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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