Just a Thought "32"

Best news the world could ever hear, we are not to cleanse ourselves in order to gain something from God, when it comes to our holy standing before him or to maintain something before God, because we have been freely given something, namely, a justified and sanctified position in his son, Jesus Christ.

Walk worthy of the vocation that belongs to us, because God has freely given it to us, we have been justified freely, sanctified in Jesus Christ, how should we be conducting ourselves. We should conduct ourselves in a manner conducive to the job that God’s given us, it is our ambassadorship of the message of reconciliation.

The carnal Corinthians are guilty of the things Paul listed for them, but that did not reduce, reverse or remove from them their sanctified position that already belonged to them in their union with the risen, glorified son of God.

We are to be subject to the higher powers, only when those higher powers are not asking us to go against the highest power there is, and that is God himself, the supreme authority in all matters of life.

Grace that results in peace with God, understanding the grace of God which has brought peace with God, is the foundation of every believer’s joy in this age. In the midst of Paul’s troubling circumstances, he was thanking God, he was thinking what God accomplished for him through Jesus Christ.

Who we are and what we have in our savior is incredible, joy began with grace unto us from God, the Father and from our savior Jesus Christ. God is anxiously awaiting his own inheritance, which happens to be us, God considers believers to be his own inheritance, he purchased us with the blood of his son, we are God’s valuable inheritance.

We cannot do destruction to one truth from Paul in an effort to validate our belief about another truth from Paul, because if we base our theology on one truth given by Paul, while at the same time destroying another truth given us by Paul, we had better rethink our theological position.

Rethinking a theological position is much better than committing doctoral destruction to a passage that is put there so very clearly by our apostle Paul.

Dead to sin, we now have a brand new identity, those who would die in their sins, were those who would continue to have their identity in Adam, Adam in rebellion, to die with that identification intact. We no longer have that identification once we believe the good news, now we have a brand new identity.

The pride nature in people has a difficult time understanding how righteousness from God’s viewpoint can be granted apart from their conduct, and it was true through the ages, God judicially declared to be righteous all who would take him at his word down through time.

Paul introduces us in Romans, how it is that God can delate sinners to be heaven-worthy, God decided to give a judicial decree of rightness apart from our behavior, apart from our practice based solely on our belief, that belief would be concerning all who would take him at his word relative to what his son accomplished for us.

So, performing that which is good and ceasing from that which is bad is directly related in most people’s minds, especially the religious mindset today to the way that God views a person.

We realize that we are saved for the purpose of good works, but we are not saved by our good works, or kept saved by our good works.

God knows whether there is a hidden motivation even to ourselves, hidden by our pride nature to look good before others, to appear knowledgeable before others, to somehow elevate self in relation to others to gain the praise of others, God knows the motivations of the human heart.

Any kind of works at all, even if they appear to be good works in our mind, that are done for the purpose attaining salvation or for the purpose of maintaining salvation, even for the purpose of proving one’s salvation is a slap in the face of God who had to provide the gift of salvation, because people’s righteousness would be totally incapable of meriting it, our good works must be done solely out of appreciation for what God has already accomplished.

Were establishing the law, we establish it by acknowledging the fact that the law was a picture of God’s perfect righteousness where human performance is concerned, and that when it comes to attaining to that righteous standard, the law can not make a right relationship with God.

Was God only partially satisfied with the payment Christ made, or was God fully satisfied where the payment made by his son for the sins of the world are concerned, Christ purchased mankind out of the market place of sins.

It is not probation, it is salvation, forgiving us is not something God must decide to do, what his son did for us was sufficient to absolve us of our sin debt, past, present, future, it is gone. If God believes that, let us all take our stand where God takes his, faith is simply taking our stand where God takes his stand.

Righteous fruit was a requirement under the law contract, and Israel, the fig tree had not produced any, Israel was incapable of producing any, because the law was weak through the flesh, there was no crop to harvest when it came to righteousness.

The law was given to Israel, not to deter sin, but to show them their sin, how very opposite from the thinking of the religious pride nature of human reasoning, people who have no clue as to why the law was given in the first place, or really to whom it was given, actually think that the ten commandments will make us all better.

The truth is those with a sin nature have never needed a license to sin, we do it naturally, have we today, learned any thing at all from God’s program with the nation Israel, even though we are not part of that program.

People who want to think they are obeying the law contract today, they think they are fulfilling that law contract at least to a degree that God will say that they are doing the very best they can, the law required much more than that.

It certainly can get much worse than it is today for believers, it is just an age of grace tribulation, and the time of Jacob’s tribulation are entirely two different things.

Persecution and suffering troubling circumstances in a wide variety of ways will very likely increase as this age of grace winds onward towards it’s culmination toward the time of our being caught up to meet Jesus, our Savior in the air.

We will be delivered from the time of Israel’s tribulation by way of the Body of Christ being caught up in the air to meet Jesus, we need not come with the idea that since we have deliverance from that tribulation, we believers of the age of grace have an automatic pass when it comes to tribulation, we certainly will not.

Every person who has believed Paul’s good news, from the point of Paul’s conversion onward has been made a member of the Body of Christ by being joined to Christ through the baptizing work of God’s power from on high, which takes place at the point of a person’s belief, no one prior to the apostle Paul ever became a member of the Body of Christ.

The Body of Christ is a reality only for the saints who came to Christ through Paul’s good news, and have nothing whosoever to do with the saints of the earthly kingdom calling.

We do not need to start pointing at particular sins, but if we are a slave to sin, whatever sin we are serving, the sin that has us in bondage will exact it’s toll on our flesh. Choices have consequences, the choices we make with serving self have an effect on others which will affect us.

Death can take place in so many ways, it could be emotional, it can be relational, we know that an unbeliever’s sin leads to physical death, so the universal principle that sin leads to death is true.

A believer can die functionally in that we can serve no further useful purpose here on earth, no heavenly purpose on earth to those to whom we become an ambassador.

Death, in a physical sense, can come from making improper choices in our lives, if we continue in a sinful lifestyle, and we continue not bringing the flesh into subjection as Paul talks about, we can count on that lifestyle to take a toll on us.

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.

Reconciliation and righteousness are two different things, the sinner becomes a new creation when that sinner trusts what Christ accomplished where their sins are concerned, and that is when God’s power from on high joins that sinner to the Savior.

The instance we take God at his word concerning what his son did on our behalf, God ask us to simply believe Christ gave his life for us, Christ did it all, there is nothing left for us to do. God did all the giving, we do only all the receiving, he is asking us to believe Christ accomplished salvation for us and we are simply to believe it.

All around us today, religion is marked by divisions, they have divided into little factions, into little groups, and little cliques separating one from another over who is more important than the other person, in the person’s mind of course.

What took place during Isaiah’s day was true of Paul’s day and it continues on in our day, the same inner mind-set, that same sin nature at work in people throughout history, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The Corinthian believers were acting like children, Paul called them babes, and not babes in a good context, they were adult children, but they were in charge of the church, the church of our day is best described as the Corinthians epistle, equally the Galatians epistle.