2009-10-16
Good Morning Cherished Ones,
There are few things in this life that are fair, but God is One of them. It’s why He can pass down to His Son, in the Sermon on the Mount, MT 7: 12, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you: this is the meaning of the Law of Moses and of the teachings of the prophets.” Last week, the Holy Spirit led me to begin discussing the truth of being, rather than just doing in the making of judgments. Being is limited by what we are, not just our strength or according to is own moral code, as doing is. The truth is that we alone can’t obey MT 7: 12, the Golden Rule, without God’s intervention. We must rely on His interaction to make living by the Golden Rule a reality. Paul, in RO 7: 14-25, explains that without God, the sin within us forces us to do what we don’t really want to do. He further explains that the only escape from sin’s power over us is our faith in Jesus Christ, which also includes our repentance of past sin. This remarkable transformation is described in RO 12: 2, “Do not conform yourselves to the standard of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete renewal of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God-what is good and is pleasing to Him and is perfect.” Several years ago, I took T. Avery Willis’ MasterLife course. Unlike any other, it advanced my knowledge of God and what He is capable of doing in my life. One of the segments of this year-long course describes how faithful obedience in Christ gradually opens one’s heart to the influence of the Holy Spirit and gradually closes off one’s heart to the influence of the adversary. If one tries to simply do without this faithful obedience, the process falls apart under sin’s temptations.
It’s important for us to consider our willingness to yield to God’s leadership in the context of our participation in the new covenant, the Covenant of Grace. The first we even hear of such a covenant comes very early in the Scriptures, in the Protevangelium of GN 3: 15 and as God is clothing Adam and Eve just before their expulsion from the Garden of Eden found in GN 3: 21. “I will make you [the serpent] and the woman hate each other; her offspring and yours will always be enemies. Her offspring will crush your head, and you will bit their heel…And the Lord God made clothes out of animal skins for Adam and his wife, and He clothed them.” These come so early and so fast that it’s easy for us to overlook the big picture that is foreshadowed by them. That is that sinful mankind will be saved and victorious over sin and death by means of a Savior Whom God will supply. Things are stated a bit more directly in JER 31: 31-34, “The Lord says, ‘The time is coming when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the old covenant [the Covenant of the Law] that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt. Although I was like a husband to them, they did not keep that covenant. The new covenant that I will make with the people of Israel will be this: I will put My law within them and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be My people. None of them will have to teach his fellow countryman to know the Lord, because all will know Me, from the least to the greatest. I will forgive their sins and I will no longer remember their wrongs. I, the Lord, have spoken.’” That last line is repeated in HE 8: 12, “I will forgive their sins and will no longer remember their wrongs.” I have typed them out here, because anything repeated by God means it’s important.
In the covenant relationship we have with God, it is a working relationship. We already know that due to His perfection, God will keep His end of the two-way promise. Once again, we are challenged to examine our own willingness to do this [without guilt being invoked]. In doing so, we must find out if we are submitting to God’s rights and His attempts to be in leadership in this relationship. As a counselor, I’m acutely aware of people who utter “counselor speak” and basically take over the therapy process. Until they stop doing this and yield to the process, they can’t be helped. On a much larger scale, people who utter the words they think God wants and who refuse to allow God to be in leadership also reject His help. Those are simply doers. JAS 2: 8, “You will be doing the right thing if you obey the law of the Kingdom, which is found in the Scripture [LV 19: 18], ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’” The statement, “I can love others, because God Who is love is in me” applies. There is a great continuity between the true believer and God. We see this in two important Scriptures, PHIL 4: 13 and 1 JN 4: 12, “I can do all things through Christ, Who strengthens me…No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.” How reminiscent this is of Christ’s statements about His relationship to the Father, in JN 10: 30 and JN 14: 9b and 11, “The Father and I are One…Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father…Believe Me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me. If not, believe because of the things I can do.” I’m not saying we are Christ, but instead, that we become like Christ, as we gradually mature in the Spirit. With the Covenant of Grace, we shuck off the legalism practiced by traditional Judaism and come gradually in to God’s great light, which is His grace. We make God’s agenda first and greatly improve our participation in the new covenant with Him.
PRAYER: O Lord, once again You have led us to where we must examine our own participation in the Covenant of Grace. Your intent is to perfect us and prepare us to return to You for a blissful eternity. While we must face sometimes painful truths about ourselves, You ask us to engage in this examination without guilt or denial. PS 19: 12-13, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults. Keep back Your servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not have dominion over me.” This is the prayer we must pray at a time like this. Christ, in His infinite wisdom, brings us to this place by uttering the Golden Rule in His Sermon on the Mount. With the strength only You, Dearest Abba, can give Him and through suffering and sacrifice of His own life on the cross for our salvation, Christ has the power to send the Holy Spirit to live in us. You, He, and the Spirit- all personalities of our One but triune Deity- still live and intervene in our lives. If we cooperate, fulfill our part of the Covenant of Grace, You have the power to resurrect us as the people that follow Him, the “First of many brothers” [RO 8: 29]. When the Holy Spirit directs our actions, we will “be holy because I am holy” [LV 11; 44-45; LV 19: 2; 1 PET 1: 16] and will “love our neighbors as we love ourselves” [LV 19: 18, JN 13: 34-35]. Loving our neighbor means obeying the Golden Rule. The Holy Spirit directs us to do the opposite of what our natural impulses are. It flies in the face of our sinfulness. We also will confess our sins openly and honestly, just as David did, in PS 51: 10-12. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and loyal spirit in me. Do not banish me from Your presence; do not take Your Holy Spirit away from me. Give me again the joy that comes from Your salvation, and make me willing to obey You.” Then and only then, can we trust in Your direction as described in PS 37: 23-24, “The steps of the godly are directed by the Lord. He delights in every detail of their lives. Though they stumble, they will not fall, for the Lord holds them by the hand.” Lord, our hands are outstretched for Your help! We offer you praise and thanks, in the holy and mighty name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Next week, we will look at the Golden Rule from a historical context. In the meanwhile, we really should never miss the applicability of the Scriptures not only in today’s world but also in our individual lives. These are word written from about 98 AD back through human history, and yet we are still gaining important lessons from them in 2009. And yes, they will be eternally appropriate. 2 TIM 3: 16-17 is a passage I never tire of repeating. “All Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching the truth, rebuking error, correcting faults, and giving instruction for right living, so that the person who serves God may be fully qualified and equipped to do every kind of good deed.” Moreover, if the Holy Spirit is really in us and in leadership of our lives, there is a bond between us and our Deity that cannot be broken [RO 8: 38-39]. This bond gives us the power to oppose our sinful nature and to do spiritual warfare with the same power that God used to raise Christ from death to eternal life. If we remain faithful, the devil doesn’t have a chance to win over us. Repeatedly, we can return to the same verse or passage in the Scriptures, and God will have a new lesson for us every time. That is the supernatural nature of the Bible, and it has the power to create in us a life-long hunger for God’s word. As for God Himself, He loves each of us with unparalleled zeal. That’s why His mission statement, as found in JN 6: 39-40 and EPH 1: 4-5 is directed at perfecting us, so that we can be brought back to Him for eternity. No human has that same profundity of love. So, we must end with offer praise and thanks to God forever and ever!
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn Johnson