Skip to main content

LIFE CHANGE

Psalm 50:16-21 “But God says to the wicked: “Why bother reciting My decrees and pretending to obey My covenant? For you refuse My discipline and treat My words like trash. When you see thieves, you approve of them, and you spend your time with adulterers. Your mouth is filled with wickedness, and your tongue is full of lies. You sit around and slander your brother— your own mother’s son. While you did all this, I remained silent, and you thought I was exactly like you. But now I will rebuke you, listing all my charges against you.”

There is a religious moralism practiced by some who claim to belong to God. They think that their worship and offerings are somehow doing God a favor. The idea held here is that by living a moral and ethical life, our religious observance puts God in our debt. The truth is, however, that what God gives us in Christ Jesus is a gift. It is all about grace and God’s power given to us to repent in honesty and humility, recognizing we are utterly dependent upon God for our salvation from start to finish.

The flipside of the same religious coin is being doctrinally correct in what is professed to be believed, but without life change. God defines such persons as “wicked”. You can read your Bible through and through multiple times, attend worship services regularly and profess an orthodox faith, but if your life doesn’t change, something is wrong. Your actions reveal that you hate God’s instructions and cast His Word behind your back. It’s not that you don’t believe that God exists, He just doesn’t matter if His Word contradicts your will and passions. The truth is that no one who is truly saved by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus will fail to live a changed life by the power of the Holy Spirit living within them.

The Lord Jesus meets us where we are when He saves us and brings us into His Kingdom. But He doesn’t leave us there. He doesn’t let us continue to compartmentalize our lives; He changes us. Our lives begin to be lived in love for and in reference to the Lord in all things. Submitting yourself to the Holy Spirit for Him to do in you all that God desires for you will mean life change, conforming you to the image and likeness of Jesus. If you find yourself resisting God’s clear Word, you need to stop and let the Holy Spirit remove the idols from your heart.

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