This week, Michael writes: We all have a testimony. Our stories are within God’s sovereign will. Our stories are in the context of history ... His story. The Lord Jesus Christ himself is the crossroads of all history. He says to us all, “set your affection on things above and not on the things of this world. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” As the Apostle Paul said, “for me to live is Christ and to die is gain… that I might be made conformable unto His death, that I might retain the out-resurrection from among the dead.” The greatest deliverance is the deliverance from the tyranny of our selfish selves.
The four truths of this life are: (1) Life is hard. (2) It’s not about me. (3) We are all going to die. (4) Only that which is done in Christ will last into eternity. The humanistic world says that there are many roads to God. However, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no man comes to the Father except by me.”
We were all born with the sin nature we inherited from Adam’s original sin. All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God. We were born separated from God by sin and without Hope in this world. The default condition is God’s righteous judgement and wrath against sin that results in eternal death in Hell. However, God who is rich in mercy and grace for His great love wherewith He loved us sent us His Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Salvation is all of Thee Lord and none of me. Salvation is not because of how good we are, but because of how good God is. For even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.
The most important thing is that we would be redeemed, bought with the price of the precious blood of Jesus Christ. For He who was without sin was made the perfect sacrifice for sin on our behalf that we may be made the righteousness of God in Him. When we confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, that we are no longer the masters of our own life but that he is, and when we believe that God raised Him from the dead, then we shall receive His salvation. Salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. He has called us and redeemed us, bought us back from the bondage of sin and the sin nature of the flesh we inherited from Adam. Now we have liberty. That liberty is not a license to sin, but to love God above all and our neighbor as ourselves. The liberty we have in Christ is the liberty to serve one another in love.
When we are “born again” of God’s Spirit, He will open the eyes of our spiritual understanding because we trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not unto our own understanding. We trust in the Lord by studying the Word of God, meditating on it, memorizing scripture and applying it in our lives. This allows God to renew our minds continuously. The freedom from sin is when “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee.” When we come to the Lord through His Word, we will develop an appetite for the truth. Truth is acquired taste, therefore taste and see that the Lord is good. My granddaughter loves ice cream. When I asked her why, she said, “because I tasted it.” This is true of the word of God also. We can’t love God and His word until we’ve tasted of it.
Let's continue Michael's message on the road to Heaven through Jesus in the next post.
In Christ, Brian
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