As my understanding begins to deepen in
light of God’s overarching plan of His production, “the bigger picture”! I find
that I need to keep reminding myself that it is by grace I have been saved and
in fact this truth mirrors our God and reflects His goodness; it had and still
has nothing to do with my own merits. I was always a reprobate seeking my own
lusts and desires as sin blinded me, even though I wore a cross around my neck
in my unsaved state; it was impossible for me to behave in any other way, selfishness
personified! Even though I wanted to believe that deep down I had a good heart
it was rotten to the core; unlike a marred piece of fruit, which after being bitten
into, the rotten portion could be cut out or eaten around, my heart was
completely diseased. It is not easy to concede theses truths but very needful
if we are to grow in the graces of our great God.
The song writer of arguably one of the
greatest hymns ever written, “Amazing Grace” understood his/our predicament
completely and this is why this hymn’s opening stanza begins like this;
“Amazing grace how sweet the sound that save a WRETCH like me” a phenomenal observation
but finally accurate. Immediately my mind wants to rush to my aid with a
concluding thought that goes something like this; I was never a slave trader
and yet I was a slave to sin; as we all outside of Christ. God requires this
honesty from us and the Lord Jesus reminded the supposed teaches of the times
about this truth; “And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at
his disciples, saying, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and
sinners?" And Jesus answered them, "Those who
are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to
call the righteous but sinners to repentance."” (Luke 5:30-32) – Its not enough to
say we are sinners but we need to actually understand how sinful we actually
are and in need of God’s grace; we must cry out for help!
God is merciful and I suppose we grow
into this understanding. The more our great God reveals himself the more we
should appreciate our old condition. I
believe my understanding has deepened when it comes to God’s reasoning and His
teaching relating to our repentance from dead works and faith towards Him.
There was absolutely nothing I could have done to earn favour from God prior to
the Lord Jesus’s sacrifice; He took the first step in reconciling man back unto
himself. It was never nor could ever be the other way around. I hope you have
all understood this, if not we will always be grappling at “stuff”, a little
bit of this and that trying to find qualification on our own merits for God to
hear our prayers. As soon as we begin to reason like this, we find a proudness
that begins to overshadow the graces of God and we have now entered a state
that God resist; “…Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility
toward one another, for "God opposes the
proud but gives grace to the humble.” (1Peter 5; 5)
We have a responsibility to be meek
but for this to happen it is crucial that we understand our position in God and
who has enabled us to enter into heavenly places. Jesus Christ has begun and
finished the work of salvation; it starts and ends with Him. We now rest in His
achievements, not our own, and now with our faith locked upon these accuracies
we march on trusting our God to get us home.
Sadly our old natures always looks for
a pat on the back, it is part of our design. However we must absolutely realise
that salvation is all of God and true Christianity, for there are many nominal
Christian organisation that claim to be Christian when in fact they are not, is
not like other religions that are filled with what the Bible refers to as “dead
works” (efforts we make to find favour from God). It took God four thousand
years to show our forefathers that our blunder in the Garden of Eden, the short
circuiting of our awareness to both that which is good and evil in the context
of His understanding has been thwarted by every effort ever made to repair our
mistake. Even the First Covenant (the Ten Commandments) was concluded a
schoolmaster to teach us that we needed God’s intervention and His salvation to
overhaul our great grandmother’s mistake way back in the beginning. We are
unable to cope with the knowledge of good and evil. We were never ready for it,
and that is why I personally believe God withheld it from Adam, he needed to be
schooled by God and not deceived by the devil and because of the outcome we now
all have a skewed perception of what is good and evil.
This is an obvious supposition, sit
around a table filled with differing personalities and bring up the death
penalty and take a vote on who is for it or against it, and then dig a little
deeper and you will soon see how skewed our perceptions are when it comes to
implementing God’s Law! Everyone has their own ideas, not good enough! Let God
be true and every man a liar! Therefore we cannot trust our own reasoning and
must always trust the Word of God as our final authority. Even now as true born
again believer we only see in part and need to be reminded of these truths.
Salvation begins and ends with God,
without His intervention we would all be doomed to an eternity of wickedness.
Why? Can one ever find unity when there are differing opinions on the same
subject? Utopia can only exist in absolute unification and with God as the
final authority; perfection has no blemish and does not make allowance for compromise,
can light and darkness occupy the same space? We will all need to fit into His
understanding of all things if we want to be blessed of Him. Thankfully God is
a long-suffering God and He is far bigger than our puny egos. No one likes to
be told they are wrong, unless wisdom is treasured more valuable than gold.
We must guard against the beast that
always looks to drives us towards pride, which parades itself in any form of
boasting. The church at Galatia started well but soon erred on the side of
error; they got saved but soon forgot these truths and needed some stern words
to get them back on track; “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting
him who called you in the
grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel-- not that there
is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the
gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a
gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed.” (Galatians 1:6-8) – The long and the short of
their struggle was that they had understood repentance but begun to move
towards dead works to find their justification before God. They began to place
their confidence in the law as they tried to earn their salvation; “yet we know that a person is not justified by works
of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in
Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of
the law, because by works
of the law no one will be justified.” (Galatians 2:16) - The Apostle Paul stepped in
with stern words righting their wrongs and this is why I
love the Word of God and its ability to correct. I love my Jesus because He
first loved me and there is no other way to cut this truth. I could never have
loved Him if He didn’t first love me.
Repent from dead works and put your
faith in God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, remembering that it is God
at work and not our feeble efforts. However, we now have a responsibility to
believe God and obey Him.
Signing off
Tyrone
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