The First Step Towards the
Abundant Life - Purity 835
Purity 835 09/13/2022 Purity 835 Podcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo view of blue skies over the Hudson River
comes to us from TammyLyn Clark as she shared this scene on social media from yesterday’s
drive up River Road between Easton and Schuylerville New York.
Well, it is Tuesday and as I will be facilitating
the second meeting of the Men’s Freedom in Christ Course on Zoom this evening I
thought I would share this roadside view and water pathway as an encouragement to
all to keep walking and talking with God on the narrow path of Christian
Discipleship.
I am so excited at the prospect of tonight’s
discussion because we will be discussing the spiritual reality of the
transformation that happens the moment we put our faith in Christ.
Our focus verse will be
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NKJV)
17 Therefore, if anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold,
all things have become new.
And I can’t wait to go through the
lesson material to explain how this is a fact and is the fundamental foundation
for a life of freedom and victory in Christ.
Something happens when you put your
faith in Jesus. Something happens when you make Christ your Lord and Savior. Your spirit is given life as the Holy Spirit comes
to indwell you the moment you put your faith in Jesus.
The problem is that the world, the
flesh, and the devil don’t want you to know that you are a new creation, and
they actively try to deceive and discourage Christians from knowing who they
are in Christ because the spiritual forces of darkness and the world system
want to keep us in bondage to prevent us from sharing the truth of the new and
eternal life that comes through faith in Jesus Christ.
Satan hates God and mankind and as
Christ told us in:
John
10:10 (NKJV)
10 The
thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come
that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.
The enemy seeks to destroy us, but
Christ came to give us an abundant life in Him and the tragic reality of this battle
between good and evil is that so many Christians are not experiencing the “abundant
life” of victory and freedom that Christ came to give us.
Our Christian faith is not merely
something we are just to “believe in” it is an abundant life that we are to “live
out” in the world, every day of our lives.
When we “walk in the Spirit”, by
living according to God’s ways and by staying connected to His presence through
prayer and reading His word, the fruit of the Spirit of love, joy, peace,
goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, patience, and self-control grow
in our lives.
But in order for us to experience
this spiritual reality in the world of the living that bears experiential fruit
and transforms us into the people that God created us to be, we have to take
that first step of faith: to know who we are in Christ, to embrace our new
identity, and to agree to live according
to it.
The “who I am in Christ” list is
based on the word of God, look up the referenced scriptures, and was compiled by
Dr, Neil Anderson, to help Christian to understand that they are accepted,
secure, and significant in Christ. I
will be sharing it tonight, so I share it here and encourage all to copy it, study
it, and live according to it:
Who I am in Christ
I AM ACCEPTED IN CHRIST
I
am God’s Child (John 1:12)
I
am Christ’s Friend (John 15:15)
I
have been justified (Romans 5:1)
I
am united with the Lord and one with Him in Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:17)
I
have been bought with a price; I belong to God (1 Corinthians 6:20)
I
am a member of Christ’s body (1 Corinthians 12:27)
I
am a saint (Ephesians 1:1)
I
have been adopted as God’s child (Ephesians 1:5)
I
have direct access to God through the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 2:18)
I
have been redeemed and forgiven of all my sins (Colossians 1:14)
I
am complete in Christ (Colossians 2:10)
I AM SECURE IN CHRIST
I
am free forever from condemnation (Romans 8:1)
I
am assured that all things work together for good (Romans 8:28)
I
am free from the condemning charges against me (Romans 8:33-34)
I
cannot be separated from the love of God (Romans 8:35, 38-39)
I
have been established, anointed, and sealed by God (2 Corinthians 1:21-22)
I
am a citizen of heaven (Philippians 3:20)
I
am hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3)
I
can find grace and mercy to help me in time of need (Hebrews 4:16)
I
am born of God, and the evil one cannot touch me (1 John 5:18)
I have not been given a spirit of
fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind (2 Tim 1:7)
I am confident that the good work
God has begun in me will be perfected (Phil 1:6)
Who I am in Christ
I AM SIGNIFICANT IN CHRIST
I
am the salt and light of the earth (Matthew 5:13-14)
I
am a branch of the true vine, a channel to His life (John 15:1,5)
I
have been chosen and appointed to bear fruit (John 15:16)
I
am a personal witness of Christ (Acts 1:8)
I
am God’s temple (1 Corinthians 3:16)
I
am a minister of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:17-20)
I
am God’s coworker (2 Corinthians 6:1)
I
am seated with Christ in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 2:6)
I
am God’s workmanship (Ephesians 2:10)
I
may approach God with freedom and confidence (Ephesians 3:12)
I
can do all things through Christ who gives me strength (Philippians 4:13)
So now that you know who you are in Christ, walk in
the new abundant life that God has given you through Jesus Christ. Read it once a day for 40 days to renew your mind,
or as a continual daily practice as I do, and watch the way that the Holy Spirit
guides you into the life where you can have the peace that goes beyond all
understanding, regardless of the circumstances you encounter, as you keep on
walking and talking with God.
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Today’s Bible verse comes to us from “The NLT Bible
Promise Book for Men”.
This morning’s meditation verse is:
Matthew 18:4 (NKJV)
4 Therefore
whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of
heaven.
Today’s Bible verse are the words of
Jesus and they remind us that the pathway to greatness in His kingdom comes
from humbling ourselves and coming to Him with child-like faith.
Children are vulnerable. Without caregivers
children die or live like savages. Ever read Lord of the Flies? Without authority, structure, guidance, and
care a group of school boys stranded on their own quickly turn to system of
survival of the fittest with elements of pagan idolatry where the strong
dominated and literally killed the weak.
But Christ tells us that to be great
in His kingdom we are to humble ourselves and He points to the innocence of
childhood to demonstrate the quality of faith and trust we are to have in
Him.
Children trust their parents to take
care of them. Their safety and
protection is given completely into the care of others without question.
Christ wants us to trust Him, and the
Bible gives us His words and example as how we should live. To experience new and eternal life, we need to
put our trust in Jesus. We need to put our faith in Christ.
And to be great, we need to follow in
His example of a humble servant leader and share the love of God that we have
been given.
If we trust Jesus, we humble
ourselves and make Him the Lord of Our life and will model our lives after
His. He is the way of salvation and He is
the way to an abundant life of peace. To experience it, we need to simply
humble ourselves and trust Jesus enough to follow Him.
______________________________________________________________________
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 Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s
“Discipleship”, also known as “The Cost of Discipleship”
As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage all to purchase Bonhoeffer’s books for your own
private study and to support his work. This resource is available on
many websites for less than $20.00.
PART ONE - Chapter
One: Costly Grace,
continued
The expansion of
Christianity and the increasing secularization of the church caused the
awareness of costly grace to be gradually lost. The world was Christianized;
grace became common property of a Christian world. It could be had cheaply. But
the Roman church did keep a remnant of that original awareness. It was decisive
that monasticism did not separate from the church and that the church had the
good sense to tolerate monasticism. Here, on the boundary of the church, was
the place where the awareness that grace is costly and that grace includes
discipleship was preserved. People left everything they had for the sake of
Christ and tried to follow Jesus’ strict commandments through daily exercise.
Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of
Christianity, against the cheapening of grace. But because the church tolerated
this protest and did not permit it to build up to a final explosion, the church
relativized it. It even gained from the protest a justification for its own
secular life. For now monastic life became the extraordinary achievement of
individuals, to which the majority of church members need not be obligated. The
fateful limiting of the validity of Jesus’ commandments to a certain group of
especially qualified people led to differentiating between highest achievement
and lowest performance in Christian obedience. This made it possible, when the
secularization of the church was attacked any further, to point to the
possibility of the monastic way within the church, alongside which another
possibility, that of an easier way, was also justified. Thus, calling attention
to the original Christian understanding of costly grace as it was retained in
the Roman church through monasticism enabled the church paradoxically to give
final legitimacy to its own secularization. But the decisive mistake of
monasticism was not that it followed the grace-laden path of strict
discipleship, even with all of monasticism’s misunderstandings of the contents
of the will of Jesus. Rather, the mistake was that monasticism essentially
distanced itself from what is Christian by permitting its way to become the
extraordinary achievement of a few, thereby claiming a special meritoriousness
for itself.
During the
Reformation, God reawakened the gospel of pure, costly grace through God’s
servant Martin Luther by leading him through the monastery. Luther was a monk.
He had left everything and wanted to follow Christ in complete obedience. He
renounced the world and turned to Christian works. He learned obedience to
Christ and his church, because he knew that only those who are obedient can
believe. Luther invested his whole life in his call to the monastery. It was
God who caused Luther to fail on that path. God showed him through scripture
that discipleship is not the meritorious achievement of individuals, but a
divine commandment to all Christians. The humble work of discipleship had
become in monasticism the meritorious work of the holy ones. The self-denial of
the disciple is revealed here as the final spiritual self-affirmation of the
especially pious. This meant that the world had broken into the middle of
monastic life and was at work again in a most dangerous way. Luther saw the
monk’s escape from the world as really a subtle love for the world. In this
shattering of his last possibility to achieve a pious life, grace seized
Luther. In the collapse of the monastic world, he saw God’s saving hand
reaching out in Christ. He seized it in the faith that “our deeds are in vain,
even in the best life.” It was a costly grace, which gave itself to him. It
shattered his whole existence. Once again, he had to leave his nets and follow.[22]
The first time, when he entered the monastery, he left everything behind except
himself, his pious self. This time even that was taken from him. He followed,
not by his own merit, but by God’s grace. He was not told, yes, you have
sinned, but now all that is forgiven. Continue on where you were and comfort
yourself with forgiveness! Luther had to leave the monastery and reenter the
world, not because the world itself was good and holy, but because even the
monastery was nothing else but world.
Luther’s path out of
the monastery back to the world meant the sharpest attack that had been
launched on the world since early Christianity. The rejection which the monk
had given the world was child’s play compared to the rejection that the world
endured through his returning to it. This time the attack was a frontal
assault. Following Jesus now had to be lived out in the midst of the world.
What had been practiced in the special, easier circumstances of monastic life
as a special accomplishment now had become what was necessary and commanded for
every Christian in the world. Complete obedience to Jesus’ commandments had to
be carried out in the daily world of work. This deepened the conflict between
the life of Christians and the life of the world in an unforeseeable way. The
Christian had closed in on the world. It was hand-to-hand combat.
Luther’s deed cannot
be misunderstood more grievously than by thinking that through discovering the
gospel of pure grace, Luther proclaimed a dispensation from obeying Jesus’ commandments
in the world. The Reformation’s main discovery would then be the sanctification
and justification of the world by grace’s forgiving power. For Luther, on the
contrary, a Christian’s secular vocation is justified only in that one’s
protest against the world is thereby most sharply expressed. A Christian’s
secular vocation receives new recognition from the gospel only to the extent
that it is carried on while following Jesus. Luther’s reason for leaving the
monastery was not justification of the sin, but justification of the sinner.
Costly grace was given as a gift to Luther. It was grace, because it was water
onto thirsty land, comfort for anxiety, liberation from the servitude of a
self-chosen path, forgiveness of all sins. The grace was costly, because it did
not excuse one from works. Instead, it endlessly sharpened the call to
discipleship. But just wherein it was costly, that was wherein it was grace.
And where it was grace, that was where it was costly. That was the secret of
the Reformation gospel, the secret of the justification of the sinner.
Nonetheless, what
emerged victorious from Reformation history was not Luther’s recognition of
pure, costly grace, but the alert religious instinct of human beings for the
place where grace could be had the cheapest. Only a small, hardly noticeable
distortion of the emphasis was needed, and that most dangerous and ruinous deed
was done. Luther had taught that, even in their most pious ways and deeds,
persons cannot stand before God, because they are basically always seeking
themselves. Faced with this predicament, he seized the grace of free and
unconditional forgiveness of all sins in faith. Luther knew that this grace had
cost him one life and daily continued to cost him, for he was not excused by grace
from discipleship, but instead was all the more thrust into it. Whenever Luther
spoke of grace, he always meant to include his own life, which was only really
placed into full obedience to Christ through grace. He could not speak of grace
any other way than this. Luther said that grace alone did it, and his followers
repeat it literally, with the one difference that very soon they left out and
did not consider and did not mention what Luther always included as a matter of
course: discipleship. Yes, he no longer even needed to say it, because he
always spoke as one whom grace had led into a most difficult following of
Jesus. The followers’ own teaching [“by grace alone”] was, therefore,
unassailable, judged by Luther’s teaching, but their teaching meant the end and
the destruction of the Reformation as the revelation of God’s costly grace on
earth. The justification of the sinner in the world became the justification of
sin and the world. Without discipleship, costly grace would become cheap grace.
When Luther said that
our deeds are in vain, even in the best of lives, and that, therefore, nothing
is valid before God “except grace and favor to forgive sins,” he said it as
someone who knew himself called to follow Jesus, called to leave everything he
had up until this moment, and in the same moment called anew to do it again.
His acknowledgment of grace was for him the final radical break with the sin of
his life but never its justification. Grasping at forgiveness was the final
radical rejection of self-willed life; the acknowledgment of grace itself his
first really serious call to discipleship. It was a “conclusion” for him,
although a divine conclusion, not a human one. His descendants made this
conclusion into a principled presupposition on which to base their
calculations. That was the whole trouble. If grace is the “result” given by
Christ himself to Christian life, then this life is not for one moment excused
from discipleship. But if grace is a principled presupposition of my Christian
life, then in advance I have justification of whatever sins I commit in my life
in the world. I can now sin on the basis of this grace; the world is in
principle justified by grace. I can thus remain as before in my
bourgeois-secular existence. Everything remains as before, and I can be sure
that God’s grace takes care of me. The whole world has become “Christian” under
this grace, but Christianity has become the world under this grace as never
before. The conflict between a Christian and a bourgeois-secular vocation is resolved.
Christian life consists of my living in the world and like the world, my not
being permitted to be different from it—for the sake of grace!—but my going
occasionally from the sphere of the world to the sphere of the church, in order
to be reassured there of the forgiveness of my sins. I am liberated from
following Jesus—by cheap grace, which has to be the bitterest enemy of
discipleship, which has to hate and despise true discipleship. Grace as
presupposition is grace at its cheapest; grace as a conclusion is costly grace.
It is appalling to see what is at stake in the way in which a gospel truth is
expressed and used. It is the same word of the justification by grace alone,
and yet false use of the same statement can lead to the complete destruction of
its essence.
When Faust says at
the end of his life of seeking knowledge, “I see that we can know nothing,”
then that is a conclusion, a result. It is something entirely different than
when a student repeats this statement in the first semester to justify his
laziness (Kierkegaard). Used as a conclusion, the sentence is true; as a
presupposition, it is self-deception. That means that knowledge cannot be
separated from the existence in which it was acquired. Only those who in
following Christ leave everything they have can stand and say that they are
justified solely by grace. They recognize the call to discipleship itself as
grace and grace as that call. But those who want to use this grace to excuse
themselves from discipleship are deceiving themselves.
But doesn’t Luther
himself come dangerously close to this complete distortion in understanding
grace? What does it mean for Luther to say: “Pecca fortiter, sed fortius fide
et gaude in Christo”—“Sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more
boldly!”*[31] So you are only a sinner and can never get out of sin;
whether you are a monk or a secular person, whether you want to be pious or
evil, you will not flee the bonds of the world, you will sin. So, then, sin
boldly, and on the basis of grace already given! Is this blatant proclamation
of cheap grace carte blanche for sin, and rejection of discipleship? Is it a
blasphemous invitation to sin deliberately while relying on grace? Is there a
more diabolical abuse of grace than sinning while relying on the gift of God’s
grace? Isn’t the Catholic catechism right in recognizing this as sin against
the Holy Spirit?
To understand this,
everything depends on how the difference between result and presupposition is
applied. If Luther’s statement is used as a presupposition for a theology of
grace, then it proclaims cheap grace. But Luther’s statement is to be
understood correctly not as a beginning, but exclusively as an end, a
conclusion, a last stone, as the very last word. Understood as a
presupposition, pecca fortiter becomes an ethical principle. If grace is a
principle, then pecca fortiter as a principle would correspond to it. That is
justification of sin. It turns Luther’s statement into its opposite. “Sin
boldly”—that could be for Luther only the very last bit of pastoral advice, of
consolation for those who along the path of discipleship have come to know that
they cannot become sin-free, who out of fear of sin despair of God’s grace. For
them, “sin boldly” is not something like a fundamental affirmation of their
disobedient lives. Rather, it is the gospel of God’s grace, in the presence of
which we are sinners always and at every place. This gospel seeks us and
justifies us exactly as sinners. Admit your sin boldly; do not try to flee from
it, but “believe much more boldly.” You are a sinner, so just be a sinner. Do
not want to be anything else than what you are. Become a sinner again every day
and be bold in doing so. But to whom could such a thing be said except to those
who from their hearts daily reject sin, who every day reject everything that
hinders them from following Jesus and who are still unconsoled about their
daily unfaithfulness and sin? Who else could hear it without danger for their
faith than those who are called anew by such consolation to follow Christ? In
this way, Luther’s statement, understood as a conclusion, becomes that costly
grace which alone is grace.
Grace as a principle,
pecca fortiter as a principle, cheap grace—all these are finally only a new
law, which neither helps nor liberates. Grace as a living word, pecca fortiter
as comfort in a time of despair and a call to discipleship, costly grace alone
is pure grace, which really forgives sins and liberates the sinner.[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
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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
[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship,
ed. Martin Kuske et al., trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, vol. 4,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 46–53.
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