Tuesday, December 31, 2013

God Views Us in Christ

Reconciliation and sanctification, two different judicial transactions, God is no longer imputing the sins of the world, unto the world, because he imputed those sins to his son. God has reconciled the entire world; believers and non-believers alike to himself through what his son accomplished.

Now, we need to be placed into God’s son, so that we can have his son’s righteousness attributed freely to our account. Total abandonment of any notion that our performance is connected by any means or in any manner to our righteous standing IN Christ.

Our performance would never cut it, not before we were born anew, and not after, we need to allow God’s power to take up residence with us, but we do not control this power, as if it were some universal force; rather, we have access to this power that is dwelling within us.

We need to cease attributing our righteous standing before God to our performance and keep our mind focused solely on how God views us IN Christ, that is what grace-life is all about, and we will be victorious in that God’s power can now produce it’s fruit in our life. When God raised Jesus from among the dead, it was God’s stamp of “pain in full” on the invoice of our sin debt.

We could not get right with God in a million life times of trial and error, we could never make ourselves right with God; God had to do what we could not do. Now believing sinners can be certain that in Christ, they are justified. The simple message of Paul’s gospel is total payment for sin, accomplished by Christ’s total sacrifice.

According to Paul, we have how much forgiveness, total forgiveness! If we want God to view us today, we got to be in his son. How can we get into his son, and have all of his righteousness freely imputed to our account? By simply taking God at his word concerning what his son accomplished for us, it is as simply as that.

When God says he is satisfied with what Christ did for our sins, when Christ died for them, all our sins were all future. It is a son issue on our part, not a sin issue, in order to receive the gift of salivation. The resurrection of Christ is not only a historical event that we look back to with satisfaction and joy; it is the greatest event in history.

One of the most disturbing things is someone unable to express confidence about whether they can know if they will have eternal life or not. The very power that raised Jesus from among the dead is available to us; we were baptized into Jesus Christ with this power. Faith is taking God at his word concerning what his son accomplished on our behalf.

God did all the giving; we do only all the receiving. God knows what his son accomplished on our behalf where all of our sin debt is concerned and he is satisfied that all of that sin has already been judged on his son, leaving no judgment for us where our sin is concerned.

Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Christ’s righteousness. Justification is not a process, but is a one-time act, complete and definitive. Justification is a legal term which changes the believing sinner’s standing before God, declaring us acquitted and accepted by God, with the guilt and penalty of our sins put away forever. 

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. 

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Shame

Far too many believers are feeling dirty, worthless and ashamed of themselves; shame is a silent, but deadly disease that pollutes the lifeblood of many believers faith. As a result, we feel unclean and therefore unworthy to approach God and have the living and intimate relationship that he wants to have with us.

Shame prevents us from intimacy with God because it makes us feel unworthy and distant from him. God’s standard is nothing less than perfection and none of us measure up, if we did or we ever could measure up sufficiently righteous for heaven through our performance, we would not have needed a savior at all.

For it is God’s grace, not our striving, that makes us accepted and acceptable. It is God’s performance through Jesus Christ, not our trying hard to perform, that eradicates our shame. Some of us spend most of our life giving up.

We are tired, burned out, disillusioned, depressed, addicted to something. People around us feel frustrated by the huge disparity between our capabilities and our performance. They either pep talk us concerning our value, or shame us for not performing.

No one can have a close relationship with us; we push people away physically and emotionally, and push God away. We are the ones in families, churches, and society that people take care of-for a while, until we are given up on because of our lack of response.

For all the performance-based people around us, we are simply bad for public relations. Once in a while we find ourselves in an environment that shames us for being so defective, then we start trying harder, but it does not last for long, we are simply out of gas to start with, we merely survive.

The goal of most believer’s life has been to become disgusted enough with ourselves to try hard enough, so that we can finally win God’s approval. Statements like these, “I always thought that in order to do what God liked, I had to do what I hated,” or “I thought if I could just hate myself enough, ignore my feelings and drives, that God would finally like me,” these characterize the lives of tired believers who do not know who they are. 

The truth Paul has proclaimed in all of his epistles is we could not get right with God in a million life times of trial and error. We could never make ourselves right with God; God had to do what we could not do for ourselves.

Yet many believers spend their entire existence unsuccessfully trying to be someone other than who they really are, paying lip service to the idea that we are accepted because of God’s grace, the struggle for acceptance on the basis of works is epidemic, but the greatest travesty of all, is the lack of understanding about our new identity in Christ.

Jesus was indeed faithful, he allowed himself to be crucified, he bore our sins there, the entirety of the sin debt of the world. Jesus died there for our sins, he was buried and on the third day God raised him from among the dead, having completed all that was necessary to accomplish our total and everlasting justification in the eyes of Almighty God.

It would be disastrous enough if the reason people did not understand who they are was simply for a lack of information, and the truth is that there is an absence of teaching concerning our new identity and what it means to be new creations in Christ.