Thought for the day

You will remember that we have seen sin defined in the Bible as independence: “whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23), and attitude of “lawlessness” (1 John 3:4); what then does repentance involve? It involves stepping out of independence back in to dependence—and the measure of your repentance will be the measure of your dependence!

Every area of your life in which you have not learned to be dependent, is an area of your life in which you have not as yet repented.—The Mystery of Godliness, page 146

Binaries

To live “to and for yourself” is to “walk after the flesh”!

To live “to and for Christ” is to “walk after the Spirit”!

These are the two principles of human behavior. It is not just a matter of degree, it is a matter of kind; to be dominated by the “flesh” is to be dominated by the devil; and to be dominated by the Spirit is to be dominated by God.—The Mystery of Godliness, page 144

The hope of the gospel

The life that the Lord Jesus Christ lived for you nineteen hundred years ago—condemns you; but the life that He now lives in you—saves you! The Christian life is the Life which He lived then, lived now by Him in you.—The Mystery of Godliness, page 133

Not so good news

There may have been created within you a genuine desire to serve God, out of a sincere sense of gratitude to Christ for dying for you; you may be impelled out of a sense of duty as a Christian, to seek conformity to some pattern of behavior which has been imposed upon you as the norm for Christian living; you may be deeply moved by the need of others all around you, and holy ambitions may have been stirred within your heart, to count for God; if, however, all that has happened is that your sins have been forgiven, because you have accepted Christ as the Saviour who died for you, leaving you since your conversion only with those resources which you had before your conversion, then you will have no alternative but to “Christianize” the “flesh” and try to teach it to “behave” in such a way that it will be godly!

That is a sheer impossibility!

The nature of the “flesh” never changes, no matter how you may coerce it or conform it; it is rotten through and through, even with a Bible under its arm, a check for missions in its hand, and an evangelical look on its face! You need something more than forgiveness, and what you need is the big news of the Gospel!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 132

<idle musing>
Broken record, I know. But, so is the alternative: Saved by grace, sanctified by works. Or at least that's what I hear people saying without realizing it.

That doesn't mean that works aren't important. Far from it! I firmly believe that without transformation there is no salvation. But that is just the point. Transformation begins from the inside; works begin from the outside.

Transformation naturally results in a changed life that is consistent. Works are highly dependent on how you feel, how tired you are, how much stress in in your life, etc.

The Spirit-led life is not dependent on us. It is dependent on God, and as Psalm 121 says, he doesn't slumber or sleep, so he is available all the time...we just allow him to flow through us.
</idle musing>

I hope there's more than that to the incarnation

The plumb-line may show me that the wall in my garden is crooked, but it will not put it straight, and had Jesus Christ come into this world simply to demonstrate a sinless life, and leave us with a matchless example, He would have left us to wallow in the squalor of our own inadequacy; the “good news” of the Gospel would have been a message of despair—to mock us, without being able to mend us!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 130

<idle musing>
And yet, that seems to be the "gospel" that some preach. If Jesus doesn't deliver us from sin and sinning, but just from the final consequences of it, what kind of gospel is that?

Is satan stronger than God?

But that seems to be the message that I hear. Are we doomed to endless cycles of sin and repent with no hope for deliverance until death?

If that is the case, then kill me now! I came to Jesus to be delivered from all that junk! It was the hope of a life free from sin that brought me to him in the first place. Now you want to tell me that that was a false hope? That the promises of scripture are bogus?

Sorry. Not buying it! I'll stand on the promise of deliverance.
</idle musing>

Don't sell God short

As the first requirement for man’s redemption—a Sinless Sacrifice—the Lord Jesus gave Himself upon the cross and “suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18) and “the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7), but it is essential that you should realize that His cross was the means to an end; for to confuse the means for the end is to rob the Lord Jesus of that for which He came.

He came that you might have life! His life—imparted to you by the renewing of the Holy Spirit on the grounds of redemption, to re-inhabit your spirit, to re-conquer your soul…—The Mystery of Godliness, page 113

<idle musing>
A good Advent reminder! The Gospel is much more than death on a cross and heaven by and by! It is about victory over sin, self, and the world; it is about the fulness of the Holy Spirit; it is about transformation; it is about conformity to the character of Jesus (theosis).
</idle musing>

The significance of the incarnation

To insist that Jesus Christ came into this world by natural birth and lived a sinless life, is to repudiate the Fall of man! It means that what was possible to Him as a natural Man, must be possible to you and to me as natural men, so that if we are not what He was, it is only because we do not try hard enough! If this were true, the message of the Gospel would simply be an exhortation to greater effort—an attempt to realize the inherent adequacy that is self-existent within every human being&mdashincluding Christ! A message of spiritual regeneration would become patently superfluous, and the Fall of man a myth, for by nature man would have what it takes!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 109

<idle musing>
An appropriate Advent meditation, don't you think? The incarnation is at the heart of the gospel. If it weren't a supernatural event, then we would still be lost in our sins...
</idle musing>

Thought for the day

It is your capacity to receive God, and to enjoy God, and to be enjoyed by God which makes you man as opposed to mere animal, and it is only God in you that enables you to function as He intended you as man to function.—The Mystery of Godliness, pages 74-75

Total dependence

[For Christ t]o have acted other than in dependence upon the Father would have violated the perfection of His own humanity. That is why Satan’s attacks upon the Son were designed to trick Him, somehow, into acting on His own initiative; but though tempted again and again, and in all points like as we are, He was without sin. He never once acted in other than dependence on the Father.—The Mystery of Godliness, page 57

Thought for a Wednesday

By independence (or the absence of faith), you eliminate God, and substitute yourself, to become both cause and effect—the source of your own “godliness,” but only God has the right to be the source of His own godliness, so that however unwittingly you are acting as your own God!

You will still believe or pretend that you are worshiping God; but as the object of your imitation, even Christ Himself may only be an excuse for worshiping your own ability to imitate—an ability vested in yourself, and this is the basis of all self-righteousness!—The Mystery of Godliness, pages 54-55

Thought for a Tuesday

Beware lest even as a Christian, you fall into Satan’s trap. You may have found and come to know God in the Lord Jesus Christ, receiving Him sincerely as your Redeemer, yet if you do not enter in the mystery of godliness and allow God to be in you the origins of His own image, you will seek to be godly by submitting yourself to external rules and regulations, and by conformity to behavior patterns imposed upon you by the particular Christian society which you have chosen, and in which you hope to be found “acceptable.” You will in this way perpetuate the pagan habit of practicing religion in the energy of the “flesh,” and in the very pursuit of righteousness commit idolatry in honoring “Christianity” more than Christ!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 49

What if you were asked?

Had a materialistically minded atheist been consulted in the face of this dilemma [feeding the 5000], the first question he would have asked would have been, “How much money do you have?” What then would have been the difference between Philip’s outlook and that of an unbelieving atheist? There would have been no difference!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 30

<idle musing>
And what difference between Philip's outlook and most Christians? Little, if any, I fear...

In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." : (
</idle musing>

What's the source?

The Christian life can only be explained in terms of Jesus Christ, and if your life as a Christian can still be explained in terms of you—your personality, your will-power, yourgift, your talent, yourmoney, your courage, your scholarship, your dedication, yoursacrifice, or your anything—then although you may havethe Christian life, you are not yet living it!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 28 (emphasis original)

Thought for the day

There is always a reasonable alternative to faith!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 28

Loyalties

You are not committed to a church, or to a denomination, or to an organization; as a missionary you are not committed to a Mission Board nor even to a “field,” and least of all are you committed to a “need!” You are committed to Christ, and for all that to which Christ is committed in You, and again I say—exclusively.—The Mystery of Godliness, page 20

Food for thought

The Lord Jesus Christ refused to be committed to the parochial needs of His own day and generation; He was not committed to the political situation in Palestine, or to the emancipation of the Jewish nation from the Roman yoke! He was not committed to the pressing social problems of His time, nor to one faction as opposed to another, any more than today His committed to the West against the East, or to the Republicans against the Democrats (as though either were less wicked than the other!). Christ was not even committed to the needs of a perishing world; He was neither unmindful nor unmoved by all these other issues, but as Perfect Man He was committed to His Father, and for that only to which His Father was committed in Him—exclusively!—The Mystery of Godliness, pages 18-19

<idle musing>
I'm tempted to brush this off as too simplistic. It levels the field too much. But, at the same time, he has a valid point. Perhaps my reticence is that far too often I've heard this argument used as an excuse for indifference to injustice.

But, if one is really committed to doing the will of God, how can it fail to overflow into social action? Unless one does a major editing job on the biblical text, there is no way one can escape the social ramifications of being a Christian.
</idle musing>

Big job

Had He been prepared to accept “religion” as He found it, and recognize the “status quo,” no doubt the Lord Jesus Christ might well have found acceptance, even among the Pharisees; but He was a trouble maker! He dared to cleanse the temple!

Christ did not come to be “accepted,” nor was He “looking for a ‘job’” in contemporary religion! He came to cleanse the temple—and to do a bigger job than just to cleanse the temple in Jerusalem; He had come to cleanse the temples of men’s hearts, that they might be fit again to be “an habitation of God through the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22).—The Mystery of Godliness, page 17

But it really isn't as bad as it looks...

It is much easier to confront a person with his sins than it is to confront him with his “sin”…”sin” is an attitude which affects a man’s fundamental relationship with God; it has to do with what a man is; whereas “sins” have to do with what a man does, and we all have a happy knack of being able to detach what we do from what we are! We are all highly skilled in the art of self-justification and are able to produce innumerable reasons as to why what we did was excusable—even if it was wrong!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 13

<idle musing>
Ain't that the truth! I ran across a good description of how we view sin a while back:

The difficulty, of course, is that sin doesn't look evil and wrong—unless we see it in someone else. In our lives it appears to be benign, attractive, and even indispensable. How could we live without it? We're so familiar with our sins that they seem second nature. That's the problem!— Christianity Lite, pages 109-110

You might recognize it, I posted it before.

Success?

All too often quantity takes precedence over quality, and in this highly competitive age those outward appearances of “success” which are calculated to enhance the reputation of professional preacher, or the prestige of those who have promoted him, are of greater importance than the abiding consequences of his ministry.

In an unholy ambition to get “results,” the end too often justifies the means, with the result that the means are certainly not always beyond suspicion, and the “results,” to say the least, extremely dubious!—The Mystery of Godliness, page 11

Eating up the time

How much can you do without Him? Nothing! So what is everything you do without Him? Nothing!

It is amazing how busy you can be doing nothing! Did you ever find that out? “The flesh”—everything that you do apart from Him—” profiteth nothing” (John 6:62), and there is always the awful possibility, if you do not discover this principle, that you may spend a lifetime in the service of Jesus Christ doing nothing! You would not be the first, and you would not be the last—but that, above everything else, we must seek to avoid!— The Saving Life of Christ, pages 150-151

<idle musing>
Ain't that the truth! Sometimes I lose sight of this and fill my days with "nothing." Lord deliver me! May my days be filled with you.
</idle musing>