2016-03-18
Good Morning Dear Ones,
Last week, I was led to compare the old and new covenants in chart style. It’s clear that God was aware that people under the Covenant of the Law were getting hung up on format at the cost of not fully understanding the content of God’s teaching. They were lapsing into legalism, despite knowing what pleases God and what doesn’t. God wanted us to understand His teaching well enough to be led by the Holy Spirit and not the written law alone. They needed to find salvation, justification, and eternal forgiveness, and only Jesus Christ’s death on the cross and one’s faith in Him could do that. That is the reason God instituted the Covenant of Grace, meant to include both knowing the law and understanding God’s teaching in it’s fullness. JN 15: 13-17 tells us that nothing is held back or kept secret any more. One must know that He chose us first, and not the other way around. JN 3: 16, RO 3: 24-25, RO 4: 3, and 1 JN 1: 9 revealed that under the new covenant, we had all of these blessings. We also have to be willing to cooperate with God in the process of sanctification. Our part is to reveal, genuinely confess, and expunge our sins; God’s part is to purify (perfect) us gradually until we are mature spiritually and have as full an understanding of God’s precepts as possible on earth. Then, God will glorify us, i.e. bring us back to His side for a blissful and eternal fellowship with Him and those who have gone on before us.
2 COR 5: 1-5 lays out God’s goal for believers in His Son, as well as the main calling of the Holy Spirit. “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we not be found naked. For while we are in this tent (on earth), we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Now it is God Who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a Deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.” For the sake of clarity, we need to look at this descriptive language carefully. The term “earthly tent” refers to our bodies. These are mortal, meaning they can die. However, God has the power to convert them to an immortal body, for which there is no death, the kind found in heaven [1 COR 15: 52-54]. If one’s name is written in God’s book of life, then this will happen. The Spirit teaches us to understand God’s truth and reminds us we can be motivated to be obediently faithful, which will, in God’s perfect time and way, lead us to glorification. It is the Spirit that was sent by a risen Christ to make His Atonement a work of redemption for us. He moves us forward in this process of “transformation by the renewal of one’s mind.”
Over the course of this series of “Our Covenant” messages, I have shared my own experiences and testimony. You have seen what my heart was like when it was asleep to God’s very existence, how He kept me in His sight the whole time, how He awakened me to the need for faith and took me, step by step, to where my faith in His Son is now. Obviously, I’m still a sinner, not yet perfected sufficiently to be glorified. Only Christ has the right to decide how far I’ve gone in being sanctified. He does the same for each of us reading these devotions. No doubt I have more to learn, more to transforming my heart to where God wants it to be when He takes me back to His side in heaven. I welcome His intervention and pray that each of us is also being sanctified, transformed in readiness for the time when God calls us to His side. Do I believe He will do that for all of us? You bet I do! I hope and pray that you don’t have to have any catastrophic trials before that time comes. If you are reading this and thinking, “what about me,” then look carefully and with complete honesty at your life. I urge you to make whatever alterations the Holy Spirit leads you to make to keep yourselves moving forward through the “narrow gate that leads to the hard path to eternal life.” The alternative is unthinkable! We must realize that God’s knowledge, understanding, and wisdom is so far greater than ours, that we can hardly conceive of it. IS 55: 6, “Seek the Lord while He may be found; call on Him while He is near.” Isaiah has written what is in my heart placed there in God’s words by the Holy Spirit, in IS 55: 11, “So is My word that goes out from My mouth. It will not return to Me empty but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” And my final wish for you is found in HE 13: 20-21, “May the God of peace, Who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing His will, and may He work in us what is pleasing to Him, through Jesus Christ, to Whom be glory for ever and ever.”
PRAYER: O Lord, we come to You, knowing full well our need for Your Spirit’s guidance and intervention, to let You know we acknowledge Your superiority and sovereignty over us. We welcome You and hold dear our covenant relationship with You. Each time we approach You with reverence, awe, freedom, and hearts opened by Your Spirit, You are there for us. We can’t help but love You for it and for Your unparalleled wisdom. It gives us great comfort to know that You have our best eternal interests in mind, and that You are always-righteous. There are times when we are like stupid sheep, forgetting we need You and making foolish choices. The sharing of our testimonies with each other, our personal and corporate prayers, the time we spend studying Your word, and the service we perform for others in Your name are all ways that You have given us to mature in our faith in and obedience to You. With growing maturity, we feel the urgency of sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ with others who will listen to us. There is nothing accidental or imaginary about a world changed for the better by the spread of faith in Your Son. Other belief systems compete, and those who belong to them try to populate areas in the world where their beliefs are foreign. You alone know the true motivation of their hearts. Your Son and Spirit are powerful in spreading goodness and the other gifts of the Holy Spirit, thus causing Your Light to pierce the darkness. We stand before You offering ourselves to Your service, desiring to work to build Your Kingdom. Your agenda has become ours. My personal experience has been transformative and a blessing, even though it was hard and painful at times. All of us are convinced of Your will to eventually bring us back to Your side in heaven. For that and all You do for/teach us, we offer You our forever and utmost praise and thanks. You are a loving and generous God, and we pray to You in the holy/mighty name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
NEXT WEEK: We have, at last, come to the end of this “Our Covenant” series of messages on covenant theology. As each of you has seen, God has had a lot to say in the Scriptures about covenants and their impact on the lives of all who believe. God has a directive for all of us, one that I hope to take up in the new “Knowing God” series of messages to begin next week. He wants each of us to know Him better! I can see all kinds of blessings that will come from doing that, so I hope to share these along the way. For many years, I have loved the book of Colossians, and that will be the base of this new series. While it has only four chapters, it is loaded with great teachings and further explanations of ones given before it was written. I hope and pray that each of you will walk beside me in prayer, as I try to listen to what the Holy Spirit has to share with me and share it with you. Every aspect of our lives is impacted by our loving God. If we obey Him and learn what He is teaching us, our lives will be even more blessed than they already are. We’ll meet some of the people in earlier times who labored hard to bring God’s teaching, through Paul, to more and more people. The remarkable spread of Christianity in the times of the early church can’t be attributed to just one human apostle. Paul had a lot of help. It’s the way Kingdom-building gets done. We can note this and work side by side in our own time to help God and each other. As faith in Jesus Christ spreads, so do the many blessings to people’s lives that can be attributed to it. It’s an important part of my ministry/mission in writing these devotions to encourage you to join me on the front lines in sharing this life-saving message of salvation and peace with those who don’t yet believe. The blessings from doing this will flow in your direction, even though you may meet up with some opposition. The Holy Spirit has shown me He is eager to convey God’s messages and lessons. If we open our hearts to Him, we will not only be equipped to help in Kingdom-building, but we will be blessed enormously in many ways. So stay with me, beginning next week, we will travel the road to getting to know our God better. Praise and thanks be to Him!
THE END
© Lynn Johnson
2015. All Rights Reserved.
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