It is not Hell, Fire and Damnation preaching that changes people’s minds, that may scare people into making a temporary, at best, decision to do something with their lives. We are told that people need more law preaching in order to become better people, because if we preach God’s goodness, they are going to go out and sin all the more.
Paul is telling us the precise opposite, 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. The truth is our deeds do not determine our destiny, our faith determines our destiny.
Our deeds have nothing whatsoever to do with the security of our eternal position in Jesus Christ. That was accomplished for us apart from our deeds, good or bad. To preach grace is not to sanction sin, it’s to settle one’s trust in the Savior.
So those who preach grace are absolutely not preaching a license to sin, they are acknowledging sin for what it is and they are saying that the only solution for sin is to trust in the Savior and what he’s accomplished for us with his sacrifice.
It is obvious that God worked through visual evidences in connection with the Israelites, who required a sign during the time that God’s program with Israel was in progress. Yet Israel, for the most part, remained an unbelieving people.
Today, for the most part, we are also an unbelieving people. Instead of trusting in God’s word and resting in the glories of his grace that we’re shown through the word, we are even now continually looking for signs, continually looking for visual evidences of God’s presence and his approval in the day-to-day circumstance of our lives.
We are not the sign nation, and we have not become the assumers and fulfillers of God’s program with that sign-nation. Many think we have, that program has been placed on hold while God completes his plan and purpose for the saints of this dispensation.
We are the saints of a brand new program. While Israel walked by sight, we walk not by sight, but by faith. The focus today is no longer on the outward, but on the inward. God is not giving us those visual manifestations, we have a new apostle through whom we have been given God’s completed instruction.
We have not been promised that earthly kingdom, an earthly inheritance. God has prepared a heavenly habitation for the saints of this dispensation, our citizenship is in heaven. God in his infinite wisdom pre-decreed that every believer would be joined to his son, fully identified with his son.
God also pre-decided that we the believer would be blessed with all the blessings and privileges of an adopted adult son. God decided in advance that we the believer are to be the praise of the glory of his grace. God has pre-determined all these outcomes for us according to Ephesians 1:4-6.
Paul’s great desire was to know Christ in his resurrection power, because that same power that raised Christ from among the dead was operating or energizing in Paul and it’s energizing in us.
Religion is filled 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 desired to be found in Christ, not with a righteous record that could be gauged as having come from Paul as the source, but with righteousness that had God at it’s source, a gift declaration of rightness before God.
Our justified standing with God is something that cannot be handed back to God as some teach today, because it depends not on the believer’s promise or performance, but solely upon Christ’s faithfulness and his faithfulness along.
We cannot give it back, because it is dependent upon Christ faithfulness and we are sealed at the point we take God at his word concerning what his son accomplished. God’s integrity is at stake in doing what he promised he would do, we can have security of mind that we have Christ’s test score written on our paper in Heaven.
What is given in exchange for another as the price of their redemption. If the ransom was for all, then the payment was made for all. The price was paid for all and through that payment Christ redeemed the entire human race from the sin barrier that separated the world from God.
It is up to those of the world to either accept or reject their redeemer, but that does no less make him their redeemer. Those who reject the gift are thumbing their noses at the one who paid that price for their redemption. Those who reject their redeemer will face the ultimate consequences of that rejection.
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. When a present event activates one 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 handling 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.
Prayer is indeed a powerful tool that God has given us, but was prayer given for the purpose of prodding God, pleading with God to alter the circumstances of our everyday lives, or was prayer given for the purpose of providing peace to the mind of the troubled saint.
There is a tremendous difference in one who believes they can influence God and therefore, alter their circumstances because they are a believer with prayer in hand, and a believer who acknowledges that God is in absolute control and is already doing what is best on behalf of every believer, no matter how unfortunate the circumstance that is at hand.
Reigning in life does not mean the absence of problems! Yet, many think that being a believer affords them the opportunity to get their unpleasant circumstances altered. Religious circles of our society believe that they reign in life over the circumstances in their life, in that God has empowered them with a tool called prayer, in order that they might have God alter the negative circumstances that come their way.
We trust God to know what is good for us even in the face of all of our adverse circumstances, God is not waiting for us to pray, so that he can decide what to do and then make the decision whether that would be good for us or not good for us.
The reality is, that we continue to suffer, it is not health, wealth, and prosperity in this life as the popular money-mongering ministers of righteousness would have us believe today. God’s purpose was to allow us to suffer, and there is a reason for that, so that we can put our hope on display to those who know nothing about our hope.
Our hope is not glorification here, not health, wealth, and prosperity on this planet, but a future glorification, because we are going to have a new body with that life God gave to Jesus - John 5:26.
Paul takes us away from chastisement and judgment and he leads us toward the reality of our position in Jesus Christ. Paul told us how we were at the point of our belief identified with Christ through God’s power from on high’s identification transaction called Baptism.
Not a ritual performed by human hands, but the operation of God, whereby we become fully identified with our Savior, in union with him, so that we actually become a part of him. Two becoming one flesh from the standpoint of God, being fully identified with Jesus Christ means that we died when Christ died.
Grace comes along and tells us that being identified with Christ’s resurrection life, we now have an everlasting life we do not deserve and could never earn. God did not establish a new law for the age of grace and place believers under that law, so that he would have a new way to measure our righteous performance for the purpose of permitting a heavenly entrance.
God works in us through his word written to and about us. God’s thinking, as we take his word as true is therefore capable of transforming our thinking, it is a new operating system. It is not about perfecting the flesh, it is about crucifying the flesh in our minds and allowing God to do his work through his word in our lives.
God cannot produce his work through us apart from the transforming work his word accomplishes in us. 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.
When we trusted Jesus Christ as Savior, something happened that took place outside the realm of our sensation, outside the realm of our feelings. God’s power from on high baptized us, immersed us by joining us to Jesus Christ.
God’s power from on high places every believer into Jesus Christ, this is what Paul was talking about when he used the expression “baptized into Jesus Christ”. 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.
We can rejoice and we can give all the glory and the praise to God and to our savior Jesus Christ for the fact that even though that sinful nature is strapped onto our fleshly backs like a rotting corpse, God does not see us in our flesh from his judicial perspective.
Our fleshly bodies will never be worthy of heaven in that they will never be able to perform to the measure of the righteousness that is true of God. As we understand what God accomplished for us through his son, we build upon that foundation the truths of who he has made us to be when he placed us into his son, we begin to view ourselves as God views us, and there is great security to be found in doing so.
If we misunderstand justification, we are going to have a difficult time understanding sanctification. Since people link a justified standing before God with performance of their own, they also link a sanctified standing before God with their own performance.
If we think our relationship with God is of a fluctuating nature, we never know where we stand. So, people’s minds are up and down and all around, an emotional roller-coaster as to where does on stand with God. We are alive because of our position, not at all because of our practice.
God no longer views us in our human flesh, he views us in our position in the second Adam (Jesus Christ), he views us in our glorified identity. God’s power put into operation as believers are baptized into the savior, the same power that raised Christ from among the dead, is the power exercised to place us into the body of Christ, we were fused with Christ himself at the instance we believe.
When we feel insecure, whatever the reason, Paul tells us to re-focus on our security, this is a security we can not lose. We are not in the process of becoming something new and different. We are at the very instance of our belief a brand new creation, God sees us in a brand new way. Sainthood is not earned at all.
Sainthood is not something to be sought after as though it could be attained to or something that only comes for a select few. Freedom from God’s condemnation is a reality for every single believer, not because of any new found performance capabilities, but because we are made the righteousness of God in our union with his perfectly righteous son.
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 morality, we are going to get the life God gave to Jesus.
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. We must understand that God has predetermined to glorify us. In fact, God has predestined us to that glorification.
The truth is, those with a sin nature have never needed a license to sin, we do it naturally. Yet, the Christian’s army is the only army that shots it’s wounded. Anytime we condemn the coming shortnesses in others, we need to understand the reality of the fact that we are all in the same boat, we all come short in the righteousness department due to the indwelling sin nature.
A person who is in the gutter, oftentimes realizes the situation they have gotten themselves into, but a person who believes they are in a position to judge someone else: a person who has rationalized away his own short-comings, is one who is falling to recognize the sins of self.
A person who is looking down their nose at someone else, yet they are doing the very same things in another form, no excuse will suffice to pardon them, it is such a shame that so many people today are trusting in their goodness to get them to heaven. Paul wants us to understand that there is no refuge in human goodness.
Judgment based on a righteousness a person can produce for themselves, can only lead to one verdict- GUILTY! God is going to see them as having no need of the saving work of his son. When we put our human hearts under the microscope of God’s truthful judgment, we are going to find out that we need much more than human righteousness to have a perfectly just standing before God.
Put another way, do people think for one moment that God is going to give them a non-wrath-worthy pass; that Jesus Christ need not have died for their sins; that their sins are of such a non-serous nature that they have no need of a Savior in the first place?
Healthy behaviors result from an identity that is healthy and fully based upon Jesus Christ’s performance on our behalf, as a result, we can begin learning to find rest; who we are has been settled in Christ. It is Christ’s faith that righteousifies those who take their stand with God when it comes to what God has stated his son accomplished for them.
It was Christ’s faith and as a result of his faith, his faithfulness that he sacrificed himself and purchased the gift of our salvation. It is our faith in the accomplishment of Jesus Christ’s faithful sacrifice that is the means whereby God acknowledges that we have accepted the gift his son purchased.
Therefore, God in his infinite wisdom devised a plan whereby he could take the very faith belonging to his son, along with its resultant faithfulness, and credit that faith and faithfulness to the account of those who believe.
Yet, finding rest sounds rather foreign to us, an idea too unrealistic or too good to be true, because somewhere in our life we have been involved in the relationships of our environments that were based on conditions. 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.
Standards may have become so deeply ingrained, that we are not even aware of them, let alone conscious of how to get free from their tyranny, constantly trying to measure up to standards that are higher than we can reach.
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 this experience, we might become conformed in his resurrection.
This process is not enjoyable, because it is hard to learn that life cannot be controlled, it is far too spontaneous and rambunctious to be fully understood.
Paul wants us to know at one point in time something was true, but now something else is true. The entire human race is guilty when it comes to human merit, performance, and production and all fall short, continually coming short of the righteousness of God himself.
Paul has made it abundantly clear that God does not measure our goodness in relation to the goodness of others; he compares our goodness with his own perfect righteousness.
That would be the criteria for dwelling with God and when our human righteousness is held up alongside the perfect righteousness of God, every member of the human race comes out on the short end of the stick.
The issue is believing what Jesus Christ accomplished in your behalf, in order to be identified with and joined to Christ himself. Christ believed that God’s justice has been satisfied where the sins he came to sacrifice himself for are concerned, Christ’s faith was and remains in God, and indeed we can believe God’s justice has been satisfied.
Christ does not have a wishy-washy faith, it is Christ’s faith who has never, nor will ever waver in faith. It is Christ’s faith that is freely credited to the account of the one who believes the good news given to the apostle Paul to proclaim to us in this age of grace.
The instance you take your stand with God, you are not only saved, but sealed until the day of redemption of these earthly tents in which we dwell. Our faith in the good news of Christ 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. Until you believe Paul’s good news of the grace of God to be true for yourself, you will not be placed into Jesus Christ by the baptizing of God’s power from on high or what is called holy spirit, and not being baptized into Christ means that you are standing in your own righteousness rather than Christ’s righteousness.
Being created in the image of God means that we must view ourselves as intrinsically valuable and richly invested with meaning, potentially and responsibilities. We are to be and to do on a finite scale, what God is and does on an infinite scale.
By virtue of being created in the image of God, human beings are capable of reflecting his character in their own life; animals possess none of these qualities. What distinguishes people from animals is the fact that human nature inherently has godlike possibilities.
Omniscience, omnipotence, or omnipresence, none of these other divine attributes have been ascribed to the human race as part of the image of God. We have been created to reflect God in our thinking and actions, but the physical sustained by God and dependent upon him for our existence in this world and in the world to come.
Developing a godly character in this present life, this will be our personal identity in the world to come. It is the character or personality that we have developed in this life, that God preserves in his memory. We must understand that God has predetermined to glorify us. In fact, God has predestined us to that glorification.
God did not predestinate us to believe, he predestinated us to be conformed to the image of his son, because he knew who would believe. 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.
What God was doing through his son; God knew about what he intended to do before the world was ever formed, yet, God had kept this secret from ages and generations until it was time for the ascended Jesus Christ to reveal it to the apostle Paul, so that Paul could reveal it to the world.
There are those who mistakenly suppose that reconciliation is the same thing as righteousification. These people have jumped to the conclusion that Jesus Christ taking the sin issue off the table of God’s justice through his becoming sin for the human race is that which makes a person as righteous as God; they have mistaken reconciliation for justification.
To have your sin slate judicially emptied because Christ died for those sins, does not mean that you now possess the righteousness recorded on the slate of the one who died for those sins. Grace is the foundation on which Paul’s entire ministry was built, and grace covers all the bases for the believer’s life and it certainly includes God’s love.
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. We are to praise God for what his grace has accomplished.
A lot of groups believe that God’s grace as it relates to salvation is something that has to be tapped into.
The good news from God to us today, is that God is not counting anyone’s sins against them, but Satan, Paul tells us, is working through ministers of righteousness to keep this news hidden from people.
It is a simple message, but very difficult for the pride nature to get past, because people’s pride nature says that if I broke it, I can play a part in fixing it, and we all attempt to do that and religion is there to give us a hand along the way.
We are not to listen to ministers of righteousness telling us sins are still the issue, and they will give people a way to keep that sin issue satisfied on a weekly, daily, monthly, yearly basis.
The good news is what will a person do, when it comes to their taking God at his Word, concerning what Jesus Christ accomplished where their sins are concerned? Ministers of righteousness have been taught to teach what they are teaching, and in so doing, they are dis-serving what was accomplished by Christ.
Just understand, there is no additional sin question in the mind of God when it comes to his forgiveness or his righteous justice, the sin issue has been taken care of. Beware, a clever counterfeit being conducted by good people who have your best interest in mind, they want the best for you, but they will be deceiving, because they themselves have been deceived.
We should be very grateful that we are saved by the faith of Jesus Christ, his faith accomplished our salvation. When it came to the earthly program, God’s glory was magnified through seeing, and the prayer of faith was the catalyst.
Is God utilizing the prayer of faith during this present dispensation of grace that we might see our deliverance? That was God’s earthly kingdom plan, miraculous events, visual events!
However, when we come to understand that that earthly kingdom program is no longer in progress, but on hold, we come to realize that God through his power from on high wants to stabilize every believer today in a completely different way.
We certainly know that God wants us to pray, but when we pray in the Age of Grace, we are to pray with thanksgiving, but are we to pray with thanksgiving that God would do it? Are we to pray with thanksgiving that we are going to get what we are praying for? Not at all.
What is our thanksgiving about then? Trust that God knows what he is doing, and he is going to do it whether we pray or not. God knows precisely what he is going to do. There is a difference in the Age of Grace, it is strength made perfect in weakness, it is not strength made perfect in the elimination of the suffering situation.
Prayer was never given to change God’s perspective of our greater preference, prayer was given to change our perspective of God’s greater purpose. God’s greater purpose was not to strengthen our faith by altering our circumstances.
God’s greater purpose is to allow us to demonstrated our faith as we remain strong in spite of our circumstances. Prayer was never given to bring God into alignment with our wants, prayer was given to bring us into alignment with God’s will.
Our patient endurance through suffering is a way of demonstrating our hope, and when our hope is put on display in the midst of our suffering, that brings glory to God.
Satan’s ministers of righteousness use the word reform, but reformation would be a work of the believer for God. They would appeal to people to reform, yet some people think it is their responsibility to remove their sins. These people commit, they recommit, they recommit their re-commitment.
Most often these people give up at some point, they fool themselves into thinking they have achieved it or they give up, because every time they are sinning again. Since they think salvation is tied to their behavior, they never come to the point of placing their total trust in the fact that Christ remove their sin, it is gone.
So they just shove the whole reformation thing aside, they want no part of this religious game. The most dangerous appeal to people to reform, are people accepting Christ’s work, but on the installment plan. These people want to go back to the atonement program, the covering for sin.
They 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. Religion is the main tool of Satan, get right with God, come back and get right with God next week once again. Keep coming back to keep right with God.
Satan’s ministers of righteousness would appeal to people to reform, God does not make that appeal! God is not patiently waiting for people to change their mind about what they do, many have done that thinking it gains salvation.
Many of Satan’s ministers of righteousness are holding over the heads of their congregations a little law mixed with the possibility of losing their salvation. That is how they keep their congregations in line, frighten them a bit with the possibility of hell fire and brimstone.
Salvation by works rather than by grace, 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, grace is a much greater motivator.
Satan and his clan have an obsessive compulsive urge with pilfering Paul’s good news, they are playing a cover up game with Paul’s good news. Ministers of righteousness will ever more keep that issue of sins on the table of God’s justice, continually wanting people to do this and stop that, in order to keep God happy with them.
People will suffer the second death, not because of the sins God’s son paid for, but they will suffer the second death because they have never been clothed with the righteousness of Christ. They have kept sin on the table of God’s justice their entire lifetimes, and sat under minister of righteousness who have led the way.
Human wisdom, human reasoning would say, “Give us something that we can do. Give us some way to perform. Give us a few balls of our own to hit, so that we might earn back what we lost through Adam.” God’s reasoning said, “Impossible!” The Law that God gave to Israel was a measure of what people would have to perform to be accepted by God.
Jesus Christ’s faithfulness was the only faithfulness sufficient to merit God’s favor. God used our faith in Christ’s faithfulness as the means whereby he would credit Christ’s righteousness to our account.
The pathway of rules and regulations for righteousness, otherwise called religion, seems right to a lot of people today. Not one member of the entire human race has ever lived up to any system of rule-keeping for righteousness. Yet, how many are attempting today, to do what humankind before us was totally unable to do?
People oftentimes base their salvation and their relationship to God on their emotions, they find themselves on an endless quest for emotional satisfaction, because they relate their closeness to God upon feeling, they are either on fire or the fire’s gone out!
As faith gives way to feeling, people begin to base their faith on feeling, they want a God they can “move to,” and they want teachers who can make them feel good in the process. Doctrine giving way to emotion will be the order of the day, that is what the emergent church is all about, satisfying the emotional desires of people.
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.
If Christ paid the penalty for our sins, to keep those sins on the table of God’s justice is to do great injustice to what Christ accomplished. That turns Paul’s good news into a not so good news, it turns salvation into probation. There is no shortage of ministers of righteousness who are doing Satan’s bidding, deceiving as they are being deceived.
A person’s law keeping will never be sufficient to provide them salvation, just as a person’s law keeping will never be sufficient to maintain their salvation for them. The truth is our deeds do not determine our destiny, our faith determines our destiny.
Those who preach grace are absolutely not preaching a license to sin, they are acknowledging sin for what it is, and they are saying that the only solution for sin is to trust in the Savior and what he has accomplished for us.
To avoid the truth of grace from fear that it may give a person the right to sin, is the same thing as saying that teaching the opposite of grace (or law) will keep a person from sinning, that is a very prevalent attitude today in religianity. Desiring to teach law, thinking that the law restrains sin, what an absurd idea!
The Gentiles had a law of their own design, they had an inner sense of right and wrong, and through that inner sense called “the conscience,” they developed for themselves their own code of ethics, their own lists of do’s and don’ts.
Unbelievers and believers alike struggle with that 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. The notion that an unbeliever does not really have a struggle with sin, everyone with a conscience struggles with an inner sense of right and wrong or a seared conscience when a person defies that conscience.
Today people think they have to ask God to forgive them for the sins that God is no longer charging to their account in the first place. Ministers of righteousness would have people believe God is not totally reconciled in his mind.
Is God waiting for people to seek after him in order for reconciliation to become reality in his mind? Is God waiting for people to ask Jesus into their heart? Is God waiting for people to walk down the isle? Is God waiting for people to pray the sinners prayer? Is God waiting for people to repent of their sins?
Satan wants to keep sin on the table of God’s justice today, as much in the Age of Grace as he has in the other ages. If Satan had known what Jesus Christ would actually accomplish where the sins of the world are concerned, Satan would not have had Christ crucified.
The natural tendency of the flesh is to set our affection on the things of the earth and the things of the flesh, and allow those things to rule our mind. Is the primary focus of our mind on the circumstances at hand in our life, depression is a rush of negative attitude that results from a vacuum of joy.
When it comes to a mind set of joy, it is our responsibility to focus our own minds appropriately, a redirection of thought based upon the accomplishments of Jesus Christ, we are not to hold the things on the earth so near and dear so as to rule our minds.
God purchased the human race out of sins dominion, never to be returned to the market place of sin again. By removing the sin issue from the table of God’s justice, God effectively canceled Satan’s ownership of all the human race. Satan can lay claim to no person based on that persons sinfulness.
Being critical of others is an intricate part of maintaining that fantasy that we are perfect, and others are somewhere a bit beneath us. The pride nature of people is such that people will always have that tenancy to think more highly of themselves then they ought.
Rather than recognizing the unworthiness of the flesh, people spend their lives trying to convince themselves and others of their value. Elevating self through the denigration of someone else, the unseen put down, a wiliness to aggressively find fault with others.
Satan knows the power that emotions play when these emotions become the cement that seals the door of the mind, such that a mind remains closed and the door locked. To be open to that which moves a person from the mental comfort zone to which that person has become accustomed, becomes not only an unsettling inconvenience, it becomes a mind-shaking threat to many people.
There are multitudes who are putting faith in their feelings, emotional cravings, the minds of the vast majority of so-called Christendom today, emotion trumps doctrine. Could it be that God is NOT giving people all these emotion tweaking experiences, because he knows that Satan will come with all manner of lying signs and wonders.
People may be going by a religious belief system that is a totally false belief system, why would God refuse to give people neat little things to look at today to determine his presence, his power, his predisposition, his purpose, and his plan? Could it be that God is having people walk by faith and not by sight, because God knew that Satan will be performing the miraculous in the last days of the age of grace.
The religious notion that Jesus Christ’s shed blood was insufficient to have fully satisfied God where people’s sins are concerned, thus the continual need for something further required of people to keep God’s justice up to date.
This is “the new sin requires new forgiveness” idea set forth by those who fail to appreciate the accomplishment of Jesus Christ. Well, they will one day stand at the Great White Throne Judgment where the merited righteousness they think they have will be put on display.
People who think they have to keep God’s justice up to date, they will be standing at the Great White Throne Judgment having only their own righteousness to show for themselves, it will be open for inspection.
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.
This is a chilling and sobering thought,when self-righteous moralizers harden their hearts and remain impenitent concerning their goodness, they are storing up to themselves wrath to be visited upon them in the day of wrath.
If God thinks what his son did on our behalf, where all of our sin debt is concerned, then we can take God at his word. If God believes it, why can’t we stand with God on what God believes, that is faith.
Those who are bent on satisfying the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, fall into a snare in that they become addicted to the manner in which they satisfy those lusts. People fall into many foolish and hurtful lusts, not only harmful to themselves, but hurtful to others around them.
Choose to serve sin and we can soon become addicted to the manner in which we have chosen to serve sin. We all have that bent towards satisfying the lust of our flesh toward serving ourselves, but God’s sentence on the flesh was not reformation, it was total eradication.
That sentence was carried out when we died with Christ, God had no intention of repairing our old man, no plan to clean it up and make it more presentable, his intention was to kill it. Every believer is standing in the gift degree of righteousness, because believers are placed into God’s son, so that when God views us, he no longer views us in do’s or don’ts.
When we stop focusing on the do’s and cease focusing on the don’ts, the do’s and don’ts become a lot easier. If our life is hid with God in Christ, then how does God view us? God views us in his son, Jesus Christ. So, while we continue to have and will continue to have to contend with the flesh this side of the new body, God no longer sees us in our identity with the flesh.
God has committed himself to preserving our individuality, personality, and character. Paul’s usage of the Greek word for body is “soma”. Soma is not something external to a person themselves, something they have, it is what they are.
Indeed, soma is the nearest equivalent to our word personality. To believe in the resurrection of the body “soma”, means to believe that my human self, the human being that “I” am, will be restored to life again. We will not be someone different from who we are now, but we will be exclusively ourselves.
The term body “soma” is simply a synonym for “person”. Both death and resurrection affect the total person, the goal of God’s redemption is not the destruction of his first creation, but its restoration to its original perfection. This is why the Scripture speaks of the resurrection of the body, rather than of the creation of new beings. The resurrected persons will be the same individuals as those who existed previously on earth.
We can rejoice and we can give all the glory and the praise to God and to our savior Jesus Christ for the fact that God does not see us in our flesh from his judicial perspective.
God no longer views us in our human flesh, he views us in our position in the second Adam (Jesus Christ), he views us in our glorified identity. 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.
But think about this: Is forgiveness the same thing as being justified or having someone else’s righteousness freely attributed to your account? They are not one and the same!
Our sins have all been forgiven, but forgiveness alone does not mean the person having forgiveness is as perfectly and totally righteous as the one who is doing the forgiving!
Justification is far more than the negative imputation of the sins fo the world to the world, it is the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness to those who believe what was accomplished on their behalf. Justified by Blood.
We find that our magnificent redemption demanded a monumental price. So justification, believing in what Christ’s sacrifice accomplished, is a requirement in order to be justified.
I may forgive another a debt that he owes me, but does that mean that the one that I have forgiven is now the primary on my bank account? Being justified (declared to be righteous) freely by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.
Satan wants to blind people’s eyes to the truth of Paul’s good news, he is very clever in using ministers of righteousness in accomplishing that blinding. Satan is offering people a way to become righteous, to achieve a righteous standing before God and he always attaches people’s performance, people’s fingerprints are found on Satan’s method of becoming righteous.
God justifies freely, not by way of people’s performance or promise, but as a gift. God justifies those who take him at his word, concerning what his son accomplished for them. Something for nothing!
Our decree of judicial perfection in the eyes of God comes not through Christ’s death for our sins, but through our union with Christ’s resurrection life. If a person believes Christ died for their sins, but does not believe that God’s justice was satisfied, when Christ died for those sins, that person has not believed Christ died for their sins.
There are people out there who believe they can lose their salvation, because they have totally confused their standing in Christ, with their state. Standing - how God views you ‘in Christ’ perfect righteousness! Saints! State - your experience through time on earth.
Standing is what God’s made you to be and what you can never cease to be in his eyes. State has to do with how you are taking advantage or not taking advantage of that God given position that is everlastingly yours by God’s decree.
God has given us a perfect standing in our union with his perfectly righteous son. God has also made provision for us now to have an ever improving state or experience, it is called growth, maturing.
Give up serving self, and that will be the best service to self you could ever give yourself. Why, because you will find true freedom and joy to be the ultimate result, give up serving self and serve others.
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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 is not Hell, Fire and Damnation preaching that changes people’s minds, that may scare people into making a temporary, at best, decision to do something with their lives. We are told that people need more law preaching in order to become better people, because if we preach God’s goodness, they are going to go out and sin all the more.
Paul is telling us the precise opposite, 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. The truth is our deeds do not determine our destiny, our faith determines our destiny.
Our deeds have nothing whatsoever to do with the security of our eternal position in Jesus Christ. That was accomplished for us apart from our deeds, good or bad. To preach grace is not to sanction sin, it’s to settle one’s trust in the Savior.
So those who preach grace are absolutely not preaching a license to sin, they are acknowledging sin for what it is and they are saying that the only solution for sin is to trust in the Savior and what he’s accomplished for us with his sacrifice.
It is obvious that God worked through visual evidences in connection with the Israelites, who required a sign during the time that God’s program with Israel was in progress. Yet Israel, for the most part, remained an unbelieving people.
Today, for the most part, we are also an unbelieving people. Instead of trusting in God’s word and resting in the glories of his grace that we’re shown through the word, we are even now continually looking for signs, continually looking for visual evidences of God’s presence and his approval in the day-to-day circumstance of our lives.
We are not the sign nation, and we have not become the assumers and fulfillers of God’s program with that sign-nation. Many think we have, that program has been placed on hold while God completes his plan and purpose for the saints of this dispensation.
We are the saints of a brand new program. While Israel walked by sight, we walk not by sight, but by faith. The focus today is no longer on the outward, but on the inward. God is not giving us those visual manifestations, we have a new apostle through whom we have been given God’s completed instruction.
We have not been promised that earthly kingdom, an earthly inheritance. God has prepared a heavenly habitation for the saints of this dispensation, our citizenship is in heaven. God in his infinite wisdom pre-decreed that every believer would be joined to his son, fully identified with his son.
God also pre-decided that we the believer would be blessed with all the blessings and privileges of an adopted adult son. God decided in advance that we the believer are to be the praise of the glory of his grace. God has pre-determined all these outcomes for us according to Ephesians 1:4-6.
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teachmevp
Paul’s great desire was to know Christ in his resurrection power, because that same power that raised Christ from among the dead was operating or energizing in Paul and it’s energizing in us.
Religion is filled 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 desired to be found in Christ, not with a righteous record that could be gauged as having come from Paul as the source, but with righteousness that had God at it’s source, a gift declaration of rightness before God.
Our justified standing with God is something that cannot be handed back to God as some teach today, because it depends not on the believer’s promise or performance, but solely upon Christ’s faithfulness and his faithfulness along.
We cannot give it back, because it is dependent upon Christ faithfulness and we are sealed at the point we take God at his word concerning what his son accomplished. God’s integrity is at stake in doing what he promised he would do, we can have security of mind that we have Christ’s test score written on our paper in Heaven.
What is given in exchange for another as the price of their redemption. If the ransom was for all, then the payment was made for all. The price was paid for all and through that payment Christ redeemed the entire human race from the sin barrier that separated the world from God.
It is up to those of the world to either accept or reject their redeemer, but that does no less make him their redeemer. Those who reject the gift are thumbing their noses at the one who paid that price for their redemption. Those who reject their redeemer will face the ultimate consequences of that rejection.
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teachmevp
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. When a present event activates one 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 handling 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.
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teachmevp
Prayer is indeed a powerful tool that God has given us, but was prayer given for the purpose of prodding God, pleading with God to alter the circumstances of our everyday lives, or was prayer given for the purpose of providing peace to the mind of the troubled saint.
There is a tremendous difference in one who believes they can influence God and therefore, alter their circumstances because they are a believer with prayer in hand, and a believer who acknowledges that God is in absolute control and is already doing what is best on behalf of every believer, no matter how unfortunate the circumstance that is at hand.
Reigning in life does not mean the absence of problems! Yet, many think that being a believer affords them the opportunity to get their unpleasant circumstances altered. Religious circles of our society believe that they reign in life over the circumstances in their life, in that God has empowered them with a tool called prayer, in order that they might have God alter the negative circumstances that come their way.
We trust God to know what is good for us even in the face of all of our adverse circumstances, God is not waiting for us to pray, so that he can decide what to do and then make the decision whether that would be good for us or not good for us.
The reality is, that we continue to suffer, it is not health, wealth, and prosperity in this life as the popular money-mongering ministers of righteousness would have us believe today. God’s purpose was to allow us to suffer, and there is a reason for that, so that we can put our hope on display to those who know nothing about our hope.
Our hope is not glorification here, not health, wealth, and prosperity on this planet, but a future glorification, because we are going to have a new body with that life God gave to Jesus - John 5:26.
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teachmevp
Paul takes us away from chastisement and judgment and he leads us toward the reality of our position in Jesus Christ. Paul told us how we were at the point of our belief identified with Christ through God’s power from on high’s identification transaction called Baptism.
Not a ritual performed by human hands, but the operation of God, whereby we become fully identified with our Savior, in union with him, so that we actually become a part of him. Two becoming one flesh from the standpoint of God, being fully identified with Jesus Christ means that we died when Christ died.
Grace comes along and tells us that being identified with Christ’s resurrection life, we now have an everlasting life we do not deserve and could never earn. God did not establish a new law for the age of grace and place believers under that law, so that he would have a new way to measure our righteous performance for the purpose of permitting a heavenly entrance.
God works in us through his word written to and about us. God’s thinking, as we take his word as true is therefore capable of transforming our thinking, it is a new operating system. It is not about perfecting the flesh, it is about crucifying the flesh in our minds and allowing God to do his work through his word in our lives.
God cannot produce his work through us apart from the transforming work his word accomplishes in us. 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.
When we trusted Jesus Christ as Savior, something happened that took place outside the realm of our sensation, outside the realm of our feelings. God’s power from on high baptized us, immersed us by joining us to Jesus Christ.
God’s power from on high places every believer into Jesus Christ, this is what Paul was talking about when he used the expression “baptized into Jesus Christ”. 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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teachmevp
We can rejoice and we can give all the glory and the praise to God and to our savior Jesus Christ for the fact that even though that sinful nature is strapped onto our fleshly backs like a rotting corpse, God does not see us in our flesh from his judicial perspective.
Our fleshly bodies will never be worthy of heaven in that they will never be able to perform to the measure of the righteousness that is true of God. As we understand what God accomplished for us through his son, we build upon that foundation the truths of who he has made us to be when he placed us into his son, we begin to view ourselves as God views us, and there is great security to be found in doing so.
If we misunderstand justification, we are going to have a difficult time understanding sanctification. Since people link a justified standing before God with performance of their own, they also link a sanctified standing before God with their own performance.
If we think our relationship with God is of a fluctuating nature, we never know where we stand. So, people’s minds are up and down and all around, an emotional roller-coaster as to where does on stand with God. We are alive because of our position, not at all because of our practice.
God no longer views us in our human flesh, he views us in our position in the second Adam (Jesus Christ), he views us in our glorified identity. God’s power put into operation as believers are baptized into the savior, the same power that raised Christ from among the dead, is the power exercised to place us into the body of Christ, we were fused with Christ himself at the instance we believe.
When we feel insecure, whatever the reason, Paul tells us to re-focus on our security, this is a security we can not lose. We are not in the process of becoming something new and different. We are at the very instance of our belief a brand new creation, God sees us in a brand new way. Sainthood is not earned at all.
Sainthood is not something to be sought after as though it could be attained to or something that only comes for a select few. Freedom from God’s condemnation is a reality for every single believer, not because of any new found performance capabilities, but because we are made the righteousness of God in our union with his perfectly righteous son.
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 morality, we are going to get the life God gave to Jesus.
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. We must understand that God has predetermined to glorify us. In fact, God has predestined us to that glorification.
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teachmevp
The truth is, those with a sin nature have never needed a license to sin, we do it naturally. Yet, the Christian’s army is the only army that shots it’s wounded. Anytime we condemn the coming shortnesses in others, we need to understand the reality of the fact that we are all in the same boat, we all come short in the righteousness department due to the indwelling sin nature.
A person who is in the gutter, oftentimes realizes the situation they have gotten themselves into, but a person who believes they are in a position to judge someone else: a person who has rationalized away his own short-comings, is one who is falling to recognize the sins of self.
A person who is looking down their nose at someone else, yet they are doing the very same things in another form, no excuse will suffice to pardon them, it is such a shame that so many people today are trusting in their goodness to get them to heaven. Paul wants us to understand that there is no refuge in human goodness.
Judgment based on a righteousness a person can produce for themselves, can only lead to one verdict- GUILTY! God is going to see them as having no need of the saving work of his son. When we put our human hearts under the microscope of God’s truthful judgment, we are going to find out that we need much more than human righteousness to have a perfectly just standing before God.
Put another way, do people think for one moment that God is going to give them a non-wrath-worthy pass; that Jesus Christ need not have died for their sins; that their sins are of such a non-serous nature that they have no need of a Savior in the first place?
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teachmevp
Healthy behaviors result from an identity that is healthy and fully based upon Jesus Christ’s performance on our behalf, as a result, we can begin learning to find rest; who we are has been settled in Christ. It is Christ’s faith that righteousifies those who take their stand with God when it comes to what God has stated his son accomplished for them.
It was Christ’s faith and as a result of his faith, his faithfulness that he sacrificed himself and purchased the gift of our salvation. It is our faith in the accomplishment of Jesus Christ’s faithful sacrifice that is the means whereby God acknowledges that we have accepted the gift his son purchased.
Therefore, God in his infinite wisdom devised a plan whereby he could take the very faith belonging to his son, along with its resultant faithfulness, and credit that faith and faithfulness to the account of those who believe.
Yet, finding rest sounds rather foreign to us, an idea too unrealistic or too good to be true, because somewhere in our life we have been involved in the relationships of our environments that were based on conditions. 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.
Standards may have become so deeply ingrained, that we are not even aware of them, let alone conscious of how to get free from their tyranny, constantly trying to measure up to standards that are higher than we can reach.
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 this experience, we might become conformed in his resurrection.
This process is not enjoyable, because it is hard to learn that life cannot be controlled, it is far too spontaneous and rambunctious to be fully understood.
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teachmevp
Paul wants us to know at one point in time something was true, but now something else is true. The entire human race is guilty when it comes to human merit, performance, and production and all fall short, continually coming short of the righteousness of God himself.
Paul has made it abundantly clear that God does not measure our goodness in relation to the goodness of others; he compares our goodness with his own perfect righteousness.
That would be the criteria for dwelling with God and when our human righteousness is held up alongside the perfect righteousness of God, every member of the human race comes out on the short end of the stick.
The issue is believing what Jesus Christ accomplished in your behalf, in order to be identified with and joined to Christ himself. Christ believed that God’s justice has been satisfied where the sins he came to sacrifice himself for are concerned, Christ’s faith was and remains in God, and indeed we can believe God’s justice has been satisfied.
Christ does not have a wishy-washy faith, it is Christ’s faith who has never, nor will ever waver in faith. It is Christ’s faith that is freely credited to the account of the one who believes the good news given to the apostle Paul to proclaim to us in this age of grace.
The instance you take your stand with God, you are not only saved, but sealed until the day of redemption of these earthly tents in which we dwell. Our faith in the good news of Christ 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. Until you believe Paul’s good news of the grace of God to be true for yourself, you will not be placed into Jesus Christ by the baptizing of God’s power from on high or what is called holy spirit, and not being baptized into Christ means that you are standing in your own righteousness rather than Christ’s righteousness.
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teachmevp
Being created in the image of God means that we must view ourselves as intrinsically valuable and richly invested with meaning, potentially and responsibilities. We are to be and to do on a finite scale, what God is and does on an infinite scale.
By virtue of being created in the image of God, human beings are capable of reflecting his character in their own life; animals possess none of these qualities. What distinguishes people from animals is the fact that human nature inherently has godlike possibilities.
Omniscience, omnipotence, or omnipresence, none of these other divine attributes have been ascribed to the human race as part of the image of God. We have been created to reflect God in our thinking and actions, but the physical sustained by God and dependent upon him for our existence in this world and in the world to come.
Developing a godly character in this present life, this will be our personal identity in the world to come. It is the character or personality that we have developed in this life, that God preserves in his memory. We must understand that God has predetermined to glorify us. In fact, God has predestined us to that glorification.
God did not predestinate us to believe, he predestinated us to be conformed to the image of his son, because he knew who would believe. 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.
What God was doing through his son; God knew about what he intended to do before the world was ever formed, yet, God had kept this secret from ages and generations until it was time for the ascended Jesus Christ to reveal it to the apostle Paul, so that Paul could reveal it to the world.
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teachmevp
There are those who mistakenly suppose that reconciliation is the same thing as righteousification. These people have jumped to the conclusion that Jesus Christ taking the sin issue off the table of God’s justice through his becoming sin for the human race is that which makes a person as righteous as God; they have mistaken reconciliation for justification.
To have your sin slate judicially emptied because Christ died for those sins, does not mean that you now possess the righteousness recorded on the slate of the one who died for those sins. Grace is the foundation on which Paul’s entire ministry was built, and grace covers all the bases for the believer’s life and it certainly includes God’s love.
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. We are to praise God for what his grace has accomplished.
A lot of groups believe that God’s grace as it relates to salvation is something that has to be tapped into.
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teachmevp
The good news from God to us today, is that God is not counting anyone’s sins against them, but Satan, Paul tells us, is working through ministers of righteousness to keep this news hidden from people.
It is a simple message, but very difficult for the pride nature to get past, because people’s pride nature says that if I broke it, I can play a part in fixing it, and we all attempt to do that and religion is there to give us a hand along the way.
We are not to listen to ministers of righteousness telling us sins are still the issue, and they will give people a way to keep that sin issue satisfied on a weekly, daily, monthly, yearly basis.
The good news is what will a person do, when it comes to their taking God at his Word, concerning what Jesus Christ accomplished where their sins are concerned? Ministers of righteousness have been taught to teach what they are teaching, and in so doing, they are dis-serving what was accomplished by Christ.
Just understand, there is no additional sin question in the mind of God when it comes to his forgiveness or his righteous justice, the sin issue has been taken care of. Beware, a clever counterfeit being conducted by good people who have your best interest in mind, they want the best for you, but they will be deceiving, because they themselves have been deceived.
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teachmevp
We should be very grateful that we are saved by the faith of Jesus Christ, his faith accomplished our salvation. When it came to the earthly program, God’s glory was magnified through seeing, and the prayer of faith was the catalyst.
Is God utilizing the prayer of faith during this present dispensation of grace that we might see our deliverance? That was God’s earthly kingdom plan, miraculous events, visual events!
However, when we come to understand that that earthly kingdom program is no longer in progress, but on hold, we come to realize that God through his power from on high wants to stabilize every believer today in a completely different way.
We certainly know that God wants us to pray, but when we pray in the Age of Grace, we are to pray with thanksgiving, but are we to pray with thanksgiving that God would do it? Are we to pray with thanksgiving that we are going to get what we are praying for? Not at all.
What is our thanksgiving about then? Trust that God knows what he is doing, and he is going to do it whether we pray or not. God knows precisely what he is going to do. There is a difference in the Age of Grace, it is strength made perfect in weakness, it is not strength made perfect in the elimination of the suffering situation.
Prayer was never given to change God’s perspective of our greater preference, prayer was given to change our perspective of God’s greater purpose. God’s greater purpose was not to strengthen our faith by altering our circumstances.
God’s greater purpose is to allow us to demonstrated our faith as we remain strong in spite of our circumstances. Prayer was never given to bring God into alignment with our wants, prayer was given to bring us into alignment with God’s will.
Our patient endurance through suffering is a way of demonstrating our hope, and when our hope is put on display in the midst of our suffering, that brings glory to God.
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teachmevp
Satan’s ministers of righteousness use the word reform, but reformation would be a work of the believer for God. They would appeal to people to reform, yet some people think it is their responsibility to remove their sins. These people commit, they recommit, they recommit their re-commitment.
Most often these people give up at some point, they fool themselves into thinking they have achieved it or they give up, because every time they are sinning again. Since they think salvation is tied to their behavior, they never come to the point of placing their total trust in the fact that Christ remove their sin, it is gone.
So they just shove the whole reformation thing aside, they want no part of this religious game. The most dangerous appeal to people to reform, are people accepting Christ’s work, but on the installment plan. These people want to go back to the atonement program, the covering for sin.
They 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. Religion is the main tool of Satan, get right with God, come back and get right with God next week once again. Keep coming back to keep right with God.
Satan’s ministers of righteousness would appeal to people to reform, God does not make that appeal! God is not patiently waiting for people to change their mind about what they do, many have done that thinking it gains salvation.
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teachmevp
Many of Satan’s ministers of righteousness are holding over the heads of their congregations a little law mixed with the possibility of losing their salvation. That is how they keep their congregations in line, frighten them a bit with the possibility of hell fire and brimstone.
Salvation by works rather than by grace, 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, grace is a much greater motivator.
Satan and his clan have an obsessive compulsive urge with pilfering Paul’s good news, they are playing a cover up game with Paul’s good news. Ministers of righteousness will ever more keep that issue of sins on the table of God’s justice, continually wanting people to do this and stop that, in order to keep God happy with them.
People will suffer the second death, not because of the sins God’s son paid for, but they will suffer the second death because they have never been clothed with the righteousness of Christ. They have kept sin on the table of God’s justice their entire lifetimes, and sat under minister of righteousness who have led the way.
Human wisdom, human reasoning would say, “Give us something that we can do. Give us some way to perform. Give us a few balls of our own to hit, so that we might earn back what we lost through Adam.” God’s reasoning said, “Impossible!” The Law that God gave to Israel was a measure of what people would have to perform to be accepted by God.
Jesus Christ’s faithfulness was the only faithfulness sufficient to merit God’s favor. God used our faith in Christ’s faithfulness as the means whereby he would credit Christ’s righteousness to our account.
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teachmevp
The pathway of rules and regulations for righteousness, otherwise called religion, seems right to a lot of people today. Not one member of the entire human race has ever lived up to any system of rule-keeping for righteousness. Yet, how many are attempting today, to do what humankind before us was totally unable to do?
People oftentimes base their salvation and their relationship to God on their emotions, they find themselves on an endless quest for emotional satisfaction, because they relate their closeness to God upon feeling, they are either on fire or the fire’s gone out!
As faith gives way to feeling, people begin to base their faith on feeling, they want a God they can “move to,” and they want teachers who can make them feel good in the process. Doctrine giving way to emotion will be the order of the day, that is what the emergent church is all about, satisfying the emotional desires of people.
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.
If Christ paid the penalty for our sins, to keep those sins on the table of God’s justice is to do great injustice to what Christ accomplished. That turns Paul’s good news into a not so good news, it turns salvation into probation. There is no shortage of ministers of righteousness who are doing Satan’s bidding, deceiving as they are being deceived.
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teachmevp
A person’s law keeping will never be sufficient to provide them salvation, just as a person’s law keeping will never be sufficient to maintain their salvation for them. The truth is our deeds do not determine our destiny, our faith determines our destiny.
Those who preach grace are absolutely not preaching a license to sin, they are acknowledging sin for what it is, and they are saying that the only solution for sin is to trust in the Savior and what he has accomplished for us.
To avoid the truth of grace from fear that it may give a person the right to sin, is the same thing as saying that teaching the opposite of grace (or law) will keep a person from sinning, that is a very prevalent attitude today in religianity. Desiring to teach law, thinking that the law restrains sin, what an absurd idea!
The Gentiles had a law of their own design, they had an inner sense of right and wrong, and through that inner sense called “the conscience,” they developed for themselves their own code of ethics, their own lists of do’s and don’ts.
Unbelievers and believers alike struggle with that 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. The notion that an unbeliever does not really have a struggle with sin, everyone with a conscience struggles with an inner sense of right and wrong or a seared conscience when a person defies that conscience.
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teachmevp
Today people think they have to ask God to forgive them for the sins that God is no longer charging to their account in the first place. Ministers of righteousness would have people believe God is not totally reconciled in his mind.
Is God waiting for people to seek after him in order for reconciliation to become reality in his mind? Is God waiting for people to ask Jesus into their heart? Is God waiting for people to walk down the isle? Is God waiting for people to pray the sinners prayer? Is God waiting for people to repent of their sins?
Satan wants to keep sin on the table of God’s justice today, as much in the Age of Grace as he has in the other ages. If Satan had known what Jesus Christ would actually accomplish where the sins of the world are concerned, Satan would not have had Christ crucified.
The natural tendency of the flesh is to set our affection on the things of the earth and the things of the flesh, and allow those things to rule our mind. Is the primary focus of our mind on the circumstances at hand in our life, depression is a rush of negative attitude that results from a vacuum of joy.
When it comes to a mind set of joy, it is our responsibility to focus our own minds appropriately, a redirection of thought based upon the accomplishments of Jesus Christ, we are not to hold the things on the earth so near and dear so as to rule our minds.
God purchased the human race out of sins dominion, never to be returned to the market place of sin again. By removing the sin issue from the table of God’s justice, God effectively canceled Satan’s ownership of all the human race. Satan can lay claim to no person based on that persons sinfulness.
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teachmevp
Being critical of others is an intricate part of maintaining that fantasy that we are perfect, and others are somewhere a bit beneath us. The pride nature of people is such that people will always have that tenancy to think more highly of themselves then they ought.
Rather than recognizing the unworthiness of the flesh, people spend their lives trying to convince themselves and others of their value. Elevating self through the denigration of someone else, the unseen put down, a wiliness to aggressively find fault with others.
Satan knows the power that emotions play when these emotions become the cement that seals the door of the mind, such that a mind remains closed and the door locked. To be open to that which moves a person from the mental comfort zone to which that person has become accustomed, becomes not only an unsettling inconvenience, it becomes a mind-shaking threat to many people.
There are multitudes who are putting faith in their feelings, emotional cravings, the minds of the vast majority of so-called Christendom today, emotion trumps doctrine. Could it be that God is NOT giving people all these emotion tweaking experiences, because he knows that Satan will come with all manner of lying signs and wonders.
People may be going by a religious belief system that is a totally false belief system, why would God refuse to give people neat little things to look at today to determine his presence, his power, his predisposition, his purpose, and his plan? Could it be that God is having people walk by faith and not by sight, because God knew that Satan will be performing the miraculous in the last days of the age of grace.
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The religious notion that Jesus Christ’s shed blood was insufficient to have fully satisfied God where people’s sins are concerned, thus the continual need for something further required of people to keep God’s justice up to date.
This is “the new sin requires new forgiveness” idea set forth by those who fail to appreciate the accomplishment of Jesus Christ. Well, they will one day stand at the Great White Throne Judgment where the merited righteousness they think they have will be put on display.
People who think they have to keep God’s justice up to date, they will be standing at the Great White Throne Judgment having only their own righteousness to show for themselves, it will be open for inspection.
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.
This is a chilling and sobering thought,when self-righteous moralizers harden their hearts and remain impenitent concerning their goodness, they are storing up to themselves wrath to be visited upon them in the day of wrath.
If God thinks what his son did on our behalf, where all of our sin debt is concerned, then we can take God at his word. If God believes it, why can’t we stand with God on what God believes, that is faith.
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Those who are bent on satisfying the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, fall into a snare in that they become addicted to the manner in which they satisfy those lusts. People fall into many foolish and hurtful lusts, not only harmful to themselves, but hurtful to others around them.
Choose to serve sin and we can soon become addicted to the manner in which we have chosen to serve sin. We all have that bent towards satisfying the lust of our flesh toward serving ourselves, but God’s sentence on the flesh was not reformation, it was total eradication.
That sentence was carried out when we died with Christ, God had no intention of repairing our old man, no plan to clean it up and make it more presentable, his intention was to kill it. Every believer is standing in the gift degree of righteousness, because believers are placed into God’s son, so that when God views us, he no longer views us in do’s or don’ts.
When we stop focusing on the do’s and cease focusing on the don’ts, the do’s and don’ts become a lot easier. If our life is hid with God in Christ, then how does God view us? God views us in his son, Jesus Christ. So, while we continue to have and will continue to have to contend with the flesh this side of the new body, God no longer sees us in our identity with the flesh.
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God has committed himself to preserving our individuality, personality, and character. Paul’s usage of the Greek word for body is “soma”. Soma is not something external to a person themselves, something they have, it is what they are.
Indeed, soma is the nearest equivalent to our word personality. To believe in the resurrection of the body “soma”, means to believe that my human self, the human being that “I” am, will be restored to life again. We will not be someone different from who we are now, but we will be exclusively ourselves.
The term body “soma” is simply a synonym for “person”. Both death and resurrection affect the total person, the goal of God’s redemption is not the destruction of his first creation, but its restoration to its original perfection. This is why the Scripture speaks of the resurrection of the body, rather than of the creation of new beings. The resurrected persons will be the same individuals as those who existed previously on earth.
We can rejoice and we can give all the glory and the praise to God and to our savior Jesus Christ for the fact that God does not see us in our flesh from his judicial perspective.
God no longer views us in our human flesh, he views us in our position in the second Adam (Jesus Christ), he views us in our glorified identity. 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.
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But think about this: Is forgiveness the same thing as being justified or having someone else’s righteousness freely attributed to your account? They are not one and the same!
Our sins have all been forgiven, but forgiveness alone does not mean the person having forgiveness is as perfectly and totally righteous as the one who is doing the forgiving!
Justification is far more than the negative imputation of the sins fo the world to the world, it is the positive imputation of Christ’s righteousness to those who believe what was accomplished on their behalf. Justified by Blood.
We find that our magnificent redemption demanded a monumental price. So justification, believing in what Christ’s sacrifice accomplished, is a requirement in order to be justified.
I may forgive another a debt that he owes me, but does that mean that the one that I have forgiven is now the primary on my bank account? Being justified (declared to be righteous) freely by God’s grace through the redemption that is in Jesus Christ.
Satan wants to blind people’s eyes to the truth of Paul’s good news, he is very clever in using ministers of righteousness in accomplishing that blinding. Satan is offering people a way to become righteous, to achieve a righteous standing before God and he always attaches people’s performance, people’s fingerprints are found on Satan’s method of becoming righteous.
God justifies freely, not by way of people’s performance or promise, but as a gift. God justifies those who take him at his word, concerning what his son accomplished for them. Something for nothing!
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Our decree of judicial perfection in the eyes of God comes not through Christ’s death for our sins, but through our union with Christ’s resurrection life. If a person believes Christ died for their sins, but does not believe that God’s justice was satisfied, when Christ died for those sins, that person has not believed Christ died for their sins.
There are people out there who believe they can lose their salvation, because they have totally confused their standing in Christ, with their state. Standing - how God views you ‘in Christ’ perfect righteousness! Saints! State - your experience through time on earth.
Standing is what God’s made you to be and what you can never cease to be in his eyes. State has to do with how you are taking advantage or not taking advantage of that God given position that is everlastingly yours by God’s decree.
God has given us a perfect standing in our union with his perfectly righteous son. God has also made provision for us now to have an ever improving state or experience, it is called growth, maturing.
Give up serving self, and that will be the best service to self you could ever give yourself. Why, because you will find true freedom and joy to be the ultimate result, give up serving self and serve others.
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