2002-01-01
Good Morning Faithful Readers,
Today’s passage, 1JN 3: 7-10, gives us insight into the lifestyle expectations that God has for His children. “Let no one deceive you, my children! Whoever does what is right is righteous just as Christ is righteous. Whoever continues to sin belongs to the devil, because the devil has sinned from the very beginning. The Son of God appeared for this very reason, to destroy what the devil had done. Whoever is a child of God does not continue to sin, for God’s very nature is in him; and because God is his Father, he cannot continue to sin. Here is the clear difference between God’s children and the devil’s children: anyone who does not do what is right or does not love his brother is not God’s child.” Those of you who have been reading my writing for awhile have no doubt figured out that I return to the greatest doctrinal treatise of the Bible repeatedly; that is the book of Romans. I don’t apologize for this, because it seems to be the best way to make the mechanism of God’s teachings clear. It is the key which unlocks all the rest of the Scriptures, both OT and NT. RO 4: 3 quotes GN 15: 6 and is repeated in GA 3: 6. “Abraham believed God, and because of his faith God accept him as righteous.” That seems simple enough, but it’s implications for us are huge. This process, called justification, reveals to us that being deemed acceptable to God is available to anyone who believes. Abraham is used as an example here to encourage us to understand this principle and to act on it. When we are justified, righteousness is imputed to our account, replacing the unfaithfulness with which we were born (because of Adam’s sin). When we accept Christ as our personal Savior, then the principle of RO 6: 9-11 kicks in. “For we know that Christ has been raised from death and will never die again-death will no longer rule over Him. And so, because He died, sin has no power over Him; and now He lives His life in fellowship with God. In the same way you are to think of yourselves as dead, so far as sin is concerned, but living in fellowship with God through Christ Jesus.” What a gift-to “no longer be slaves to sin” [RO 6: 6]! That is a gift that our loving Abba has given us, a gift not to be wasted.
Romans is not the only place in the Scriptures to deal with the issue of a righteousness by far. The nature of the transformation that has taken place by the renewal of our minds [see RO 12: 2] is that we are “a new creation in Christ” [see 2 COR 5: 17]. A bond which is eternal in nature has been established between us and Christ. RO 8: 14-17, the passage about being adopted as God’s children that I discussed the other day, demonstrates the the bond between us and Christ is also between us and the Holy Spirit. But, that is not all. JN 14: 11 reveals that the bond is also between us and God, because of our bond with Christ. [Christ speaking] “Believe Me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me.” All of this is capped off by Christ’s clear statement in JN 14: 6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one goes to the Father except by Me.” When we have true faith, the kind that deems us acceptable to God, we have entered into an intimate bond with the entire Trinity. Is it no wonder that we will choose to live a righteous lifestyle, making Godly decisions and taking apostolic action?
God is omniscient-all knowing. He can’t be fooled by the devil’s children who try to appear righteous when they are not. God loves His children enough to have equipped us with powerful weapons against the deception and spiritual warfare of the devil. Those weapons are 1) the Scriptures, which give us discernment, 2)the desire to endure in faith, which comes from the righteousness God imputed to our accounts, and 3) prayer, which is an open, two-way conduit of communication with Him through the Holy Spirit. God’s compassion is extended to the other persons of the Trinity as well as all those who believe in Him. JN 10: 14-15 is a beautiful example of this. [Christ speaking] “I am the Good Shepherd. As the Father knows Me and I know the Father, in the same way I know My sheep and they know Me. And I am willing to die for them.” If the bond between a person and the Trinity is absent, the person will continue to sin-make sinning a lifestyle. It’s as simple as that. He also doesn’t have discernment that comes from understanding the Scriptures, prayer for on-going communication with God, or the Holy Spirit indwelt to give Him guidance and understanding. Lacking these weapons against evil will certainly catch up with the devil’s children. We’re told that in RO 6: 23, “For sin pays its wage-death; but God’s free gift is eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God introduced the concept of loving one’s neighbor back in LV 19: 18. “Do not take revenge on anyone or continue to hate him, but love your neighbor as you love yourself. I am the Lord.” Christ takes this one step further in JN 13: 34-35. “And now I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have love you, so you must love one another. If you have love for one another, then everyone will know that you are My disciples.” Because we are children of God, we will love one another as Christ loved us. That is built into the “new creation” that this marvelous bond between us and the three persons of the Trinity has produced. While we are still capable of sin, the Holy Spirit will make it clear to us that we have slipped, and our bond will make us want to turn from that sin having learned a lesson from it and get back in line with God. What a gift! Be encouraged in faith by knowing that as God’s children, He has equipped us to have victory over the Devil and his evil. Take comfort in knowing that we can look forward to joy and eternal fellowship with our loving Abba in heaven if we will endure in our faith and choose to live according to the convictions it gives us.
PRAYER: O Lord, we are truly blessed to be Your children. Our world is not an easy place for us to be. Yet in Your infinite wisdom, You know we needed to be here to undergo the process of sanctification. You toil hard to polish our rough spiritual edges, to perfect us, so that we might be properly prepared to accept and appreciate the gift of eternal life and fellowship with You that You have made available to us. Your compassion is revealed in the effective weapons against evil with which You equip us. You sent Your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, to pay the price that bought us out of the marketplace of slavery to sin. We are Your children and humbly take this opportunity to express our gratitude for all You have done in the past, continue to do for us now, and will do in the future. In making us Your “new creations,” You have established an eternal bond between us and the three persons of the Trinity that is the mechanism by which You see to our protection against the devil and his followers as we struggle to become perfected. Only a loving Parent Who is Sovereign over all would do this for us. We confess any sin that still remains in our lives and dedicate ourselves to getting rid of it. We praise, honor, adore, glorify, magnify, and worship You. In Christ’s name, amen.
Tomorrow, we will look at the issue of loving one another as God reveals it to John in 1JN 3: 11-18. If you are feeling loved today, then you are receiving the message of the Scriptures as our loving Abba intended it to be. I hope that you share my conviction that the more deeply I study His words, the more confident I can be that they are a huge love letter to each person who has faith. Peter and I send you our love too.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn