God is Good but am I “good” with God – Purity 765
Purity 765 06/23/2022 Purity 765 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a pathway by the
ocean comes to us from a friend who visited the Sebastian Inlet State Park at
Melbourne Beach Florida back on June 20th.
Well, It’s Thursday again and as
is my habit I share this photo of a pathway as an encouragement to get on, or
to keep going, on the pathway of Christian Discipleship which is my little euphemism
for “following Jesus”, or “walking in the Spirit”, or “seeking the Lord and His
will for your life” or “growing in your faith”, or “developing your personal relationship
with God”. If you notice, each of these
concepts describe a present and continuous journey. They describe a process
more than a possession.
Although we “have Christ” or are “in
Christ”, when we put our faith in Jesus as Our Lord and Savior, Christ called
His disciples to follow Him with their lives.
Although our faith in Christ gives us a new and eternal life and makes
us “good with God”, it doesn’t mean we are “done” with God. Although Christ
said that “it was finished” as He died to pay for our sins on the cross, He was
resurrected to life again, and He is not finished with us.
The Christian life is to be lived.
The Christian life is a process of becoming more like Jesus through the process
of sanctification while we discover our purpose in Christ, which is to walk
into the good works that the Lord has prepared for us. So while we have
attained much with our covenant relationship with God that was established
forever when we put our faith in Christ, there is much more to discover and
accomplish in our lives of faith.
The Apostle Paul, who had
accomplished much in his life as a disciple of Jesus said:
Philippians
3:12-14 (NKJV)
12 Not that I have already
attained, or am already perfected; but I press on, that I may lay hold of that
for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.
13 Brethren, I do not count
myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things
which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead,
14 I press toward the goal
for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
So as Christians, we are to keep “reaching
forward to those things which are ahead” in our walk with God, to answer the “upward
call of Christ.” We are to keep going “onward and upward” as we seek to grow in
spiritual maturity and to do good works for the kingdom of God and for God’s
glory.
Unfortunately, many of us who grew
up in liturgical traditions of Christianity were exposed to a form of “cultural
Christianity” where faith was viewed as a possession more than a process, a
religion more than a relationship with God.
In a religion, you perform certain
rights to be a member of that religion and there is a sense that once you meet
the requirements of your faith tradition, you are “good”. Once you meet the requirements of your religion,
like baptism or confirmation, there is “nothing more to do”. In the tradition I grew up in, the rite of
confirmation was often followed by a steep decline in church attendance. Once you were confirmed, you met that “minimum
qualification” of faith, that was required by the church, or at least that of
the your family’s expectations. “Grandma
wants you to be confirmed”.
Well thank God for the grandmothers
and grandfathers that required obedience to the precepts of the church
tradition, but unfortunately the emphasis on meeting religious requirements was
often accompanied by a lack of discipleship and resulted in a next generation
of practical atheists.
We can’t force people, even our family members, to have faith. We can’t teach someone to have a personal relationship
with God. As much as we can all gather
together in a congregation for a worship service, our relationship with God is
personal. It’s one on one.
And if you don’t have a personal
relationship with God through faith in Jesus, where you know God and He knows
you, no amount of religious duties performed or traditions adhered to are going
to make you “good with God”.
While we can’t see the hearts of
men like God can, even we can observe that some “members” of our church seem to
be going through the motions or are utterly disengaged and bored with the
worship service and seem more filled with joy when they leave the house of
worship than when they walk in, and it’s a joy that is not necessarily a result
of the Pastor’s edifying message or the worship team’s performance as it is joy
born from the freedom from God’s presence to pursue worldly or selfish desires.
The whole concept of viewing yourself
as “good with God” for performing minimum requirements reveals an ignorant or
immature faith that at best will result in a fruitless life of selfishness or
could result in a rude awakening when the Lord that they paid lip service to
declares that even though they thought they are “good with God”, they weren’t with God at all
and that He never knew them.
Unfortunately, many of us grew up
in these church cultures where our relationship with God was like a game, where
if we “followed the rules”, for the most part, we would “win”. Unfortunately,
many of us were raised up in families of spiritual infants who liked to “play
dress up” on Sunday mornings at church but never brought faith home, who were
more childish than child like in their faith, and who may have been “playing
make believe” more than believing and trusting in the Lord in a real and
significant way.
Because of my experience with the
goings on around the “church building” of my faith tradition, when I heard a
message that proclaimed salvation through Jesus Christ alone part of me was
amazed at God’s great love for us that didn’t require us to jump through a
bunch of religious hoops to be one with Him. God only required that we leap
into His grace through an act of surrendering to the Lordship of His beloved
Son, our Savior Jesus Christ.
Even though I knew my salvation
was assured, I didn’t want to declare myself as “done here” in my relationship
with God. I didn’t want to leave the presence of a such a kind, loving, and
holy God. I had found the safety for my soul and I wanted to bask in the
wonders of its joy and to pursue the One who had pursued me all my life.
In the process of seeking to know
God more and to know who I am in Christ and in discovering how one could live
in His presence and in His ways, I discovered that our faith wasn’t a set of rules,
it wasn’t a game. Our faith is a relationship with the God of all creation who
wants His love for us to pour out into our lives and into the lives of all we
come in contact with.
So rejoice over the fact that your
faith in Christ has made you “good with God” but long to stay in and to grow in
the goodness of God by walking and talking with Him. We are “good with God” but
we are not “done” with Him and neither is He done with us. Our life of faith,
our relationship with God, is to be pursued and it is not for His good that we
pursue it, it’s for ours, and for all the lives that we can touch with the
assurance that God is good all the time, and all the time God is good.
______________________________________________________________
Today’s Bible verse comes to us
from “The NLT Bible Promise Book for Men”.
This morning’s
meditation verse is:
John 15:10 (NLT2)
10 When
you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s
commandments and remain in his love..
Today’s Bible verse encourages us to follow in Christ’s
example and how our harmonious relationship with God is maintained with
obedience.
Yesterday, I shared a couple of verses from Deuteronomy on
Facebook to encourage Bible study and to reveal God’s revealed will for our
lives and the reason why God calls us to obedience.
Deuteronomy 10:13
(NKJV) says
13 and to keep the
commandments of the LORD and His
statutes which I command you today for your good?
Here the Lord speaking through Moses, informs the nation
of Israel of their requirement of obedience to His commandments has a reason: our
obedience is for our good!
Christ’s words here tell us more about how our obedience
to God’s commandments are “good” for
you. When we obey Christ’s commandments, which contain all the wisdom of the Old
Testament Law and Prophets in His simple instructions to love God and to love
our neighbors as ourselves, we remain in Christ’s love.
When we are obedient, we remain in harmony with God
because we are doing His will on the earth. When we obey, our words, thoughts,
and actions are representing God’s kingdom and demonstrating our love for Him,
When we obey the Lord we have no guilt or shame and can have joy knowing that
we have peace with God and we are doing nothing to disrupt it.
When you obey, you can rejoice in the transformation the
Lord has brought to your life and continue to experience the wonders of God’s
love as much today as when you first believed.
So “feel the love” of God, and remain in it, by walking in obedience to
the commandments that are pure and holy and were written with your good in
mind.
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 Clinton
E. Arnold’s “Powers of Darkness”
As always, I share this information for
educational purposes and encourage all to purchase Clinton Arnold’s books
for your own private study and to support his work. This resource is
available on many websites for less than $20.00.
4
Judaism
The apostle Paul
was a jew. his lineage was rooted in the tribe of Benjamin; he was circumcised
as a Jew, trained by the rabbis, and became a zealous Pharisee, a “Hebrew of
Hebrews.” After Paul encountered the risen Christ, Jewish Christians nurtured
him. Although he was commissioned to be the apostle to the Gentiles, he still
proclaimed Christ to the Jews throughout Asia and Greece, following his guiding
principle, “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” He planted a number of
churches, all having a strong, if not dominant, Jewish contingent.
We should therefore learn to appreciate
what first-century Judaism believed about evil spirits if we want to understand
what Paul believed about the powers of darkness and if we want to see how he
applied his theology of the powers to the early Christian congregations. To
what extent did a belief in the influence of evil spirits factor into the world
view of the Jews of Paul’s day? An answer to this question will help us paint a
sharper portrait of Paul’s views in terms of the continuity and contrast to his
religious upbringing and the beliefs of the Jews to whom he writes. Since Paul
accepted the Old Testament as an authoritative informing source for his
theology, it is best to begin there.
It is often thought there is virtually no
demonology in the Old Testament, and it is only when we turn to the New
Testament that we find any substantial teaching on this theme. While the issue
of the demonic is more to the forefront in the New Testament, demonology is not
absent from the Old Testament. The Old Testament writers assume the existence
of a major figurehead of evil and a plethora of evil spirits. The authors spend
no time reflecting on the nature of this realm. Satan, demons or evil spirits
suddenly make an appearance from time to time in the text as hostile opponents
to the people of God, with the writers giving very little description of their
identity or how they operate. The Old Testament authors apparently felt little
need to explain what these beings were; rather, writers and readers apparently
shared a common awareness of the distinctive traits of this realm.
Demons and False Gods
The nations
around Israel worshiped a multiplicity of gods and goddesses. In every century
and in every geographical region, including Palestine, the Jews lived in a
polytheistic environment. Among the hundreds of deities they were exposed to
were the Assyrian gods Anu and Ishtar; the Canaanite deities El, Baal, Dagan,
Anat and Ashtoreth; the Egyptian deities Re, Atan, Amon, Thoth, Isis and
Osiris. Later in their history they were introduced to the numerous Persian,
Greek and Roman gods.
Biblical writers attributed no real,
independent existence to these deities. Instead they called them idols, a way
of referring to the images of these gods and goddesses as the focus of worship.
The term idol, meaning copy or image,
emphasized the unreality of all the pagan gods, and was clearly a slur on
non-Jewish religions. The Jews claimed to worship the one true, real God. All
the rest were phonies.
These idols, however, were not mere
harmless stone images a covenant person could be indifferent to. There was a
real spiritual dimension to the pagan cults and the worship of idols. Biblical
writers complete the picture of Yahweh’s attitude toward false gods by
portraying the pagan cults as the work of demons. In Deuteronomy 32:16–17,
Israel’s abandonment of God for idols in the wilderness is explicitly
described:
They made
him jealous with their foreign gods and angered him with their detestable idols.
They sacrificed to demons, which are
not God—gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared, gods your fathers
did not fear. (italics mine)
The Psalms
express the same thought. One psalm describes Israel’s entry into Canaan,
deploring the fact that God’s people had adopted many of the local customs and
had worshiped the local idols. They also “sacrificed their sons and their
daughters to demons,” which the psalmist sets parallel with the statement that
they “sacrificed to the idols of Canaan” (Ps 106:37–38). In Psalm 96:5, where
the Hebrew text reads, “for all the gods of the nations are idols,” the
Septuagint text (the Greek translation) reads, “for all the gods of the nations
are demons.” The Septuagint reflects the Jewish conviction that pagan religions
had a close affiliation with the demonic realm. This belief also became the
conviction of the apostle Paul (1 Cor 10:19–21).[1]
---------------------------more
tomorrow------------------------
Join our “Victory over the
Darkness”, “The Bondage Breaker”, "Freedom in Christ" series of
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at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com,
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Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship
[1]
Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness:
Principalities & Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove,
IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 1992), 55–57.
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