The body of doctrine Paul taught renews our thinking, because in this dispensation God is not giving us experiences to look at, he is giving us doctrinal truths to learn. It is the Word of God, that does the work of God, because it contains the living water whereby people have their minds renewed today.
The Word of our salvation washes away any notion of self-cleansing for righteousness as an approach to God. Paul’s writings rinses any notion of people’s production as the basis of a right standing before God right down the drain and leaves the believer standing only in the purified state of Christ’s righteousness.
Only when the truth of reconciliation achieved through Jesus Christ is believed, does a new creation become a reality as far as that individual is concerned. The new creation hinges upon the acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice, that it accomplished reconciliation. The new creation is who you stand to be in Christ. A new creation is your new identity in Jesus Christ.
The new creation is not how you perform in a different way, or make commitments to perform differently, it all has to do with your being placed into Christ, that is the new creation. When a person believes in the reality of reconciliation, that person becomes an instantaneous member of the new creation called the Body of Christ; joined to him.
Cease attributing your righteous standing before God to your performance and keep your mind focused solely on how God views you in Christ. That is what grace life is all about, and you will be victorious in that God can now produce his fruit in your life. If your flesh could perform sufficiently, Christ’s sacrifice would never have been a necessity.
Superstition falls under the deception heading of the religion of our last days, Satan has as much a field day with superstition as he does with counterfeit miracles. How do we know what is not so? It’s not so much the things we do not know that get us into trouble, it’s the things we know that just is not so.
Superstition is all that is required for many people to come to believe that supernatural events are actually taking place, they believe the Holy Spirit is involved. There is a tendency of people’s preconceptions to bias their interpretations of what they see, superstitious mind set can make something out of nothing, in order to validate a belief.
People will tend to engage in a search for evidence that is bias towards confirmation of their beliefs. They engage in evidence that tends to confirm their previously held belief, not fully utilizing all the information that is out there. Only searching out that which agrees with their cause, avoiding information that might dis-confirm their cause.
The tendency of the human mind is to seek out information that supports their belief and attribute a great deal of weight to that when they find it, while they discount or ignore evidence that goes contrary to the belief they hold. If they expect to see Mary make an appearance on a grill cheese sandwich, they will see the outline of Mary; setting their criteria so broadly that their preexisting beliefs is validated no matter what the outcome.
Colossians 2:8 - Not about to give up their traditions, because previous held beliefs, especially superstitious beliefs, are a most difficult thing to discard. The bias effect of second hand information. “They say” secondary experience, testimonial seasoning of superstition, the story validated the point someone wishes to promote.
Ephesians 5:30 - Nowhere in the Word of God are we told that we are joined to God, of his flesh, and of his bones, because God’s body is composed of a substance called spirit. We are members of Jesus Christ’s body, because we have been joined to him through the identifying work of God through his energizing power from on high.
That energizing power from on high is in all who have taken God at his Word, as to what Christ accomplished when it comes to the resolution of God’s justice where our sins are concerned. It is because of Adam’s transgression, sin entered into the human race, but following right on the heels of sin entering into the human race, death by sin.
The issue for life everlasting is not what church you attend or to which denomination you belong or how religious you are or even whether or not you are a good person in the worldly sense of the word “good.”
The issue in eternity will not be how many sins you have committed or how many sins you have promised God you will abstain from committing. It will not be whether you have walked an aisle, recited a particular prayer, or asked Jesus into your heart.
The issue in eternity will be to which MAN are you related?Do you have your identity in the first Adam, or do you have your identity in the second Adam, Jesus Christ, you cannot be identified in both. When Paul talks about a new creature, old things being past away, all things become new, he is not talking about sin in an individuals life, he is talking about all that we were prior to salvation in the first Adam.
Once saved, we are no longer in the first Adam, we are at the initial point of our belief in the second Adam, Jesus Christ. In God’s eyes we are no longer who we once were, we are now the new creation being forever joined to our savior.
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