Skip to main content

 ONLY ONE WAY TO VICTORY

1 John 5:1-5
"Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, has become a child of God. And everyone who loves the Father loves His children, too. 2 We know we love God’s children if we love God and obey His commandments. 3 Loving God means keeping His commandments, and His commandments are not burdensome. 4 For every child of God defeats this evil world, and we achieve this victory through our faith. 5 And who can win this battle against the world? Only those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God."

Those who do not believe there is a spiritual war going on all around them have had the wool pulled over their eyes. The "world" is vying for your loyalty, devotion and commitment in order to keep you separated from the Love of God that alone can restore you to wholeness and peace.

The things the world system promises will fulfill you, give your life meaning, value, and purpose will never actually produce what they advertise. Education cannot change your heart and nature. The accumulation of money and stuff cannot make you secure. The accolades of others will never be enough to give you any lasting peace. The world's system to seduce and enslave a person are based on the craving of physical pleasure, the strong desire for everything we see, and pride in one's achievements or possessions.
With those "idols" ruling your life, your imagination, your motivation, your sense of being, there is no room for real life.

Real life comes from the Giver of Life. Becoming fully human is the singular result of surrendering all of life to Jesus Christ, believing Him, trusting in what He has done for you to be restored to a living relationship with God. The salvaging of a human life can only be done by God. When you are spiritually dead and enslaved by this world system, sin is normative. Sin never restored anyone to wholeness, never healed a broken heart, never provided a peace that was not connected to human effort and the delusion that "I'm OK." Sin never saved anyone, just the opposite.

Believing the Lord God and what He has done in love to rescue and restore humanity through the Life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, and His sending the Holy Spirit to give one the power to really live a new Life is what it means to live a life of faith. Faith is the confidence that God has told you the truth that He loves you and surrendering all you are to Him. It's a turning from the world's deception of sin and addiction to self. It's turning to Him to receive forgiveness for all your folly and to receive His forgiveness and gift of eternal life.

The battle is won, not by achieving, but by believing. It is the abandoning of every false way of trying to obtain love and believing that God has told you the truth. That Truth is revealed in His Word, the Bible. It revels our desperate condition of being spiritually and thus essentially dead in sin and rebellion (living as though God really doesn't matter in my day-to-day existence). The Bible also reveals that God has done for us that very thing that is impossible for us to accomplish. God made a way, in Jesus Christ, for us to be forgiven and restore to God as sons and daughters.

We live on a planet that is at war, spiritual war. Victory in this conflict comes only by God, by believing and receiving His promises in Christ Jesus.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HEARING MUST BE UNITED TO BELIEVING Hebrews 3:16-19 “And who was it who rebelled against God, even though they heard His voice? Wasn’t it the people Moses led out of Egypt? And who made God angry for forty years? Wasn’t it the people who sinned, whose corpses lay in the wilderness? And to whom was God speaking when He took an oath that they would never enter His rest? Wasn’t it the people who disobeyed Him? So, we see that because of their unbelief they were not able to enter His rest.” I have heard people say, “If I heard the voice of God. I would not rebel; I’d believe.” Others have said, “If I saw a miracle, I’d believe.” We really do not have a grip on the capacity for unbelief that is resident in the human heart and mind. The children of Israel saw God decimate the false gods of Egypt in the plagues He sent through Moses. The Lord God who had called Abraham made sure that Abraham’s children saw that the gods and religious culture surrounding them for 400 years were not gods at all...
Post a Comment
Read more
 HIS POWER...HIS PROMISE Helping people walk in the Spirit the devotional below is seminal! The devotion below is today from Oswald Chambers. I makes me think of some I have known that have assumed that the Lord doesn’t want them empowered by the Holy Spirit or that He won’t manifest Himself in them because they have reasoned otherwise. Given ministry opportunities to have the Holy Spirit confirm the Word of God with demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power, they rely on how they feel, their experience thus far and not on the reality that the will of God in mission and ministry is either done in the Holy Spirit’s Power or not at all. Our capacity to do what Jesus does has nothing to do with our imagined capacity, but upon the indwelling power of God through is. Now to Him who is able to do far above and beyond what we could ever imagine or think, by His power at work in us now, to Him be glory…   Matthew 25:14-30 Jesus told the parable of the bags of gold as a warning ...
Post a Comment
Read more
 INFINITELY MORE Ephesians 3:20-21 " Now all glory to God, Who is able, through His mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.   Glory to Him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen." In the Gospel of John, many of His followers turned away because of the covenant commitment He required of those who would follow Him. That covenant declared that what was to happen to Jesus would also happen to them. We, too, must lay our lives down and choose the will and way of God's Kingdom over all else. Those in the crowd knew that in Jerusalem, the Jewish religious leaders were plotting and planning Jesus' destruction. To follow Jesus to that degree required denying self and the thrall of the world and its ways, even to the point of laying one's life down by refusing to deny the Lord and His salvation. Jesus turned to the 12 and asked, " Are you also going to leave?" ( John 6:67-...
Post a Comment
Read more