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| Subject: GRACE AND PEACE | |
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Author: Posted By The Crusader |
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Date Posted: 20:22:39 09/21/02 Sat GRACE AND PEACE There is no peace without grace. That is why the world has never known peace...it has never known grace. That is why so many Christians languish in depression, live on pills, endure lives of endless frustration. All men long for peace...and fight grace, the only source of peace. We humans desperately cling to our own imagined merit as a means of winning God’s approval. The grace of God displayed at Calvary should make us wish to rid ourselves of the rags of human righteousness instantly, to be clothed with the perfect righteousness that Christ procured for us and God gives to us freely. The hardest thing for a person to do is to let go of his own righteousness and take hold of the righteousness of God. We keep on thinking that if we let go of our own righteousness we will have no hope before God...we will stand before Him naked. This is the very thing that we must do, come to Him naked, completely without any righteousness of our own, without a leg to stand on. Our own righteousness condemns us. God Himself describes it as "filthy rags." Our personal righteousness is the last thing that we should bring with us into God’s court room. It pronounces our guilt, declares our utter poverty, completely destroys our defense. Human good is not a defense attorney, but a prosecutor. To wear filthy rags where beautiful attire is required is worse than foolhardy. Christ has perfect human righteousness. He has never thought a sinful thought, spoken a sinful word, or committed a sinful act. His earthly life completely satisfied the perfect Law under which He had volunteered to live. God’s Law demands perfection; it does not mark on a curve. It is the perfect expression of what God has a right to require of the flesh. Christ obeyed it perfectly. He displayed once and forever what a man should be before God--completely obedient at all times. Always He loved God with all His heart and always He loved His neighbor as Himself. None of us has ever done this. That is why it is insane to wish to stand before God on Law ground--the ground of human merit. There stands Christ before the Father in perfect attire, without spot or wrinkle, and here I come dressed in my righteousness, all torn and filthy, and ask to have the same judgment that He had. It doesn’t make any sense. The Law does not simply demand perfect conduct, but a perfect person. My conduct cannot be perfect as the Law requires because I am not that perfect person that the Law can approve. The flesh is not subject to the Law of God, nor can it be. It will seek to be under the Law only if it can use the Law unlawfully. When you tell an unsaved man that the Ten Commandments cannot be his hope, but must be his dread, he will usually become angry with the Lawgiver; he feels that a God who demands perfection is unreasonable and unjust. He fails to see that an infinitely holy God cannot tolerate the least sin; that a God Who has a right to require some righteousness has a right to require all righteousness, and that the latter is as reasonable as the former. If men thought as God thinks, all that the Bible says about righteousness would be unnecessary. If man’s conclusions matched God’s truth we would not need a Bible. God speaks absolute truth and man must scrap his own "wisdom" and bow to the wisdom of God. Adam became a sinner when he made his first bad choice. We are born sinners. Men don’t like to hear that they were born sinners. I saw a man fall to his death once and, for a while, I didn’t like the law of gravity; but the law of gravity didn’t change because I didn’t like it. Men who don’t like the concept of being born in sin demonstrate the fact of our sinnership every day they live. Thinking people everywhere realize that humans don’t have to be taught to do wrong. We begin early in life to prove that we were born with a tendency to do wrong...we didn’t have to acquire it. God’s Letter to Rome (Romans) indicates that, as serious as sins (plural) are, Sin (singular) is more serious; sin the act is but the symptom of Sin the disease. Sins are simply the evidence of our sinful nature. Our old sin nature is the soil from which our sins grow. The answer is not spending a lifetime weeding this soil. The answer is planting in the good soil of our new natures. A farmer who spent his time pulling weeds from worthless ground instead of planting crops on good ground wouldn’t just be wasting his time; he would be perpetuating disaster while losing the opportunity to harvest bountifully what he really needs to grow. The more time that you and I spend sowing to our new natures, the less time we will have to invest in struggling with the old--and the less need. Each of us has a "good dog" and a "bad dog" fighting in our bosoms. The best way to defeat the bad dog is to feed only the good one. The mind of the flesh sees only the total freedom that Grace affords and views Grace as a license to sin. The mind of the spirit sees in Grace the greatest motivation the Universe will ever witness and views Grace as a liberty to serve. Man’s inner peace can only result from God’s Grace. God’s Grace is His infinite generosity exercised toward sinners. Peace is your response, and mine, to the knowledge of that infinite generosity. Millions of Christians have prayed for inner peace throughout their entire lifetimes without ever knowing one single hour of the peace they prayed for. Galatianism, the attempt to mix man’s merit with God’s Grace as a means of approach to God, will never permit inner peace no matter how much peace is prayed for. Peace is not some mystical stardust that God sprinkles on us from the balustrade of Heaven in answer to our prayers. Peace is what we experience when we believe what God says about His Grace! We are criticized for teaching "pure grace." Grace is always pure. Grace could no sooner be impure than God could be impure. An impure God would be a false God and not the true God Who reveals Himself in the Bible. Impure grace would be false grace and not the infinite generosity of God revealed in Scripture. It is the very nature of Grace to be pure. Nursery water is no longer nursery water if arsenic has been added. Grace is no longer Grace when the arsenic of human "merit" has been added to it. If you wish to have peace...study the Grace of God revealed in the Epistles of Grace, the Pauline Epistles. The better you do your homework the more peace you will have. Take a highlighter and highlight everything that God says became true of you the instant you trusted Christ. As you discover the benefits Christ purchased for you at the cross, peace will rise up in your soul like a mountain spring. As you become more and more familiar with the riches that you as a believer received as a gift, and so can never forfeit, the spring will become a stream and the stream will become a river. God wishes every believer "Peace." It is His provision for all--you have not been left out! Study Grace and believe God and you will have Peace, and to spare! "GRACE TO YOU AND PEACE FROM GOD THE FATHER AND OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST." (Galatians 1:3) From Web-Site: The Grace Believer http://www.gracebeliever.com/ [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
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