It is amazing that religious teachers would tell people that they have got that sin, and they preach a message to make people fell guilty about the indwelling sin, and then they would give those people rules to straighten up from the sin. People want to be saved by grace, and then they want their fellowship with God maintained by rule-keeping.
The responsibility for keeping the slate clean after salvation would be up to us. If we could do it after salvation, we could have done it before our salvation! If we are not acting saved, we did not get saved, is the idea that is being promoted. The predicament of sin is that no person can escape it, and no person can beat it, there is not any fixing the sin-nature, the flesh cannot be repaired.
Grace comes along and tells us that being identified with Christ’s resurrection life, we now have an everlasting life we do not deserve and could never earn. God did not establish a new law for the age of grace and place believers under that law, so that he would have a new way to measure our righteous performance for the purpose of permitting a heavenly entrance.
The issue in eternity will be to which man are you related? Our understanding of the identity that Adam had before the fall, that identity has been restored to us. Our old pattern for thinking and responding to our sin-trained flesh must be transformed by the renewing of our mind, it is our responsibility to change our behavior. The issue for life everlasting is not what church you attend or to which denomination you belong or how religious you are.
It is not about perfecting the flesh, it is about crucifying the flesh in our minds. Yet, how many are attempting today, to do what humankind before us was totally unable to do?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. 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.
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. Not one member of the entire human race has ever lived up to any system of rule-keeping for righteousness. 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.
God wants believers to all think the same way when it comes to what’s happening in this Age of Grace, what God is doing today and how’s he doing it. Every sin we have or ever will commit was put on Jesus Christ, but how many people in the world miss it, because they think God is still looking at them and judging them and evaluating them on the bases of their performance.
Religious circles of our society believe that they reign in life over the circumstances in their life, in that God has empowered them with a tool called prayer, in order that they might have God alter the negative circumstances that come their way. Prayer is indeed a powerful tool that God has given us, but was prayer given for the purpose of prodding God, pleading with God to alter the circumstances of our everyday lives, or was prayer given for the purpose of providing peace to the mind of the troubled saint.
There is a tremendous difference in one who believes they can influence God and therefore, alter their circumstances because they are a believer with prayer in hand, and a believer who acknowledges that God is in absolute control and is already doing what is best on behalf of every believer, no matter how unfortunate the circumstance that is at hand.
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