Saturday, May 2, 2009

Complete in Him

Colossians 2:10

Within Jesus Christ is all of God’s nature complete (Colossians 2:9), and you and I dwell in Christ, and He in us. Because Christ is complete then we are complete in Him, meaning that there is nothing lacking in the believer. When we grow in Christ, we are not adding to who we already are, we are simply shedding the old habits and ways and allowing who He is to shine forth from our life.

When Paul told the church at Rome how to avoid looking and acting like the world, he told them to be transformed, by the renewing of their minds (Romans 12:2). The transformation of the believer has nothing to do with adding more works to their lives, but rather it is in the stripping away of the way that we used to think and respond. We cannot do this without the transformative power of the Holy Spirit, but with Him, we are slowly but surely changed into the very image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18).

If Paul says that we are complete, what more can we add that has not been placed in us by Christ? Even the things in our lives that we know are not right and that need fixed are simply remnants of the old man which is constantly being put off as we grow in Christ. Just as a sculptor will look at a chunk of marble and see a beautiful masterpiece trapped inside, God looks at us with all of our problems and idiosyncrasies and sees a wonderful finished product, fashioned in the very image of His Son Jesus.

Paul writes that part of our completion is accomplished through the fact that we “are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11). We know that the circumcision of Christ cannot mean His physical circumcision, for how could that make a difference in our sinful flesh? This circumcision of Christ is the cutting off of Jesus from the Father, causing Jesus to cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

When we accept Christ, we are taking part in the cutting off of Jesus, having our sinful flesh cut away. We are no longer a slave to its nature and passions, though our old mindsets remain. These mindsets are constantly being dealt with by the believer, as we change our mind to reflect our new nature. Nothing needs to be added to us in order to take away sin, for Jesus has already taken it away, instead, let us take away the old mentality that makes us see ourselves as fallen and sinful.

Jesus bore all that He did at the cross so that you would not have to. Rejoice in all that He did for you and dwell on it everyday. Because He took it, you get the blessings! Memorize what He did and meditate on these:

Jesus was made poor, so that I could be made rich; He was made naked so that I could be clothed in the garments of salvation and the robes of righteousness; He became the curse so that I could have the blessing; He was rejected so that I would be accepted; He was made to be sin so that I could be made the righteousness of God; His body was broken so that mine could be whole and healthy; He cried “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, so that I could cry, “Daddy, daddy, why are you so good to me?”

He is good and you are complete in Him!

Friday, May 1, 2009

Beware of Dogs

Philippians 3:2

“Beware of Dog” is a sign that we might see on someone’s property to warn you that there is a guard dog on the premises. It is not a phrase that we would expect to see in the Bible, yet that is precisely what the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the church at Philippi. He warns them of three things; all prefaced with the word “beware”: dogs, evil workers and the concision.

We can assume that Paul is not actually warning the church about ferocious dogs, but using the tried and true method of allowing the Bible to interpret the Bible, we find that there was previous precedent for this example. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber. Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter” (Isaiah 56:10, 11).

In this example, Isaiah is talking about the watchmen, or the supposed men of God, who were supposed to hear from the Lord for Israel. With that in mind, we can assume that Paul is warning of the spiritually lazy leadership who will not “bark” to warn you when something is threatening. This apathy unfortunately is rampant in every church age.

He also warns of “evil workers”, which is different from the dog that won’t bark. These workers actually perform evil deeds, and they influence others to do the same. David said of them, “Depart from me, ye evildoers: for I will keep the commandments of my God” (Psalms 119:115). The actions of the evil workers will pull the saint further away from Christ and His finished work, causing the saint to slip into wickedness.

Finally, Paul mentions “the concision”. This is the token appearance of this word in the entire Bible, and it is a statement of sarcasm. The Greek word for ‘concision’ means ‘mutilation’ in English. The next verse in this sequence shows us what mutilation that Paul is speaking of, “For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3). Paul is referring to the circumcision of the Jewish nation when he speaks of the concision. His warning is stern and must have struck a serious chord with the Jewish readers of that day. Circumcision was considered the single rite of Judaism that separated them from the rest of the world, like no other single act did. By warning the Philippian Christians to watch out for the ‘mutilation’, Paul was effectively lowering the act of circumcision to that of asceticism, taking all spiritual authority away from it.

In our modern age of political correctness, it is hard to fathom just how offensive and controversial that the Apostle Paul was with his preaching of pure grace. When he warned of “another gospel”, he was warning of a return to a religion of works and ordinances. When he said “Beware of the concision”, he was warning of placing your confidence in the physical act of circumcision to identify you as one of God’s chosen one’s. While there is nothing spiritually wrong with a baby boy being circumcised, Paul was adamant about all confidence being removed from the flesh and its abilities and into the finished work of Jesus Christ.

“Worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:3).

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Sit, Walk, Stand

Ephesians 2:4-6

Many times in our Christian walk, we speak of resting in the Lord as if it is something that we should do after we are completely exhausted from the cares of this life. It is made to sound as if we finally sit down and take our ease in Christ only after we have worked sufficiently for Him in one capacity or the other. The order usually goes something like this: Stand up for the Lord in front of the world and take the blows; then walk softly before God and stay on the straight and narrow; and finally, someday, when it is all said and done, we will sit together with Him in heaven. Paul paints quite a different picture.

The order of events, according to the Apostle Paul, is designed by the Holy Spirit, for nothing happens in the Word by chance. Paul shows us what I call the “2-4-6” method of Christian experience. Watch it unfold:

Sit“And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (2:6).

Walk“I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called” (4:1).

Stand “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (6:11).

We actually start out defeated and beaten somewhere on the road of life, and then Jesus “raised us up together” (2:6). This is a type of our salvation experience, where the Good Samaritan cares for us along life’s highway. The first thing that He does is sit us next to Jesus. The starting point for every believer is resting next to the Master. Only when we have learned to rest with Him in His finished work are we qualified to “walk worthy” (4:1).

The “walk” is now made easier because we are accustomed to being so close to Him in proximity. You need not fear that you are going to wander off of the “straight and narrow”. Even if you do go down into a valley of the shadow of death, your Shepherd will enter it with you, and He will not abandon you in the midst.

Once we have placed our daily walk in the Lord, we are ready to stand when the enemy begins his attack. Interestingly enough, there is no mention here of the believer fighting back. Some have preached sermons on spiritual warfare, calling for militant Christians to “attack the devil”. Paul tells the believer to “be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might” (6:10), showing us that all of the battle belongs to the Lord and none of it belongs to us.

In Christ, He does the fighting and we get the victory. What a Savior! While we certainly wrestle (6:12), when it comes to the attack of the enemy, we simply stand there, while Christ takes care of us (6:13, 14). Consequently, the Holy Spirit is careful to let us know that we will stand in the “evil day”. Note that it is singular, for whatever bad comes our way, it is temporary. When God blesses the believer, it is always with “good days”, used in the plural, for they will last for all time (1 Peter 3:10).

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The Faith of Christ

Galatians 2:16-20

We know that a man is not justified by doing the works of the law, for we can never do them all perfectly. How is a man justified? Paul says, “By the faith of Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16), but surely that is a misprint for it says, “the faith of Jesus Christ”, and certainly it should say, “faith in Jesus Christ”. Actually, if we read on, we find that Paul makes a distinction:

“Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.” (Galatians 2:16)

Paul makes a distinction between the faith of Jesus Christ and faith in Jesus Christ. In Greek, which is the language that the New Testament was written in, there is no phrase for “of”, but there is a phrase for “in”. When you look at this text in Greek, the assumptions must be made for the usage of the word “of”, but there is a distinct Greek word “eis”, meaning “in or into”. It is the same phrase that Jesus used when He told the woman with the issue of blood to “go into peace” (Mark 5:34). Because the text shows where to place the English word “in”, the translators had to assume that in the other places it should be another word.

We take the authority away from this verse when we begin changing the words to suit our modern vernacular. Paul states that we are justified by the faith “of” Jesus Christ and then furthers it by stating that we have placed our faith “in” Jesus Christ. What Jesus did in sacrificing His life on the cross and taking His own blood to the Father in heaven was faith of the highest form. He believed that His sacrifice would be sufficient and He also believed that His Father would be so pleased with this sacrifice that He would raise His Son from the dead, which He did. Christ’s faithfulness is what causes all of us to be justified.

That certainly cannot stand alone, for we need to meet His faith with our faith in His finished work. Paul makes it clear in this verse that our believing in Jesus Christ is what makes us justified “by the faith of Christ”. Christ can have a mountain of faith but if I do not meet Him with my faith, I leave without His justification.

Paul said it this way in Romans, “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:1). It is our faith that brought the justification but it was Jesus’ faithfulness to the cross and its atoning work that brings us peace with God. In other words, without the faithfulness of Jesus, our faith means nothing.

Further, we do not continue to remain righteous based upon the volume or quantity of our faith on a day to day basis. Paul says that the life which we now live in the flesh we “live by the faith of the Son of God” (Galatians 2:20). I live this life, not due to my own faithfulness but due to His faithfulness. It is His faith that never waivers, while mine may shift from time to time. Thank God that Jesus is faithful!

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Blinded Minds

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Paul wished for the entire world to both see and have the gospel of Jesus Christ, as had been revealed to him. He calls himself an “able minister of the New Testament” (2 Corinthians 3:6), and then “seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully” (2 Corinthians 4:1, 2). His chief concern regarding this message of the New Covenant was that it not be handled in a wrong manner, but that it was open and honest before all.

He knew that the glorious gospel was and is life-changing. He also knew that the only way to stop the light of the gospel from penetrating into every area of darkness was if the enemy went to work blinding men from receiving it. “If our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost” (2 Corinthians 4:3), Paul says, knowing that the good news is so good that it can never be hid from a saint, only from the unsaved.

Paul goes a step further with his description, stating that it is not only hid from the lost but that “the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not” (4:4). It is not their spiritual eyes that the enemy must blind, because they can’t really use them anyway, but it is their minds. A sinner can certainly use his or her mind to reason and theorize, so Paul identifies that Satan will attack this capability in the unbeliever to try and convince them against the good news of Jesus Christ.

Have you ever encountered someone who does not believe on Jesus and they give you a laundry list of reasons why they have no faith in God? They have intellectualized their unbelief and have left themselves no room for faith. In that instance, you are speaking to someone who has been blinded to the truth of the love of God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Paul’s answer to this problem was to continue to shine the light. “For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord” (4:5), is Paul’s way of saying that there is no need to argue of your own intellect; simply preach Jesus Christ. When you meet someone who is an unbeliever and who wishes only to argue about whether or not God exists or how many days it took Him to create the earth, your only counter is to shower them with the love of God. In the face of all of their disputations, simply give them more of His love. The good news of Jesus can be boiled down to one simple fact: God loves you. If this principle is repeated and reinforced, it is the only truth that can penetrate the darkness of unbelief.

Even believers benefit by frequent and repeated exposure to this light. Paul said that this light gives “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (4:6). We literally learn more of the glory of God as we see the face of Jesus day to day. Actually, we are changed into His very image as we learn more of His glory through the good news of Christ’s finished work (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Be changed into who He is by the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Go in peace!

Monday, April 27, 2009

Babes in Christ

1 Corinthians 3:1-4

Paul spent his ministry trying to elevate the believer into a knowledge of who they were in Christ. When he tells the Philippian church to, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God” (Philippians 2:5, 6), he was prompting them to think of themselves as Jesus thought of Himself. It is a seemingly endless task to try and bring believers to this place, due to the conflicting reports that the enemy is sending into their minds.

When Paul dealt with the Corinthian church, he was dealing with a people who were saved in the midst of the most hedonistic city in the world. Within this church, Paul had to deal with incest (5:1), legal disputes (6:1), prostitution (6:16) and drunkenness (11:21), and all of this from the believers! When he refers to them, he does not call them sinners or backsliders, but rather he says that they are “carnal”, “babes in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1).

The word “carnal” in Greek means “fleshly” or “governed by the human nature”. Every believer wishes to be governed by the “divine nature” which Peter spoke that we have (2 Peter 1:4), but oftentimes we find ourselves doing some of the same things that we did when we were unbelievers. Paul not only called this carnal but also said, “are ye not carnal, and walk as men?” (verse 3).

Paul felt that when a believer lives with strife and divisions (or any other sin), he is walking beneath their status as children of God. Rather than being “spiritual”, they are being carnal (verse 1). He repeats the thought in Ephesians when he says, “Walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (Ephesians 4:17). For Paul to see believers living in the manner of sinners, it was not a warning that they were going to suddenly becomes sinners again, but that they were so spiritually immature that they could handle nothing more of the things of God than the milk.

He compares the carnal believer to a sinner, living after their human impulses; and to their development as babies, unable to swallow solid food. Many times in the church, we preachers must go back over the most elementary of foundations for believers because so many of them are unable to go much deeper into the word, due to a Christian life spent in carnality. They are not thinking like believers, thus they are not living like believers.

To experience spiritual growth, and live spiritual and not carnal, you must feed on the Lord Jesus Christ every day. This is more than just reading the Bible. Many people read their Bible and feed on the cold stone of the law, finding no hope in it. Feast on Christ and His finished work and let the living water and the daily bread feed your soul. Concentrate on what Christ did for you, taking your sin and giving you His righteousness. See yourself as forgiven and accepted, and as you begin to believe it, you will see it live out in your life.

You are not carnal, you are spiritual. Walk as mature saints not babes in Christ. Go in Him and grow in Him in Jesus’ lovely name.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Slander Against the Gospel of Grace

Romans 3:8

The Apostle Paul preached such radical grace that he felt it necessary to defend the message on more than one occasion in the book of Romans. He starts by stating his case in Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek”. People around him were trying to make Paul feel ashamed to minister a gospel that excluded works and placed the emphasis on faith alone.

Now watch as Paul mentions various arguments that he has heard against his message of pure grace:

“We be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say, ‘Let us do evil, that good may come?’” (Romans 3:8) Paul preached so much grace that people accused him of promoting evil lifestyles so that God’s grace could appear.

“What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?” (Romans 6:1) Having just proclaimed that where sin abounds, grace does much more abound (Romans 5:20), Paul confronts the argument that he is preaching that we should go ahead and sin considering that God’s grace is greater.

“What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law, but under grace? God forbid” (Romans 6:15) Paul preaches so much of God’s grace as being different from God’s law that he is often accused of being soft on sin due to his heavy grace preaching.

“What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid.” (Romans 7:7) Having preached about the power of the law to incite sin, Paul is accused of preaching that the law is a bad thing. He refutes that with this argument, going on to state that the law is “holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good” (Romans 7:12).

These arguments against Paul were obviously birthed by the fact that Paul preached a message of amazing grace. It could be said that if you have never posed at least one of the above questions regarding God’s grace, you have probably never heard the gospel of grace preached as the Apostle Paul preached it. When grace is preached with as much passion and intensity as Paul preached it, it sounds so great that your old “law-abiding” nature will fight against it.

One famous grace preacher once asked, “Why does no one accuse the modern preacher of preaching this kind of grace?” What a great question! Why are we not accused of preaching too much grace and goodness? If we are accused of it, we can rest assured that we are in good company as Paul has already faced these arguments.

As you bask in the glorious grace of God, silence the voices of slander against this wonderful message of God’s goodness. Some will try and bring you back beneath a law of works and performance, but rest in the knowledge that Jesus has paid for your righteousness through his finished work and that you have everything that He promised. That is radical grace, and it is yours!