Thoughts To Think About

If God is no longer imputing people’s sins unto them because God imputed those sins to his son, would that mean that the entire world would then instantaneously become dead to sin? NO! Reconciliation and Sanctification are not one and the same, they are two different truths.

But now, it’s a gift decree of perfect righteousness put on your account immediately at the point of your belief. It’s a judicial transaction that is all of God’s doing, none of your doing. It’s not something you become through practice, it’s a gift decree of righteousness given to you by God.

It was not Paul’s practical walk that made him free from the law of sin and death. It was the law of the new identity of life in Jesus that liberated the apostle Paul. The law of the new identity of life in Jesus is the true liberator. When we come to fully understand and appreciate that new identity, the striving can end.

The issue is not that of sinners making God’s son become their Savior through the avenue of a present day forgiveness of sins, but in believing that the son of God became their Savior the day he took their sins, the entirety of that sin debt upon himself and that is what makes a person Heaven worthy.

The insidious reality of Satan and his forces relentless assault of deception on our mind can keep us from experiencing maturity and freedom, because our past has shaped our present belief system and will determine our future unless it is dealt with. We have been tricked into believing that what we do makes us what we are.

Salvation is not doing; it is believing! To believe that what you are doing and what you are restraining yourselves from doing is the way you are earning your righteous standing with God, you have got to put a lot of confidence in your flesh to do that; religion is doing that! Those who are in Jesus their Savior, are those who are not walking after the faulty assumption that their righteousness is related to their performance, that was Israel’s problem. 

There are many who refuse to believe in what Jesus actually accomplished. They fail to understand what the ‘for my sins’ part of Paul’s message of the grace of God is all about. They refuse to acknowledge that Jesus’ death actually resolved God’s justice where the sins Jesus died for are concerned and they continue to hang on the notion that God is hanging on to their sins.

Justification is a legal act, wherein God deems the sinner righteous on the basis of Jesus’ 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 them acquitted and accepted by God, with the guilt and penalty of their sins put away forever.

Our labor of love is all about transformation, it’s not about reformation. Paul’s message of the grace of God is able to transform our thinking, such that transformed thinking begins to manifest itself through transformed relation. It becomes more about who we have become, rather than about who we are trying to be.

It doesn’t seem quite right that God could consider someone righteous, especially if that person is not expending the same amount of effort or attention that they are to become righteous by way of his or her practice. One can see why some have called this justification of God; cheap justification. One can see where the pride of life comes up with that notion.

We are saints whom God has declared righteous, believing the enemies lie will lock us into a defeated, fruitless life, but believing God’s truth about who we are will set us free. It’s imperative to our growth and maturity that we believe God’s truth about who we are in the Savior.

The vast majority of the people of this earth don’t understand what reconciliation is all about, they think that new sin needs a new measure of reconciliation. Is that not the golden thread woven through every denomination out there, it’s called religion. The truth is the human race couldn’t obtain an ounce of forgiveness if they tried, because God has already forgiven all the human race.

The reconciliation that Jesus accomplished for the human race was total, complete, everlasting and unalterable, it will always stand. Jesus didn’t die to give people a reprieve, he didn’t die to give people temporary relief. This is not difficult, God said what his son did for the human race was sufficient to absolve every one of their sin debt; past, present and future, it is gone.

Therefore the assumption is, God is not reconciled when people sin. In their mind they are separating themselves from God by their sin and Paul is saying, God has already reconciled the human race where their sins are concerned. Rather than asking for forgiveness when we sin, we should thank God every moment of our lives for the forgiveness that was achieved for us when Jesus died for us.

If the flesh is incapable of producing righteousness, why is it then that Paul exhorts us to do certain things and to avoid other things? The flesh always points us to do that which satisfies the sin nature and brings credit to self. This is true of all of us. Dying to self is not fun or easy, but what is particularly difficult about fighting this tendency is that it’s not exactly a behavior or action.

Shall we continue to sin that grace may abound? There are two reasons given in response in the hallways of religion, judgment and chastisement. Those are the traditional answers as to why Christians should not think they should continue to sin. Yet, Paul gives two entirely different reasons to that very same question, identity and slavery. We are going to become enslaved to that which we choose to put ourselves in servitude.

We all miss the mark! We all come short, some of us may come closer to it than others, but none of us completely and consistently eliminate sin in our lives. Most people think that victory over the law’s demands can only be achieved by obedience to the law’s demands. We that believed Paul’s good news, our being set apart is not contingent upon the degree to which we set ourselves apart.

Grace on the other hand, bestows freely that which we could never earn and could never deserve. 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 the Savior. That’s what grace-life is all about and we will be victorious in that God’s power deposited within us can now produce it’s fruit in our life. There is a glory that belongs to God’s grace and it’s to be praised on the bases on what God’s grace has accomplished.

God has kept the fingerprints of the guilt-worthy off the righteousness he designed for the guilt-worthy. What an amazing salvation the believer truly has. The issue remaining on the table of God’s justice today is whether a person will accept that gift. If one has yet to believe this powerful message, they are standing only in the righteousness their flesh has been able to produce for them, which means they have missed the mark of the righteousness God requires for heaven.