Monday, December 26, 2016

All My Behavior Is A Reflection Of My Faith

My Utmost For His Highest
 
If we walk in the light as He is in the light…the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. —1 John 1:7
 
[CHAMBERS] “To mistake freedom from sin only on the conscious level of our lives for complete deliverance from sin by the atonement through the Cross of Christ is a great error. No one fully knows what sin is until he is born again. Sin is what Jesus Christ faced at Calvary. The evidence that I have been delivered from sin is that I know the real nature of sin in me. For a person to really know what sin is requires the full work and deep touch of the atonement of Jesus Christ, that is, the imparting of His absolute perfection. […] it is not until we truly perceive the unrivaled power of the Spirit in us that we understand the meaning of 1 John 1:7 , which says, “…the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.” […] I must “walk in the light as He is in the light…”— not in the light of my own conscience, but in God’s light. If I will walk there, with nothing held back or hidden, then this amazing truth is revealed to me: “…the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses [me] from all sin” so that God Almighty can see nothing to rebuke in me. On the conscious level it produces a keen, sorrowful knowledge of what sin really is.”
 
[ELGIN] Talking to my grandchildren about a problem they were having with each other, I realized that they believed that the problem was unavoidable, inevitable, a fact of life, the way it was going to be.  They had come to accept it as normal. I told them that it was not consistent with who they are in Christ.  Spiritual truth is something that you can’t convince people of, the Spirit does that, but you can share the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15).  Feeling that something in our lives is inevitable, unavoidable, even acceptable is not uncommon.  We try to overcome it on our own, and can’t, so we decide we will just have to live with it.  Talking to my grandchildren, they seemed so matter of fact that what they were doing was really OK.  To make it worse, they were listening to conversations about how things were when people growing up fought and argued with their siblings and the parents decided to let them “work it out”. 
 
And so how do that help us be more like Jesus?  As the conversation continued I realized that they did not associate their behavior with being a Christian. (Matthew 15:8-9) “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”  A part of spiritual maturity is letting spiritual truth find its way into our hearts in such a way that the natural is overcome by the supernatural.  The we instantly know that what we do or say or think is inconsistent with who we are in Christ.  That the struggle with our old nature will succeed only through the power of Christ in me.  (Romans 7:22-25) “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”  Jesus is the answer.

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