediately choose to take that thought captive, we will begin to consider it as an option.
If we begin to mull it over in our mind, immediately our emotions will be affected and the likelihood of yielding to that temptation is increased. We need to take every thought captive by practicing first-frame thinking, evaluate every thought by the truth and do not give place to the lie.
Our emotions play a major role in the process of renewing our mind, our emotions reveal our perceptions and here is where the shield of faith comes into play. Our emotions are a product of our thought life, and if we are not thinking right, if our mind is not being renewed, if we are not perceiving God and his word properly, it will show up in our emotional life.
If we fail to acknowledge our emotions, we may make ourselves a slow-moving target for Satan and his forces. We are not shaped as much by our environment as we are by our perception of our environment. Life’s events do not determine who we are; God has determined who we are, and our interpretation of life’s events determines how well we will handle the pressures of life.
In reality, we have very little control over our emotions, but we do have control over our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our feelings and our responses. If what we believe does not reflect truth, then what we feel does not reflect reality. When we believe what we feel instead of the truth, how will our ministry of reconciliation be? As inconsistent as our feelings.
The important process of renewing our mind includes managing our emotions by managing our thoughts and perceptions. Satan and his forces are always hurling their fiery darts of fear, doubt and worry in our direction, but the only time they can hit us is when we let our shield of faith down.
A shield deflects; it keeps the darts of the enemy away from our mind, the shield moves with the attack. When we allow doubt to creep in, an actively raised shield of faith prevents this otherwise inhibiting fatigue, so the shield is the first line of defense, the enemy has to get past the shield first.
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teachmevp
Our only boast is in Jesus Christ, none of us can boast in ourselves, there will be no body in heaven wearing a merit badge based on fleshly achievement, no one there will be introduced as super saint.
Our reconciliation is of God, he designed it, he provided the means by which it could be accomplished, but people continue to operate today in their thinking, nothings really changed, under the assumption that their sin is separating them from God.
If an ounce of new reconciliation in this Age of Grace could be restored for anyone, when it comes to the issue of their sins, then the degree of forgiveness that must be obtained in order to restore the reconciliation is the very degree to which that individual refuses to believe what Christ accomplished, he accomplished it all.
The truth is, a person could not obtain an ounce of forgiveness if they tried, because God has already forgiven us all, that is why Christ’s ambassadors have the responsibility and privilege of making the reality of the reconciliation Christ has already accomplished, known to those who know nothing of it.
We can look at others through new perspective, because we serve others today, motivated by appreciation in the fact that God loves them, Christ died for them, we are intricately joined to them, just as we are joined to Christ, the very instance they believe the good news that Paul proclaimed.
Love has much more to do with attitude in action, than it has to do with emotions, direction that does what is in the best interest of another individual, this is a work of righteousness. The law had apprehension as a motivation factor, our labor of love under the Age of Grace has had the apprehension aspect removed entirely.
Israel’s labour of love under the law contract was a system of performance according to demand, they had to deal with their neighbors according to a strict system of rules and regulations, the law told them how to deal with one another.
We are to serve others today, based on how God expressed his love to others through Christ, and what he accomplished for them, who he made them and us to be in our savior, by joining us to our savior.
We should be extremely relieved to know that God’s not using our works of faith, he is not even using out labour of love to determine our worthiness for heaven, we know sins have been taken off the table.
God uses Christ’s labour of love, as expressed through what Christ accomplished on our behalf, and our trust in what Christ accomplished where our sins are concerned, as his criteria for our heaven worthiness, we can rejoice that it’s Christ’s faithfulness, not our faithfulness.
When the circumstance of the moment is a happy circumstance, when everything is well on the home front, that is when we can say a person might very well be happy, but circumstances can go south, if joy were dependent upon the situation at hand, it would be uncertain as a match lit on a windy day.
Joy is a trust issue, joy for a believer is a state of mind, independent of surrounding circumstances, rejoicing is the exhibit of that inter-state of mind, the joy Paul is talking about has no relationship to the transient nature of life, so the believers attitude need not to be come victim to uncertainty or adversity.
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What a marvelous plan God had for us! God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off of the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. The greatest determinant of our mental health and freedom is a true understanding of God’s reconciliation.
The insidious reality of Satan and his forces relentless assault of deception on our mind can keep us from experiencing maturity and freedom, because our past has shaped our present belief system and will determine our future unless it is dealt with. We have been tricked into believing that what we do makes us what we are.
We fail, so we see ourselves as failures, which only causes us to fail more. We sin, so we see ourselves as sinners, which only causes us to sin more. We have been sucked into Satan and his forces futile equation, and that false belief sends us into a tailspin of hopelessness and defeat.
It is absolutely vital that we put on the breastplate of righteousness, so that we can resist the persistent accusations of Satan and his forces, they never give up trying to get us down and keep us down by hurling one false accusation after another. Wholeness and meaning in life are not the products of what we have or do not have, what we have done or have not done, we are already a whole person and possess a life of infinite meaning and purpose because of who we are in Christ.
Our understanding of the identity that Adam had before the fall, that identity has been restored to us, that restored identity is the critical foundation for our belief structure and our behavior patterns. Many people that are of the body of Christ have obsessive-compulsive behaviors because of this relentless battle for their minds, and the battle for our mind can only be won as we personally choose truth.
A mentally healthy person is one who is in touch with reality and relatively free of anxiety. Rejoice in Christ always, in our minds is what this is all about, everything whether good or evil begins in the arena of our minds. Joy is a trust issue; joy in Christ for a believer is that of a state of mind independent of surrounding circumstances.
Rejoicing is the exhibit of that interstate of mind, because no longer do we have to strive to attain and maintain God’s acceptance on the basis of who we are and what we can do, no longer are our sins held against us, no longer does the death penalty for sin hang over us. Joy comes from an understanding of the grace of God, an understanding and appreciation of the resultant peace with God that we now have because of God’s grace.
Paul wants us to know at one point in time something was true, but now something else is true. Paul presented the evidence that all people of all time justly deserve the wrath of a perfectly just God, because people glorifies themselves by filtering everything they say and everything they do through that screen of self-protection, self-elevation, and self-gratification.
But now, as far as God is concerned, he loved mankind so much that he was willing to let his own son die for sinful people, and have his son pay all the penalties of their sins, forget their rebelliousness and overlook their hostility, while they were still sinners, still rebellious, and still hostile. God made up his mind to become completely reconciled to mankind before people made any signs of making peace with God.
God has one-sidedly reconciled himself to mankind through what the death of his son accomplished; all sins and hostility are paid for as far as God is concerned. By removing the sin issue from the table of God’s justice, God effectively canceled Satan’s ownership of all mankind.
Those who put on the breastplate of righteousness know that we have peace with God, for a person to have to make their own peace with God would be nothing more than an exercise in futility, it could never be done. We could not make peace with God, to say that anyone could make peace with God, would be to limit God to his mercy, because grace is the foundation on which Paul’s entire ministry was built.
There is a glory that belongs to God’s grace, and it is to be praised on the bases on what God’s grace has accomplished.
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If a person is holding on to the law today, in order to keep their salvation, they do not understand Paul’s good news at all! It is a dangerous thing to attribute righteousness to law keeping today, because keeping the law prior to salvation would not get a person saved, and keeping the law after salvation will not keep a person saved.
It does no good for ministers of righteousness to replace the word salvation with fellowship, because that is just as damning an idea! If fellowship is not based on performance, but based on position as Paul tells us it is, to suppose a person can lose their fellowship with God based on their performance, is not to understand what Christ accomplished where their sins are concerned.
This is the hiding of the truth, and the stealing of the truth away from people that ministers of righteousness involve themselves every week, they steal the truth, they hide salvation by grace alone through faith alone in their cross work ideal of Christ alone, in their effort to stick with tradition, rather than slick with truth, so they follow the tradition of men, because people are resting in the law today.
What does it mean to walk in the spirit, should not the word spirit, be new nature? Galatians 5:16-18 - This I say then, walk in the new nature, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusts against the new nature, and the new new nature against the flesh, and these are contrary the one to the other, so that you cannot do the things that you would, but if you be led of the new nature, you are not under the law.
Paul talks about a battle going on in the mind of every believer, a struggle taking place between the new nature and the flesh, a struggle taking place between the ears of the believer. The flesh, Paul’s talking about all that we once were in Adam, prior to salvation, but once saved, we are no longer in Adam, at the very point of our believe, we are that instant in Christ, having been forever joined to our savior, the new nature.
Our pride is such, that we will always have that tendency to think more highly of ourselves then we ought, everything we say and everything we do is filtered through that sieve of self, it is just our sin nature.
Paul’s great desire was to know Jesus Christ in his resurrection power, because that same power that raised Christ from among the dead was energizing in Paul, and it is energizing in us.
There are believers out there who know Christ in his resurrection power, because they are acquainted to one degree or another with the fellowship of his sufferings, one does not come apart from the other.
Religion is fill with lots of people who would rather beg God to fix their suffering circumstances, rather than to thank God for his enabling grace that is sufficient for every suffering saint, that energizing power, most of Paul’s pain and suffering came from making the right decisions.
Paul was striving to know Christ, and know him intimately in the power of his resurrection, and in the fellowship of his suffering, Paul wanted Christ’s life to be manifest in his own life.
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We are more vulnerable to Satan and his forces deception than to any of their other schemes, because when they tempt us or accuse us, we can recognize it, but when they deceive us, we do not always know it, that is their strategy, to keep us in the dark.
We cannot expose their deception by human reasoning; we can only do it by the light of the truth, it is the only valid piece of the armor against the darkness of deception. It is critical that when we put on the armor of God, we start with the belt of truth, because the only thing big about Satan and his forces are their mouth, they are habitual liars.
When we put on the armor of God we are really putting on Christ, and when we put on Christ, we take ourselves out of the realm of the flesh, where we are vulnerable to attack, it is not wise for us to live on Satan and his forces level. Since their primary weapon is the lie, our belt of truth is continually being attacked.
If they can disable us in the area of truth, we become an easy target for their other attacks. We stand firm in the truth by relating everything we do to the truth of God’s word, and when we learn to live in the truth on a daily basis, we will grow to love the truth because we will have nothing to hide.
If Satan and his forces can deceive us into believing a lie, they can control our life in that area. God’s protection is that our role is not passive, God requires us to be active participants in the defense that he has provided for us.
The belt of truth challenges us to be mentally active, not passive, because unlike our day-to-day emotions, which are the product of our day-to-day thought life, the emotional baggage from the past is always there. Years of exposure and experience in life have etched emotional grooves inside us, which produce a decided reaction when a certain topic is introduced.
We may have grown up with a physically, emotionally or sexually abusive parent. We may have suffered through a painful relationship in the past: a broken friendship, the untimely death of a loved one, a divorce. When a present event activates one of those emotional grooves, we believe what we feel instead of believing what is true.
Perceiving those events from the perspective of our new identity, which God sealed in Christ, is what starts the process of healing those damaged emotions, because we have the privilege of evaluating our past experience in the light of who we are now, as opposed to who we were then.
We must learn how to resolve previous conflicts or the emotional baggage will accumulate as we continue to withdraw from life, the past will control our life as our options for handing it continue to decrease. Those who have had major traumas and have learned to resolve them by wearing the belt of truth know how devastating the past can be to present reality.
When we do not understand the doctrinal truths Paul taught pertaining to our sealed position in Christ, we have no ground for success in the practical arena. When we get our eyes off our new identity, and try to produce in our daily experience the acceptance God has already extended to us, we will struggle, because Satan and his forces will try to convince us that we are an unworthy, unacceptable, sin-sick person who will never amount to anything in God’s eyes.
We are saints whom God has declared righteous, believing their lie will lock us into a defeated, fruitless life, but believing God’s truth about who we are will set us free. It is imperative to our growth and maturity that we believe God’s truth about who we are.
Our old pattern for thinking and responding to our sin-trained flesh must be transformed by the renewing of our mind, it is our responsibility to change our behavior by putting to death the deeds of the body. The battleground we face is in our mind, and Satan and his forces are at the heart of all sin, and deceive people into believing a lie.
The most dangerous and harmful detriments to our growth is passivity, putting our mind in neutral and coasting, sitting back and waiting for God to do everything is not God’s way to maturity.
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We would rather be the blamer than the one being blamed, excepting blame means we have got a crack in that perfect persona of ours, the blame game is the battle that no one wants to lose.
Rather than recognizing the unworthiness of the flesh, and the imputed worthiness of the new nature, we spend our lives trying to convince ourselves and others of our value, one of the ways we do it is by elevating self through the denigration of someone else.
The unseen put down, that is a major tool in our ego preservation tool box, being critical of others is an intricate part of maintaining that fantasy that we are perfect and others are somewhere a bit beneath us, that is why we are immediate in our defense of self, a wiliness to aggressively find fault with others, a way to be superior, to feel safe.
Thank God that our destiny, our blessings are not dependent on our serving, because Christ did the serving for us, he did it faithfully, as well as it could be done, he is our righteousness, but every believer is promised reward at the Judgment Seat of Christ, a judgment all believers must under go, and the issue there will be rewards or lost of rewards for how we served the Body of Christ.
Paul wants us to recognize that Justification and Sanctification are not based upon feelings at all, they have nothing to do with feelings or emotions, they are not based on sensation in any sense. In fact, they are not based upon the capacity or the production of the flesh in any sense at all, because all now have equal access to God today.
According to Paul, God had given up on dealing with the Gentiles, and he called out one man, Abram, through who would come that special nation, that special people Israel. God belongs to Israel and Israel belongs to God, they are called the children of God, God’s espoused wife no less, but the blessing of reconciliation changed all that.
Reconciliation simply means a change in status, a change in status for true entire world, does that mean the entire world is saved? No! We have to have an individual change of status, and that takes place when we accept what the son accomplished for us, our sin debt being forever settled.
Now all have access to God, sin is no longer the issue with God, the issue with God today is his son, will we accept what Jesus Christ accomplished, our sin debt pain in full, or will we reject it?
All the different churches of our day is best described as the Corinthians epistle, equally the Galatians epistle, the same mind set that led to the judgment Isaiah warned Israel about, continues to operate within society today.
It never went away, the same inner mind set, that same sin nature at work in people throughout history, the more things change, the more they stay the same. They are marked by divisions, they have divided into little factions, into little groups and little cliques, separating one from another over who is more important than the other person, minds bent on serving only self.
Only when we come to see ourselves as God sees us, and are able to fully appreciate and understand who God has already made us to be, and who he has made us to be in Christ, can we become in our behavior, what he wants us to be in that aspect of our lives.
As Paul’s sound doctrine is taken in and fully appreciated, the believer who takes that doctrine in, and appreciates it, and applies it, begins to grow and mature in what they believe, that believer’s mind is being transformed in the process.
As we understand what God accomplished through his son for us, and build upon that foundation the truths of who he has made us to be by placing us into his son, we begin to view ourselves as God views us, and that is great security to be found in doing so.
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The person who does not know what death is does not know either what resurrection is. In order to take the resurrection seriously, we must also take death seriously. The Christian belief in the resurrection of the body did not arise from philosophical speculations or wishful thinking like the notion of the immortality of the soul.
It arose from the conviction that such an event had actually already taken place with the resurrection of Jesus from among the dead. The resurrection is proof that Jesus is who he claimed to be, and that his sacrifice was pleasing to God. As long as Jesus lay in the tomb, he was just another tragic religious figure who suffered a martyr’s death.
In fact, Paul tells us that the resurrection is the greatest display of God’s power ever to be demonstrated, nor can it ever be surpassed. Our decree of judicial perfection in the eyes of God comes not through Jesus’ death for our sins, but through our union with Jesus’ resurrection life.
Paul’s statement that Jesus’ resurrection was “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep,” the expression “first fruits” has little meaning for today’s urban dwellers. In Bible times, it had a rich meaning because it referred to the first produce of the harvest, which was offered in sacrifice to God to express gratitude for granting a new harvest.
Thus, the first fruits, which were brought to the Temple, were seen not as mere hope of a new harvest, but as its actual beginning. Jesus’ resurrection, then, is “the first fruits” in the sense that it has made the resurrection of believers not a mere possibility, but a certainty.
God planned that his son become sin for the world which his son did indeed become, but when it comes to being made the righteousness of God IN Christ, what response is necessary in order for a person to be made the righteousness of God by being placed INTO CHRIST? BELIEF in what God’s son accomplished where sins are concerned is that required response, it is very simple when we understand the difference in Reconciliation and Righteousness.
Not everyone has been baptized into Christ even though Christ, by himself, purged his or her sins when his blood dripped on God’s Ark. If Christ purged only the sins of believers, then Christ did not become a ransom for all, faith in what Christ accomplished where your sins are concerned is the requirement to be placed into Christ and have Christ’s test score placed on your paper.
Paul wanted to be found clothed in the righteousness that comes from being placed INTO Jesus Christ rather than to be found wearing the righteousness that came from his performance. Paul knew that the righteousness related to his performance would never measure up to the level of God’s righteousness.
The reality of reconciliation is the good news that Satan would gladly give up his pitchfork to keep people from believing today, and he has been very successful through what Paul calls “ministers of righteousness” in doing that very thing.
Satan only needs to focus on today to keep people in a lost condition is The Reality of Reconciliation, he does not need to go any further than that. If Satan can keep that glorious truth hidden by blinding people's eyes to it through a message that keeps sin on the table of God’s justice where that sin has already been put away, that turns Paul’s glorious gospel into a not so glorious gospel after all! Many people are living in their minds today with probation rather than salvation.
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Illustrations of the diversities of early Christianity are many, which are called Christologies. Christologies is what do you believe about Christ: what kind of nature is Jesus Christ?
We can map out all these differences; when did Jesus become divine according to the gospel of John? He always was. He was with God from the very beginning. Everything was created through him. The beginning of the gospel of John ends up having the Christology that now become Orthodox Christianity.
Before Jesus was executed, he was recognized as a prophet, he seems to accept himself as a prophet, and it may be that he claimed to be a king or a messiah, but certainly by the time of his execution, some people thought he was a king, because that is the charge on which he was executed.
The Romans executed Jesus, because at least either he or other people were claiming that he was a king. He is a prophet and he is a king, but does that mean Jesus is divine? No, of course not.
The Israelites had lots of kings that were not divine. The Israelites had lots of prophets that were not divine. Many modern people get the idea that the word “Christ” or “Messiah” in itself signifies divinity, but it doesn’t. The “Messiah” in Jesus’ day was simply some Israelite figure who would rise up and take over the throne of David and reestablish the kingdom of Israel.
Calling someone the messiah in the ancient world did not mean that he was divine. Jesus is a prophet; he is even considered the messiah, but that does not make him divine. Some Christians therefore have to make a decision. Is Jesus human and only human? Is Jesus human and divine?
Jesus being human and divine is the take most followers of Jesus end up taking, although there are some followers today of Jesus who believed he was purely human. Those who believe Jesus was purely human tended to understand the Israelites history and they even accept him as a messiah, but that does not mean they think he was God.
They know the monotheism of Israel does not and cannot evolve from polytheism, because the two are based on radically divergent world-views, radically divergent intuitions about reality. The monotheism of Israel was not, it could not be the natural outgrowth of the polytheism of an earlier age, it was a radical break with it.
Monotheism was a revolution, not an evolution. Therefore, they say, no, Jesus cannot be divine. The early Christians who chose the human and divine route, though they had to spilt this up. Some believed Jesus was always divine; others believed Jesus became divine.
If Jesus became divine, then when did he become divine, at his birth, at his baptism, or at his resurrection? Other Christians say, no, he always was divine, but even they believed in different choices too, because some believed Jesus was divine but also fully human.
Other Christians believed Jesus was fully divine but not fully human. They believed Jesus was so divine he was God, so that when Jesus walked along on wet sand on the beach, his feet did not leave footprints, that is how divine he was, but this belief became declared as a heresy.
Out of all these choices, only one of them is considered Orthodox by the later church, so that what Christians end up with is the Nicene Creed, or the Creed of Chalcedon, which is what Christians came to believe? There were lots of complexities in early Christianity that finally got whittled down into a more united consensus view on Christology.
It is God’s sovereign right to choose the criteria and he chose to use the criteria of belief. God has always used faith in every age; God has always used faith, or what a person believes, as the criteria necessary to effect salvation for humankind.
Our faith in the good news of Christ given to Paul enables God to impute us with the faith of his son. Once we believe, and are sealed, it is not about us; our faith, but Christ’s faith. If you want God to view you today, you got to be in his son.
For any one to think they are just before God through their performance; to think that they have perfected themselves with God through their behavior proves that man is a liar and the truth is not in them. One who puts their faith in the Nicene Creed or any Creed, has not met the criteria that God requires, and living up to a Creed is based upon performance.
Ministers of righteousness have a lot of fun with these Creeds controlling people! How can you get into his son, and have all of his righteousness freely imputed to your account? By simply taking God at his word, concerning what his son accomplished for you.
This one-sided reconciliation on God’s part is self-evident proof of God’s superabundant love to man. As far as God is concerned, he loved us so much that he was willing to let his own son die for sinful man, and have his son pay all the penalties for their sins, forget their rebelliousness and overlook their hostility, while they were still sinners, still rebellious, and still hostile.
God made up his mind to become completely reconciled to mankind before man made any signs of making peace with God. God has told the world through Paul’s teaching’s (not through Creeds), that he has reconciled himself to them because of his love for them, and it was God alone who did this harmonious act; we have had nothing to do with it, all we have had to do is to receive the reconciliation that God has made with mankind.
God has one-sidedly reconciled himself to mankind through what the death of his son accomplished; all sins and hostility are paid for as far as God is concerned, and it is time all people begin to believe it. This three-in-one god concept has its roots from polytheism; monotheism was a revolution, it was a radical brake from polytheism, not an evolution of polytheism!
If you want to believe Jesus is God, whatever. God has reconciled himself to man, before man wrote those Creeds?
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Reconciliation and sanctification, two different judicial transactions, God is no longer imputing the sins of the world, unto the world, because he imputed those sins to his son. God has reconciled the entire world; believers and non-believers alike to himself through what his son accomplished.
Now, we need to be placed into God’s son, so that we can have his son’s righteousness attributed freely to our account. Total abandonment of any notion that our performance is connected by any means or in any manner to our righteous standing IN Christ.
Our performance would never cut it, not before we were born anew, and not after, we need to allow God’s power to take up residence with us, but we do not control this power, as if it were some universal force; rather, we have access to this power that is dwelling within us.
We need to cease attributing our righteous standing before God to our performance and keep our mind focused solely on how God views us IN Christ, that is what grace-life is all about, and we will be victorious in that God’s power can now produce it’s fruit in our life. When God raised Jesus from among the dead, it was God’s stamp of “pain in full” on the invoice of our sin debt.
We could not get right with God in a million life times of trial and error, we could never make ourselves right with God; God had to do what we could not do. Now believing sinners can be certain that in Christ, they are justified. The simple message of Paul’s gospel is total payment for sin, accomplished by Christ’s total sacrifice.
According to Paul, we have how much forgiveness, total forgiveness! If we want God to view us today, we got to be in his son. How can we get into his son, and have all of his righteousness freely imputed to our account? By simply taking God at his word concerning what his son accomplished for us, it is as simply as that.
When God says he is satisfied with what Christ did for our sins, when Christ died for them, all our sins were all future. It is a son issue on our part, not a sin issue, in order to receive the gift of salivation. The resurrection of Christ is not only a historical event that we look back to with satisfaction and joy; it is the greatest event in history.
One of the most disturbing things is someone unable to express confidence about whether they can know if they will have eternal life or not. The very power that raised Jesus from among the dead is available to us; we were baptized into Jesus Christ with this power. Faith is taking God at his word concerning what his son accomplished on our behalf.
God did all the giving; we do only all the receiving. God knows what his son accomplished on our behalf where all of our sin debt is concerned and he is satisfied that all of that sin has already been judged on his son, leaving no judgment for us where our sin is concerned.
Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness. Justification is not a process, but is a one-time act, complete and definitive. Justification is a legal term which changes the believing sinner’s standing before God, declaring us acquitted and accepted by God, with the guilt and penalty of our sins put away forever.
In our position in Christ, now we can bear fruit unto God, but it is only in our position in Christ, not through this fleshly body in which we dwell. Only when we come to see ourselves as God sees us and are able to fully appreciate and understand who God has already made us to be and who he’s made us to be in Christ, can we become in our behavior what he wants us to be in that aspect of our lives.
We need to be less interested in trying to become something, or trying to do something, and we need to become a whole lot more interested in learning about who we already are, that is the key.
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What a wonderful blessings is this blessing of sainthood, and it is ours this very instance, because saint has been our moniker in heaven, it is this very moment and has been so since we first trusted Jesus Christ.
Being made the righteousness of God himself in our union with a perfectly righteous savior, then being hid with Christ in God gives us a tremendously safe and special place, because what child does God see, when he deals with us, God sees his son, Jesus Christ.
We have been given new motivation to serve, but thank God that our destiny, our blessings are not dependent on our serving, Christ did the serving for us, he did it faithfully as well as it could be done, he is our righteousness.
When we get our eyes off our new identity, and try to produce in our daily experience the acceptance God has already extended to us, we will struggle, because the enemy will try to convince us that we are an unworthy, unacceptable, sin-sick person who will never amount to anything in God’s eyes.
We are saints whom God has declared righteous, believing the enemies lie will lock us into a defeated, fruitless life, but believing God’s truth about who we are, will set us free. It is imperative to our growth and maturity that we believe God’s truth about who we are in Christ.
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If Satan cannot touch the body of Christ, then why did Paul instruct us to put on the armor of God, to resist the devil, to stand firm, and to be alert? If we are not susceptible to being wounded or trapped by Satan, why does Paul describe our relationship to the powers of darkness as a wrestling match?
Those who deny the enemy’s potential for destruction are the most vulnerable to it. Even though our eternal destiny is secure and the armor of God is readily available, we are still vulnerable to Satan’s accusations and temptations. If we give into these, we can be influenced by Satan, and if we remain under his influence long enough, we can lose control, if we fail to stand against him.
Ownership is never at stake, Satan cannot touch our new identity, but as long as we are living in this fleshly body, we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable targets to all Satan’s fiery darts. How do you think Satan carries on his worldwide ministry of evil and deception?
He is a created being; he is not omnipresent, omniscient, or omnipotent. He cannot be everywhere in the world tempting and deceiving millions of people at the same moment. He does so through an army of emissaries “fallen angels called evil spirits” who propagate his plan of rebellion around the world.
The Bible does not attempt to prove the existence of evil spirits any more than it attempts to prove the existence of God, it simply reports on their activities. If these evil spirits can get us to listen to the thoughts, they plant in our mind, they can influence us, and if we allow them to influence us long enough through temptation and accusation, they can control our ability to carry out our ministry of reconciliation.
Bad habits and sinful thought patterns were established when we learned to live our life independently of God before we were born anew. Our environment taught us to think about and respond to life, and those patterns and responses were ingrained in our mind as strongholds.
These evil spirits perpetual aim is to infiltrate our thoughts with their thoughts; they know if they can control our thoughts, they can control our behavior. They can introduce their thoughts, tempting us to act independently of our ministry of reconciliation, as if they were our own thoughts or even God’s thoughts.
These evil spirits can put thoughts in our mind even as Satan did with David (1 Chronicles 21:1). If we do not conquer their tempting thoughts right at the threshold of our mind, we will begin to mull their thought over, consider them an option, and eventually choose to act them out.
Repeated acts form a habit, and if we exercise a sinful habit long enough, a stronghold will be established in our mind. Once a stronghold is established, we can lose the ability to control our behavior in that area. Next to temptation, perhaps the most frequent and insistent attack from these evil spirits to which we are vulnerable is accusation.
Accusation is a deep-seated sense of self-deprecation; I am not important, I am not qualified, I am no good. We become paralyzed in our witness and productivity in our ministry of reconciliation by thoughts and feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.
These evil spirits often use temptation and accusation as a brutal one-two punch. They come along and say, “Why don’t you try it? Everybody does it.” Then as soon as we fall for their temping line, they change their tune to accusation: “What kind of believer are you to do such a thing? You are a pitiful excuse for a child of God.”
Many believers are perpetually discouraged and defeated because they believe their persistent lies about them. When we leave a door open for these evil spirits by not resisting temptation and accusation, they will enter it. If we continue to allow them access to that area, they will eventually control it.
Many believers today who cannot control their lives in some area wallow in self-blame instead of acting responsibly to solve the problem. They berate themselves and punish themselves for not having the willpower to break a bad habit.
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teachmevp
God justifies those who take him at his word concerning what his son accomplished; something for nothing! Being declared righteous is God’s gift to the believing sinner and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sinner himself doing anything to deserve or merit that righteous standing.
The righteousness God credits to the account of the believer is a righteousness that comes without a cause in the one being declared so. We have to admit, that is difficult for people imbued with the pride of life to imagine. It is difficult to accept because it does not seem fair to the human mind, especially to the religiously minded.
It does not seem quite right that God could consider someone righteous, especially if that person is not expending the same amount of effort or attention that they are to become righteous by way of his or her practice. One can see why some have called this justification of God; cheap justification, one can see where the pride of life comes up with that notion.
If it is that easy, (is the idea) if you can obtain righteousness without doing something, or even trying to do something (or at the very least, promising to do something) in order to gain it-why, that would be too easy and that would make it cheap. It is absolutely free, but it was certainly not cheap, it came at tremendous cost.
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teachmevp
Do you believe it was an all-sufficient reconciliation where the entirety of the world’s sin debt was concerned, or do you believe that you must obtain a new measure of reconciliation every time you sin? Yes, Christ died for everyone’s sins, but only those who believe and trust Paul’s message of the grace of God will have their sins actually paid for.
There are many who refuse to believe in what Christ actually accomplished, they fail to understand what the ‘for my sins’ part of Paul’s message of the grace of God is all about. They refuse to acknowledge that Christ’s death actually resolved God’s justice where the sins Christ died for are concerned and they continue to hang on the notion that God is hanging on to their sins.
This renders Christ’s payment for sin a partial payment, or a down payment, or a future payment at best, rather than a completed and satisfactory payment. God never collects a debt twice, Christ paid for your sins, this should motivate us all the more to love him and to serve him by serving others.
Our labor of love is all about transformation, it is not about reformation, and Paul’s message of the grace of God is able to transform our thinking, such that transformed thinking begins to manifest itself through transformed relation. It becomes more about who we have become, rather than about who we are trying to be.
The more we know about who we were apart from Christ, and who God made us to be in Christ, the more we see our own human sin-nature bent. Thus, the more we can see why people who have not believed Paul’s message of the grace of God are functioning in the manner they are.
Dying to self, is never portrayed as something optional, it is the reality of being born anew, God wants us to stop putting our faith in ourselves, he wants us to actually come to the place where we literally have no confidence in the flesh, but have full reliance in Christ alone.
We must come to the place of utter weakness, be stripped of all confidence in ourselves, unless we are willing to see our old lives crucified with Christ, and begin to live anew in obedience to him and then we will find our true self in Jesus. Not some depressing ‘down-on-self’ condition, but a return to God’s original pattern for man: free of obsession with self, and focused upon God.
It is not normal to have high self-esteem or low self-esteem; both are a focus on self, but to leave self alone and to be absorbed with Jesus Christ, weak in ourselves, but fully reliant upon Christ in every way. This is why God allows all kinds of things into our lives, which he uses to strip us of our personal sense of worth.
God is making us conformable to the death of Christ, so that in living experience, we might become conformed in his resurrection. This does not mean that when we die to self we become inactive or insensible, nor do we feel ourselves to be dead. Rather, dying to self means that the things of the old life are put to death, most especially the sinful ways and lifestyles we once engaged in.
The entire concept seems a bit strange to our natural eyes. Dying to self is something you can take very literal; you will die in every way possible in order to be someone you are not. Dying to self is not fun or easy, but what is particularly difficult about fighting this tendency is that it is not exactly a behavior or action.
It can certainly manifest itself in those forms, but underneath them is an attitude, a real change of mind and attitude towards sin itself and the cause of it, a change in our principle action from what is by nature the exact opposite. The answer to that sin has nothing to do with our desire to do it.
The fact is that it is grievous to God, and we do not answer that by saying that we are going to stop doing it, or we are no longer going to desire to do it, it is not our ability to stop it. The answer to the fact that we all have this sin nature lies solely in the fact that Christ paid for it, but Christ did not clean-up the sin nature.
His effort was not to take the old man and fix him up, dress him up, and make a Christian out of the old man. Christ crucified the old man, and we are called upon simply to believe what Paul tells us Christ did where that shortcoming in us is concerned. Being saved is not something that God has to do, something that God has to make a decision about doing.
Being saved is about man accepting the gift that has already been purchased, and there is no saving work to be done by Jesus, because it has all been done, it has been accomplished.
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MRAP
Yes, I do believe in an all sufficient reconcillitation - Jesus took care of that. What I still question is the act of works.
I do good works, not for redemption or paying for sins but to gain more rewards in the Kingdom.
Either way you look at it, I do those works knowlingly or unknowingly.
It's often after the work that I realize it is added to my account when appearing in front of the bema.
I got this strange thing in my head that if I do a good work because I know it adds to my account then it's not worth as much but a random work (without thinking about it) has more worth.
Is it about motive and recollection as to the why for the work?
Maybe the best thing is to be ignorant but knowing causes questions.
So, teachmevp, drop a bit of insights, you have tons of words to enlighten the masses.
Would much appreciate other posts to this.
Either way, I will just keep on going and praying for a bit less insight - sounds a bit strange.
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teachmevp
It is an amazing thing that for believers and that is the only people to whom Paul is writing, there is a Bema Seat of Christ Judgment that husbands will not be judged by how well their wives responded, it will be how well they led, and wives will not be judged as to whether their husbands were leading correctly, but in their role in serving the husband.
Paul’s not saying, walk worthy in order to gain our calling, or walk worthy in order to keep our calling, but walk worthy of the calling that belongs to us, because God has freely given it to us. How can we who have been justified freely, sanctified in Christ, how should we be conducting ourselves, we should conduct ourselves in a manner conducive to the job that God’s given us.
We should conduct ourselves in a manner that goes sides by side or that goes in hand with what God’s already called us to do, that job is our ambassadorship. It is our ambassadorship of the message of reconciliation, how our we to conduct ourself given our ambassadorship, we are called to peace, this is how believer’s are to relate to other believers. Sorry buddy, somehow my morning post got mixed up with my answer to you.
As believers, we do not possess the life that Jesus got when God raised him from among the dead as an inherent quality any more than we possess God’s righteousness as a property in our own nature. Just as in the midst of our sinfulness, we are righteous, so in the midst of our self-evident mortality, we are going to get the life God gave to Jesus.
In John 5:26, Jesus was “to have” that life that God has within himself, Jesus never had that kind of life before, he was to have it. In 1 John 1:1-5, Jesus indeed got that life, his disciples testify he got that life he was telling them he was going to get.
As a result of our being sealed in Christ, we are what we are not. In ourselves, we are not righteous and not immortal, but in Christ, we are both righteous and immortal. The fact that the living saints will meet with Christ at the same time as the sleeping saints indicates that the latter have not yet been united with Christ in heaven.
Paul was not concerned about a ‘state’ which exists between death and resurrection, but for a relationship that exists between the believer and Christ through death. This relationship of being with Christ is not interrupted by death, because the believer who sleeps in Christ has no awareness of the passing of time.
Paul did not think the question of the status of the person between death and resurrection was a question that needed to be considered. The reason is that for Paul, those who die in Christ, their relationship with Christ is one of immediacy, because they have no awareness of the passing of time between their death and resurrection.
Paul explains that both the sleeping and living believers will be united with Christ, not at death, but at his coming for his body of believers in this age of Grace. Paul never alluded to the conscious survival of the soul and its reattachment to the body at the resurrection, that is a notion totally foreign to Paul and to Scripture as a whole.
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teachmevp
Salvation is not doing; it is believing! It is counting what God believes to be true for you and about you as true for you and about you. Our performance is not the source of our righteousness before God; the only righteousness God can recognize is our position in Jesus Christ when it comes to mankind and mankind’s indwelling sin nature in the flesh.
To believe that what you are doing and what you are restraining yourselves from doing is the way you are earning your righteous standing with God, you have got to put a lot of confidence in your flesh to do that; religiondumb is doing that! Those who are IN Jesus Christ are those who are NOT walking after the faulty assumption that their righteousness is related to their performance, that was Israel’s problem.
Those who are IN Jesus Christ are those who place no confidence in their flesh, but understand, as Paul understood, that in their flesh dwells no good thing. The sanctification that comes by way of being placed INTO Christ - joined to Christ - is positional truth. A sanctified position IN Christ comes not as a result of behavior, it comes as a result of belief! God is not looking at how well we adhere to any standard.
God is not looking at our production. God is not looking at our behavior in order to view us as being in favor with him. What a marvelous plan God had for us! God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off of the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. God’s reconciliation to man is from God’s side only.
God alone decided to make peace with man, while man is still very much ungodly, a sinner, and while man is an active enemy to God. This one-sided reconciliation on God’s part is self-evident proof of God’s superabundant love to man.
As far as God is concerned, he loved man so much that he was willing to let his own son die for sinful man, and have his son pay all the penalties of their sins, forget their rebelliousness and overlook their hostility, while they were still sinners, still rebellious, and still hostile. God made up his mind to become completely reconciled to mankind before man made any signs of making peace with God.
God has told the world through Paul’s teaching’s, that he has reconciled himself to them because of his love for them, and it was God alone who did this harmonious act; they have had nothing to do with it, all they have had to do is to receive the reconciliation that God has made with mankind. God has one-sidedly reconciled himself to mankind through what the death of his son accomplished; all sins and hostility are paid for as far as God is concerned.
Many people involved in religion’s domain are dealing with God on the basis of probation, rather than salvation. Then God must make a decision in their minds, whether or not to save that individual. Their suitability for heaven depends upon their turning away from all of their sins.
If they will simply dedicate themselves to no longer to sin, that is the idea. God testing over and over again the validity of that dedication. Then God will know if they are truly devoted to him, then he will be able to finally make a decision as to whether or not they are heaven worthy. That is the idea in and in most people’s minds; it is the idea being promoted by ministers of righteousness.
That is probation, not salvation. God is not testing or proving people today, in order to make a final decision as to whether or not to save them, or to keep them saved. All the saving work that God could possibly do, he has already done through Christ. God now holds forth the reconciliation that Christ has accomplished, in his mind, offering man the choice to either accept or reject that gift of salvation.
Appreciation based on the reality of salvation, not apprehension based on religion’s message of probation. If Satan can keep that glorious message of Paul hidden by blinding people’s eyes to the reality of reconciliation through a message that keeps sin on the table of God’s justice where that sin has already been put away.
Many people are living in their minds today with probation rather than salvation. With Israel's earthly program being set aside, during this age of grace, no nationality enjoys special favor in the eyes of God; all must come alike to God today. God did not lift up the Gentiles, who had been without God, and put them on an equal or higher plain, than belonged to Israel.
He concluded Israel in unbelief, as he had previously concluded the Gentiles in unbelief, both of them down on the same level, so that he might have mercy on all, and that is where it is today, according to Paul. It is man who needs to be reconciled to God, not the other way around.
God is already reconciled to us, where our sins are concerned. It is not a sin issue, it is a son issue. What a marvelous plan Gods for us! God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off of the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. Understanding the grace of God is an intricate part of the joy that should really be a part of every believer’s life.
The grace of God has brought peace with God, is the foundation of every believer’s joy in this age. Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness. Justification is not a process, but is a one-time act, complete and definitive.
Justification is a legal term which changes the believing sinner’s standing before God, declaring us acquitted and accepted by God, with the guilt and penalty of our sins put away forever. Christ did not die to give us a reprieve, he did not die to give us temporary relief.
The only reason God could say through Paul, “Grace and peace be unto you“ is because his son fully paid the price. So in the midst of Paul’s troubling circumstances, he is thanking God, he is thinking what God accomplished for him through Christ.
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teachmevp
It is simply been given to man to either accept or reject what Christ has already accomplished in this age of grace. The believer today then, is to be based upon appreciation of what Christ has already done, and the security that we have in him, rather than apprehension based upon a supposition of what God may or may not do in the future for us.
Many people involved in religion’s domain are dealing with God on the basis of probation, rather than salvation. Then God must make a decision in their minds, whether or not to save that individual. Their suitability for heaven depends upon their turning away from all of their sins.
If they will simply dedicate themselves to no longer to sin, that is the idea. God testing over and over again the validity of that dedication. Then God will know if they are truly devoted to him, then he will be able to finally make a decision as to whether or not they are heaven worthy.
That is the idea in and in most people’s minds; it is the idea being promoted by ministers of righteousness. That is probation, not salvation. God is not testing or proving people today, in order to make a final decision as to whether or not to save them, or to keep them saved.
All the saving work that God could possibly do, he has already done through Christ. God now holds forth the reconciliation that Christ has accomplished, in his mind, offering man the choice to either accept or reject that gift of salvation. Appreciation based on the reality of salvation, not apprehension based on religion’s message of probation.
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teachmevp
God has a plan for heaven that pertains to you and I. That pertains to people today who will take God at his message through the apostle of the Gentiles, the apostle Paul. Satan and his forces are so obsessed with stealing Paul’s gospel, obsessed with keeping it hidden so people do not discover it.
As long as people do not discover Paul’s gospel, as long as they are steered away from the true gospel they cannot believe Paul’s gospel. Satan and his forces are playing a cover up game with Paul’s gospel, because they have a desire to keep people lost.
For example, Satan and his forces have deceived a great many people into believing a negative view of the body in contrast to the soul, and a concept of salvation as interior experience rather than total transformation. A great many people have been deceived into believing that their nature is dualistic, that is, consisting of a material, mortal body and a spiritual, immortal soul.
They generally envision a destiny where their immortal souls will survive the death of their body and will spend eternity in the bliss of heaven or in the torment of hell. These people have been taught that death is the separation of the immortal soul from the mortal body, so that the soul survives the body in a disembodied state.
By death, the soul is separated from the body, but a resurrection God will give incorruptible life to the body, transformed by reunion with the soul. Worst of all, dualism has given rise to the sadistic teaching that God makes the wicked suffer unending conscious torment in hell, which has been such a burden to the Christian conscience and such unnecessary offense to many seekers.
Dualism has done such a serious harm in weakening our blessed hope of Christ ‘s appearing and in distorting our understanding of our citizenship in heaven. The Bible never sees the flesh and the soul as two different forms of existence. Rather, they are manifestations of the same person, the ancient Hebrews could not conceive of one without the other.
The two are indissolubly connected because the body is the outward form of the soul and the soul the inward life of the body. The body and soul are an indivisible unity; people are seen from two different perspectives. The body is the physical reality of human existence; the soul is the vitality and personality of human existence.
“For the soul of every creature is the blood of it,” the phrase “every creature” suggests that the reference to blood apply to both humans and animals. We have here a most important insight revealed into the essence of human nature; soul and blood are identical.
The fact that a person consists of various parts which are integrated, interrelated and functionally united, leaves no room for the notion of the soul being distinct from the body and thus removing the basis for the belief in the survival of the soul at the death of the body. The first death is a temporary sleep because it is followed by a resurrection. The second death is permanent and irreversible extinction because there is no awakening.
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teachmevp
Some people are extremely proud of their humility, there are those who put on a show humility for the sake of elevating self. The selflessness Paul has in mind in his epistles does not point to itself, it does not tell others how selfness it is in order to call attention to it’s self, it does not seek a response from others, it does not have to make an appeal to the emotions of others for the purpose of calling attention to it’s self, true selflessness would point to the selflessness of someone else, rather than it’s self.
One serving of self, leads to another serving of self, words spoken in haste, lead to other words spoken in haste, harmful words to further harmful words, we serve the sin nature rather than our Savior, as we serve self, rather than the Body of saints to whom we are as equally and intimately joined, as we are joined to our Savior.
Apart from trusting Jesus Christ as Savior, human righteousness comes from self-interest-motivation, it is self-glorifying, and while it may be of earthly benefit, that will not cut it when it comes to meeting the demands of God’s perfect justice. We cannot use experience to prove the validity of our doctrinal position, we must always use doctrine to prove the validity of our experience.
Emotion can lead us down the path, and will oftentimes, most likely lead us down the wrong path, when emotion becomes the governor of our intellect, rather than the doctrinally governed intellect becoming the ruler of our emotions. Emotion should never be the fuel, we should never be emotionally driven, but doctrinally driven.
Unbelievers and believers alike struggle with the innate sense of right and wrong, and they are drawn toward that desire to fulfill the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, that is the sin nature working in opposition to the conscience, to have a person go in a direction contrary to that inner sense of right and wrong that is common to all humankind.
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