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FROM START TO FINISH

Philippians 1:6 "And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ."

This is an eternal truth: salvation is of the LORD. There is an Old Testament verse that states, "Seeing eyes and hearing ears are from the Lord. " (Proverbs 20:12) God is the one who make the spiritually deaf to hear His voice, to understand His Word. He causes the spiritually blind to see the desperate condition of the human heart and its deadness apart from the intervention of God. He alone saves, rescues, redeems, restores and renews, giving eternal Life where there was only spiritual death at work in a person's life.

This work in us is possible only because God has finished the work of redemption through the Life, Death, Resurrection and Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. All of salvation, from the moment a person receives new life being born again by the Holy Spirit, till that salvation is brought to completion by the Holy Spirit is of God's grace. A follower of Jesus is destined to come to maturity and enter into the fullness of their salvation in heaven.

Just as a baby, being born, must have time, security, protection and nurture to become mature human being, a Christian will grow in time as the Life of Jesus expands and fill the whole of their life by the Holy Spirit. This New Life is not something that we innately know how to live. It is a radically new Life, literally the Life of the risen Lord Jesus being lived out in and through us by the Holy Spirit. The Christian Life is nothing less than the Life of Jesus Christ lived in the believer.

We are utterly dependent upon the One who called us out of our death and into His Life. He has done a completed work that, because we now belong to Him by grace through faith, will be brought to completion and fullness by Him. There is a race that He has set before us to "run", a life to be lived by fixing our eyes on Jesus Christ, the One upon Whom our faith depends from start to finish. There is meaning and purpose for each follower of the Lord Jesus. There is a race to be run, a life to be lived out with your name on it.

Our hope is grounded in God alone, in His promises, in His faithfulness and by His power. He enables us to trust Him. Jacob wrestled with God at the Jabbok River because God enabled him to wrestle (Genesis 32:22-32) and to not let go until God had blessed him and given him a new name. Jacob could hold on to God because God was holding on to him, enabling Jacob to not stop struggling until he had received what God planned to give him in blessing.

The Lord God, having begun the good and perfect work of salvation in us, is because we now belong to Him as His daughters and sons. He will never ask us to depend on ourselves to any degree. It is because God has made us His own heirs in Christ Jesus that we need never fear that He would ever abandon or leave us. It is BECAUSE we are His that we can trust Him to finish in us what He began. We didn't begin it and can't bring it to any degree of completion. He does it, enabling our obedience and faithfulness. We live because He is Life within us.

He has overcome all that sin and death could ever contain. His Life in us is "overcoming Life." because His Life is eternal overcoming Life.


 

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