Live and Let Die – The Cost of Compromise – Purity 715
Purity 715 04/26/2022 Purity 715 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo of sunset over the Florida Everglades comes to us
from a friend who is traveling in the sunshine state and sharing some of their “views”
on social media. Don’t worry our friend’s
sharing isn’t likely to cause offense as the views they are sharing are visual
rather than religious or political.
I, as someone who has come to understand the great a importance
of a relationship with Jesus Christ don’t have that luxury. While I share magnificent views of God’s
creation to encourage people to consider something bigger than themselves and to
ponder the meaning of our lives, I do so to lead people to seek God and to find
Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
I more than anyone else know the truth that you can bring a “horse
to water, but you can’t make him drink” but I also know that God can use anyone
and anything to start the process to bring people to be reconciled to Him. In my experience, my long and winding road of
searching for meaning after the loss of my infant son eventual lead to a moment
of clarity as the Lord used a gospel radio message to open my eyes and to bring
me to Him.
In all those years of being lost, I was looking. I was looking
for love in all the wrong places as the song goes, but I was looking. And even on that faithful day when I made
Christ my Lord and Savior, my willingness to listen, my curiosity, was all the
faith that the Lord needed to work with. So it is my deep hope, not to offend,
and that my encouragements to “seek the Lord” or “keep walking and talking with
God” will lead others to find their salvation, and their freedom in
Christ.
The problem with the concept of freedom is that we really are
deceived in terms of what we think freedom is.
My idea of freedom before being set free by Jesus was very simple. Freedom for me, and undoubtedly for many
others, was the simple idea that I could “do whatever I want” or to “do
whatever I choose.”
Unfortunately, without God in our lives, the things that man
tend to “want” are selfish, short sighted, and lead to the opposite of freedom:
bondage.
The simplest example of “freedom” that is bondage are
addictions. We are “free” to do whatever
we want, right?, but somehow if we keep exercising our freedom to do the same
things over and over again we seem less free to say no to those impulses and
cravings to “feed the beast” be it alcohol, drugs, shopping, eating, relationships,
sex, gathering possessions, or earning recognition in the eyes of others.
Freedom turned to bondage usually reveals itself when our “wants
to” turns into “have to” or “needs to”,
as in “I have to do this!” Or “I need this!”
In America, we are bid believers in the pursuit of happiness and
the freedom to choose and as we have developed as a society in this current
post-Christian era, there seems to be only one standard of restraint of our ‘freedoms’,
which is “as long as it doesn’t harm others.” But even that has slipped, as I
have heard the implication of “unless the other person is okay with it” showing
us that it’s okay to victimize someone as long as they are complicit with it. The battered wife or husband isn’t battered if
they are “into it.”
It's a dark, dark world out there and it hasn’ gotten so dark
that I have seen the light so to speak. I
like many other Americans, believe in freedom. I believe that people are free
to do whatever they want, because in reality they are: they have free
will. Whether it’s healthy or harmful,
legal or illegal, wise or foolish, people are going to do what they are going
to do.
Because of this fact of life, I used to hold the view that if it
didn’t hurt anyone, who was I to tell anyone what they were doing was wrong. I could disagree with what they did but I had
problems and issue of my own and I wouldn’t want anyone to try to tell me to
change my behavior so I took on the philosophy of “live and let live” and wouldn’t
say a negative word about anyone’s lifestyle choices because I knew I didn’t want
anyone telling me that my lifestyle choices were wrong, even if they were causing
me to suffer.
I think our society has had “the live and let live” motto for
years and years and somehow we are surprised that things seem to be getting
worse and worse. The world seems to
increasingly abandoned their standards for morality that would align with the
wisdom of God’s word as we have all been doing what seems ‘right in our own
sight.”
I once thought that “the world could do what it wants, that’s
freedom” and somehow my family and I would be wise and unaffected by the foolishness
out there. I hadn’t always been the best
at making wise choice but I tried to instill in my children the basic tenants
of right and wrong and when I became a Christian I brought them to church with
me every week. At several times through
the years, I was encouraged from things that my children said to me that
indicated that they had made Christ their savior and although they weren’t
perfect they somehow learned from the mistakes of their father as they are living
drug and alcohol free.
But although I thought I was clear about our faith and what was
right and wrong, I also taught them to accept others for who they are and I taught
them that we are all free to choose our path in life.
I know you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make him
drink. So instead of demanding mandatory church attendance, after my kids were old
enough to have cars and drive, I allowed them to choose how often they attended
church. And it may be no surprise to you that, they stopped going.
I knew from my life’s journey that you can’t “make someone
believe” so I decided to give them liberty in their walk of faith. But the world, the flesh, and devil have
other options out there. And whether it
was laziness or cold hearts of apathy or hot hearts of rebellion, the kids exercised
their freedom of choice that a lot of people choose to “do nothing”.
I let my kids decide that for themselves and figured as long as
they weren’t doing drugs and alcohol and keeping their sex lives a mystery to
me everything was “good”. “Good but not great” right?
But now I think differently.
As the John Piper’s book that I am sharing on the blog currently is tells
us – a life without Christ is a wasted life. A life that is not lived according
to the Lord’s wisdom and for His purposes is a life of bondage, not freedom and
it’s not “good”.
So as much as I have previously let “bygones be bygones” and to “live
and let live”, I realize the errors of my ways and that as Christians we need to
let people know what the word of God indicates about the choices they are making
with their lives.
What’s wrong is wrong, no matter how free you are to choose and
do it.
A life without peace with God through faith in Jesus Christ is a
life that is lost and that is headed for destruction. Our supposed freedoms will lead to consequences
of suffering.
Sportsbook gambling – which is advertised all over the place has
the potential to lead to financial instability, people losing their homes, and families
being broken in the aftermath.
The legalization of drugs and the development of less bitter
alcoholic options – leads to the bondage of addiction, loss of income, physical,
emotional and mental suffering. Ask me
how I know.
The legitimization of loose sexual ethics, both hetero and
other, lead to loss intimacy, shame, the erosion of the family, divorce, bondage
to sex addiction, and gender role confusion.
The proliferation of “food culture” – with its instance on prescribing
“comfort” – leads to obesity, health problems, and death.
Everyone seeking their own happiness with their own personal
recipe of all of the above leads to a society of self-interest that results is
division and strife where fear and hatred increases and no one has peace. Without the Lord all these paths, no matter
how “right they seem in our own eyes” or how they “work for us”, will lead to
death and separation from God’s kingdom in eternity.
None of the things of this world can give lasting peace. No
matter how free we are to pursue them and indulge our desires, the things of
this world, because of their impermanent and imperfect attributes, will fail to
satisfy. True peace can only come from
God and when we let people “live and let die” we are being complicit in their
destruction.
While we can’t save anyone, we need to warn people that while
they are free to choose whatever they like, they are not free from the
consequence of their choices.
If they choose to ignore the fact that their “freedom” is
bondage and is slowly killing their bodies, and destroying their minds and souls,
they will die.
If they choose to ignore the implications of Christ’s life,
death, and resurrection, they choose to reject the life that He came to give
them and they will perish.
So be kind, be loving, and don’t be a jerk. But let’s not be silent in our concerns for
our fellow man and let’s try to be clear to point out the consequences that
their “freedom and moral compromises will bring. Let’s point to what God’s word
says about sexual immorality, drunkenness, gluttony, and worshipping things
other than the One True God, that reveals Himself in the holy scriptures
contained in the Bible and that came to earth in the person of Jesus
Christ.
While we can’t make the horse drink, we can try to show them the
life giving properties of the living waters that Jesus Christ has to offer by
showing our care, concern, and love for them by saying the difficult things, by
telling people that their freedom isn’t freedom, it’s sin. And while they are
free to sin, they are also free to suffer from their choice to sin.
The Lord told us to love our neighbors as ourselves and that may
require us to have difficult conversations that may cause others to revile us. Jesus said that the world would hate us. Have you ever wondered why? In Christ, we are the light of the world and
Jesus told us in
John 3:19 (NKJV)
19 And
this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved
darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
So men may hate us for telling them
that the darkness they love is evil but Christ so loved the world that He died
to save them from their darkness and He called us to share good news even if
the world doesn’t want to hear it.
So keep walking and talking with God. Listen to His voice and if the Holy Spirit moves you to speak to help bring someone out of their darkness and to invite them into the light, say what needs to be said. Make it clear that your words come from care and concern and are based on the word of God and the peace and joy that you received when you entered into His Kingdom through Christ the Lord.
______________________________________________________________
Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible Promise Book
for Men”.
This
morning’s meditation verse is:
1
Corinthians 2:12 (NLT2)
12
And
we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the
wonderful things God has freely given us.
Today’s Bible verse reminds us we have received the Holy Spirit to know
all the wonderful things that God has
freely given us.
Life and Life more abundantly is what Christ wanted us to have. Spiritual life. Eternal Life. A life set free
from sin and death re all given to us when we put our faith in Jesus.
The Holy Spirit confirms this by revealing these truths when we read God’s
word and when we choose to live our lives in obedience to the Lord’s will. The realization of who we are in Christ and
the wonderful promises draws us close to God, wiping away our fears and giving
us the assurance of our salvation and the Lord’s love for us.
So seek to know what you have received and what has been promised to
you and live in the hope that you can know more of these promises in your life
here and now and will one day inherit the rest when you see the Lord face to
face,.
As
always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I always share insights from
prominent Christian theologians and counselors to assist my brothers and
sisters in Christ with their walk.
Today
we continue sharing from John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life”.
As always, I share this information for educational purposes
and encourage all to purchase John Pipers’ books for your own private
study and to support his work. This resource is available on many
websites for less than $5.00.
Dying, Living, and
Boasting in the Cross
Now let’s take all that
over to Galatians 6:14, and we will see how we come to live totally for the
glory of Christ crucified. “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to
the world.” That is, don’t boast in anything except in the cross. How shall we
become so radically cross-exalting? How can we become the kind of people who
trace all our joy back to joy in Christ and him crucified? Answer: The old self
that loves to boast and exult and rejoice in other things died. By faith we are
united to Christ. His death becomes the death of our self-exalting life. We are
raised with him to newness of life. What lives is a new creature whose single
passion is to exalt Christ and his cross.
To
put it another way, when you put your trust in Christ, your bondage to the
world and its overpowering lure is broken. You are a corpse to the world, and
the world is a corpse to you. Or to put it positively, according to verse 15,
you are a “new creation.” The old “you” is dead. A new “you” is alive. And the
new you is the you of faith. And what faith does is boast not in the world, but in Christ, especially Christ crucified.
This
is how you become so cross-centered that you say with Paul, “I will not boast,
except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The world is no longer our
treasure. It’s not the source of our life or our satisfaction or our joy.
Christ is.
Shall We Prize What He Presents or What It
Portrays of Him?
But what about safety in
the car accident? What about the insurance payment we received? Didn’t I say I
was happy about that? Isn’t that worldly? So am I really dead to the world?
Dead to insurance payments and new cars?
I
pray that I am dead in the right way. I believe that I am. Not perfectly, I am
sure, but in a real sense. How can this be? If I feel glad about safety or
health or any good thing, and if these things are things of the world (which
they are), then am I dead to the world? Yes, because being dead to the world
does not mean having no feelings about the world (see 1 John 2:15; 1 Timothy
4:3). It means that every legitimate pleasure in the world becomes a
blood-bought evidence of Christ’s love, and an occasion of boasting in the
cross. We are dead to insurance payments when the money is not what satisfies,
but Christ crucified, the Giver, satisfies.
C.
S. Lewis illustrates what I mean by an experience he had in a toolshed.
I
was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and
through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I
stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most
striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was
seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on
my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and
(above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top
of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond
that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and
looking at the beam are very different experiences.
The
sunbeams of blessing in our lives are bright in and of themselves. They also
give light to the ground where we walk. But there is a higher purpose for these
blessings. God means for us to do more than stand outside them and admire them for
what they are. Even more, he means for us to walk into them and see the sun
from which they come. If the beams are beautiful, the sun is even more
beautiful. God’s aim is not that we merely admire his gifts, but, even more,
his glory.
We Die to the Innocent World in the Blaze of
Christ’s Glory
Now the point is that the
glory of Christ, manifest especially in his death and resurrection, is the
glory above and behind every blessing we enjoy. He purchased everything that is
good for us. His glory is where the quest of our affections must end.
Everything else is a pointer—a parable of this beauty. When our hearts run back
up along the beam of blessing to the source in the blazing glory of the cross,
then the worldliness of the blessing is dead, and Christ crucified is
everything.
The Only God-Glorifying Life
This is no different than
the goal of magnifying the glory of God that we saw in Chapter 2. Christ is the
glory of God. His blood-soaked cross is the blazing center of that glory. By it
he bought for us every blessing—temporal and eternal. And we don’t deserve any.
He bought them all. Because of Christ’s cross, God’s elect are destined to be
sons of God. Because of his cross, the wrath of God is taken away. Because of
his cross all guilt is removed, and sins are forgiven, and perfect
righteousness is imputed to us, and the love of God is poured out in our hearts
by the Spirit, and we are being conformed to the image of Christ.
Therefore
every enjoyment in this life and the next that is not idolatry is a tribute to
the infinite value of the cross of Christ—the burning center of the glory of
God. And thus a cross-centered, cross-exalting, cross-saturated life is a
God-glorifying life—the only
God-glorifying life. All others are wasted.[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join
our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage Breaker”, "Freedom in
Christ" series of Discipleship Classes via the mt4christ247 podcast!
at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can
also find it on Apple podcasts
(https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-mt4christ247s-podcast/id1551615154). The
mt4christ247 podcast is also available on Google Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts,
Spotify, iHeartradio, and Audible.com.
These teachings are also available on the MT4Christ247 You
Tube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTxjSNstREpuGWuL0bF3U7w/featured
Email
me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class
materials, share your progress, and to be encouraged.
My
wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian encouragement via her Facebook Group:
Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask,
Seek, and Knock on Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)
Encouragement for the Path of Christian Discipleship
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.