Just a Thought "44"

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 off ministers of righteousness who are doing Satan’s bidding, deceiving as they are being deceived.