When you die to self, embracing the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for your sin, you lay your life down and the Holy Spirit comes to live New Life within you. You are no longer your own, but have been bought with the price of Jesus Christ dying the death and the separation from all goodness that you deserved. In this New and Eternal life, the Holy Spirit lives in the followers of Jesus Christ. Being united to both Jesus’ death and resurrection, physical death is now but a transition from this life to Eternal Life in God’s Presence. Dying before you die (thus bring united to the Life of Jesus Christ), when you die, you will not die (not be separated from God). The second death comes to those who have rejected the grace of God, those for whom God simply did not matter in earthly life. We are now in Holy Week. Please do not scorn the love of God, His provision of forgiveness, new Life, meaning and purpose.
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. ...
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