Tuesday, September 17, 2019

No Matter What The World Thinks - We Are Not All God’s Children

Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.” – 1 John 3:1

Over the years, I have heard a number of people refer to humankind as being “all God’s children”.  It’s one of those sayings that sounds good, but is patently false. We are all God’s natural creation but we are not all His spiritual children.  What happened in the Garden changed that and now we must be adopted into His family.  (Ephesians 1:5) “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will”  I cannot adopt my own children, so it must be that without Jesus, we are not part of God’s family nor are we heirs of eternal life.  Without that adoption I am bound for hell.  Once adopted I have eternal life with God in heaven.  Pretty simple really.  Saying we are all God’s children may sound sweet but it is a bitter falsehood – a deception.  With the great movement toward inclusivity – we are all the same – people are losing the distinction between what men think to be truth and what God has declared is truth.  Only the Spirit of God can convince people of that truth.  We have an obligation to share the Gospel when given the opportunity, even in the real possibility of being castigated and rejected and called a hater, a bigot.  Why? Because you are telling people that what they have chosen to do is sin.  And you will have the opportunity.  Don’t give people who are lost false hope, but always “Speak the truth in love.”

What is true is God is the Source of all creation.  And Jesus is at the center of it. 

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” – John 1:1-4

Jesus is the “living” Word.  [It was this truth that the Spirit used to open my mom’s eyes and salvation]  I am not going to address the Trinity this morning. Spiritual reality is so different from our human reality.  We try to cram spiritual understanding into the shoes of our natural understanding and those “feet” are just too big!  They don’t fit.  So the temptation is to reject Spiritual truth because of the limitation of our natural understanding. Those who have not put their faith in Jesus will not receive the truth.   Apart from the presence of the Holy Spirit it is impossible to understand.

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.” – 1 Corinthians 2:14

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