Skip to main content

 Whose Will?

A man named Dennis F. Kinlaw wrote this years ago, “Satan disguises submission to himself under the guise of personal autonomy. He never asks us to become his servants. Never once did the serpent say to Eve, ‘I want to be your master.’ The shift in commitment is never from Christ to evil; it is always from Christ to self. And instead of His will, self-interest rules and what I want reigns. THAT is the essence of sin.”

The chaos that is recorded human history is the fruit of us simply wanting to do what we want. Truth is, we think we know what to do and thus we do what we want. We show what we believe by doing what we do. It is seminal to understand that the life God has given us to live on this planet is not something we really know how to live. The questions of, “Why am I here?” and “What is the purpose and meaning of life?” have fueled the machinations of philosophers for centuries. Most religious systems try to make sense out of the human condition, but they all fall short in attempting to answer the questions because they lack any real connection with the Creator.

There is only One Source of true wisdom about how to live and what will make for human flourishing, and it comes from The Creator. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Eternal Father of the Eternal Son, Jesus Christ Who is God incarnate, did not leave humanity’s nagging questions unanswered. God has spoken and His Word has been recorded and preserved so we might understand the what and why of life. The beginning of wisdom is reverence for God, yielding to Him, believing Him, surrendering all of life to Him so that He rules in us for our good and not “self-destructive-self-interest”.

God in His love for the “crown of His creation” did not leave us to flounder and perish in our self-interested death-throws. He has come to us and revealed Himself so that we might know what He is like, what His ways look like, and what will make for meaning and purpose as we live here in time. Jesus said, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” We don’t have to live in confusion. We can be united to the full Life of God by believing and receiving from Him what He has done to deal with the sin of the world. With utter finality, He has dealt with your sin and mine; sin that has always been grounded in the satanic deception of finite, lame, blind, deaf, and dead-ended self-interest.

Jesus Christ made it so clear when He stated, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but by me.” If we want to know the what and why of our existence, it can be known in following Jesus Christ, surrendered to His will, living by the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, and being changed more and more into what God intended all along. Whose “will” will it be for you? Or phrased another way, what do you want, to become alive or remain spiritually, essentially, dead?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY Martin Luther said that the human heart is an idol factory. The truth is that we were created to know and live by the gracious rule of and in the Presence of God who created us. Our peace, our understanding of meaning and purpose can only be truly grounded in God who created us for that meaning and purpose. The rebellion of Adam and Eve, their decision to do the opposite of what God said would make for life, resulted in spiritual and ultimately physical death. They chose to believe they needed something more than what God had provided. Their doomed attempt to try and live life without reference to God as the ground of meaning and purpose did not make life fuller, but emptied it. They wanted to decide what was good and what was evil without God and the disintegration of human life was the consequence. Rather than living in the Presence of God and by the gracious rule of God all around them, they turned from wholeness to brokenness, from fulfilment to scarc...
Post a Comment
Read more
  WORKING AGAINST ALL HUMANITY 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 “They fail to please God and WORK AGAINST ALL HUMANITY   as they try to keep us from preaching the Good News of salvation to the Gentiles. By doing this, they continue to pile up their sins.” WOW! What a startling statement! St. Paul is making it crystal clear that those who oppose and work to prevent the proclamation of the Gospel are actually “working against ALL HUMANITY.” Why would he write that? It is because the only means of the restoration, reclamation and salvation of humanity is what God has done for all people through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the essence of the Gospel: Jesus Christ. To oppose and try to silence the presentation of the Gospel is to work against the reclamation of all humanity. Who would want to work against ALL humanity? Satan is the name by which he is known. He hates ALL humanity because every human being still bears the image of God, albeit that ima...
Post a Comment
Read more
  TIMING Years ago, I head an old preacher say, “The right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing.” That statement is an offense to the culture being worshipped world-wide today. There is a lust for the immediate, as a line from an old movie stated, “Immediate gratification takes too long!” We want faster internet, immediate responses to our texts, mobile orders at the ready when we walk into Starbucks. What we want, we demand to have NOW. We are masters at justifying ourselves. “Well, we’re engaged already and we’re going to get married anyway, so what’s wrong with us living together and being sexually intimate now?” God’s timing in human relationship is not arbitrary, it is protective and covering. Sad to say, even some who call themselves followers of Jesus Christ choose to justify their living in sexual sin now, because they promise that they will one day get married. The context where sexual intimacy finds its true meaning and purpose is in the covenant of marriage. ...
Post a Comment
Read more