What Your Mercy Did For Me! – It Ain’t All Sinner’s Day! - Purity 877
Purity 877 11/01/2022 Purity 877 POdcast
Good morning,
Today’s photo of a solitary flower in full bloom
declaring new life after it was mercilessly mowed down comes to us from yours
truly as I took the time to document this object lesson of hope and determination
that I witnessed on my property Down By the River on Sunday afternoon.
Well, it may be the second day of the work week but
it’s the first day on a new month in which everyone in our country will be
called to give thanks and it just happens to also be the day when the body of
Christ is called to remember the faithful brothers and sisters in Christ that
have gone before us and for us to give thanks to God that we will be in that
number when the saints go marching in! Happy All Saints Day.
That’s right ALL SAINTS, as in every man, woman, and
child who has ever “bowed the knee” in humble surrender and made Jesus Christ
the Lord and Savior of their lives. And
while anyone could read this message, I have to believe that YOU and ME!
We may have been sinners saved by grace when we
heard the call to repent and trust in Jesus, and we will always be less than
Christ’s sinless perfection, but after
we placed our faith in Jesus, we were adopted into God’s royal family, and
should thus claim and declare our identity as saints.
While yesterday’s Halloween Celebrations unwittingly
gave homage to the spiritual forces of darkness, today, along with every other
day, is a day that we should celebrate the fact that of all the people in the
world, the Creator of the universe chose us to know the truth about life and
death, sin and forgiveness, heaven and hell, and called us to life through
faith in His Son!
This morning during my work out Micah Tyler’s What
Mercy Did for Me came on and I have to tell you the words penetrated to my
heart as I remembered once again that I was once lost in darkness when the Lord
called me to know His love and His light and to experience a new life in Him!
The chorus to that song says:
“Lord
you found me
You
healed me
You
called me from the grave
You
gave me your real love
I
thank you Jesus
You
washed my sins away
Oh
now I'm living like I'm forgiven
You
came and set me free
That's
what your mercy did for me”
God’s mercy and grace gave me forgiveness, love, and
a new life filled with meaning and purpose.
And the gift of His mercy and grace continues to shape and transform my
life and the lives of others that I encounter as I keep on walking and talking
with God.
Tonight I host the Freedom in Christ Course on Zoom and the lesson is
all about renewing the mind and breaking strongholds, a lesson that reminds Christians
that Christ came to set us free and to destroy the works of the enemy. It’s a
sad truth that many Christians have great joy at their salvation but stay
locked in chains by believing the lies that the world, the flesh, and the devil
have set up in their minds.
The course teaches that just because we believed lies
in the past doesn’t mean we have to live according to them now that we are in
Christ. God has given us the Holy Spirit and His Word to use to overcome all
the strongholds in our lives that have given the enemy a foothold and kept us
from living the life of freedom and victory that the Lord has called us
to.
Just like the flower in today’s photo , that was
dead, cut off mercilessly by my lawn mower, we can grow into the life God has
for us. Because there was life in it that plant, unseen in the dirt, it was
able to rise above its brokenness and fulfill its purpose to give God glory for
the life He had given it by rising up and blooming by reaching for the light of
the sun. We too can rise up and if we
abide in the Light of the Son of God and the truth of His Word, we can grow out
of our brokenness and give God the glory for the life He has put in us.
That’s what His mercy can do for all of us, so keep
on reaching out for the Lord, that’s right keep on walking and talking with God
because He has transformed us from sinners into saints and all we have to do is
believe it to receive it, by living it.
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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:
Psalm 33:18 (NLT2)
18 But the LORD watches over those who fear him, those
who rely on his unfailing love.
Today’s Bible verse reminds us that the Lord watches out for those
who fear Him and rely on His unfailing love.
And as a reminder, we should fear the Lord. His righteousness and holiness
calls us to repentance and if we don’t make peace with Him there will be hell
to pay.
But if we put our faith Jesus, we don’t have to be afraid of Him
anymore and our fear should be changed to an awe and respect that causes us to
obey Him and to rely on His unfailing love.
And this is a huge step that we have to make sure that we make
after we put our faith in Jesus. We have to develop our love relationship with
God. We have to interact with Him
relationally. We do that by thanking Him continually for the life He has given
us, for all He has provided for us, and for all that He is and for all that He
has done.
Today’s the first day of November, the month we celebrate
Thanksgiving, so if you aren’t already practicing gratitude and appreciation
for the Lord, give it a try. When we live
a life of thankfulness to God, out love for Him grows and we can get past any
false beliefs we may have had about Him as an angry judge and we can see Him as
just, holy, good, loving heavenly Father that made a way to save us when He didn’t
have to.
Start the practice of relying on God’s unfailing love today by
respecting Him enough to give Him your thanks and praise and by letting Him
know that you love Him for what He has done for you and for who He is. “I love you Lord” is probably the most
appropriate thing we can say to One who made us and who saved us. God is good
and if you know it you should remind yourself by relying on the love that never
fails.
___________________________________________
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.
The
Sermon on the Mount
Matthew
5
On
the “Extraordinary” of Christian Life
The Enemy—the “Extraordinary” concludes
“Pray for those who
abuse and persecute you.” That is the most extreme. In prayer we go to our
enemies, to stand at their side. We are with them, near them, for them before
God. Jesus does not promise us that the enemy we love, we bless, to whom we do
good, will not abuse and persecute us. They will do so. But even in doing so,
they cannot harm and conquer us if we take this last step to them in
intercessory prayer. Now we are taking up their neediness and poverty, their
being guilty and lost, and interceding for them before God. We are doing for
them in vicarious representative action what they cannot do for themselves.
Every insult from our enemy will only bind us closer to God and to our enemy.
Every persecution can only serve to bring the enemy closer to reconciliation
with God, to make love more unconquerable.
How does love become
unconquerable? By never asking what the enemy is doing to it, and only asking
what Jesus has done. Loving one’s enemies leads disciples to the way of the
cross and into communion with the crucified one. But the more the disciples are
certain to have been forced onto this path, the greater the certainty that
their love remains unconquered, that love overcomes the hatred of the enemy;
for it is not their own love. It is solely the love of Jesus Christ, who went
to the cross for his enemies and prayed on the cross for them. Faced with the
way of the cross of Jesus Christ, however, the disciples themselves recognize
that they were among the enemies of Jesus who have been conquered by his love.
This love makes the disciples able to see, so that they can recognize an enemy
as a sister or brother and behave toward that person as they would toward a
sister or brother. Why? Because they live only from the love of him who behaved
toward them as toward brothers and sisters, who accepted them when they were
his enemies and brought them into communion with him as his neighbors. That is
how love makes disciples able to see, so that they can see the enemies included
in God’s love, that they can see the enemies under the cross of Jesus Christ.
God did not ask me about good and evil, because before God even my good was
godless. God’s love seeks the enemy who needs it, whom God considers to be
worthy of it. In the enemy, God magnifies divine love. Disciples know that.
They have participated in that love through Jesus. For God lets the sun shine
and the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. It is not only the
earth’s sun and earthly rain which descend on good and evil, but it is also the
“sun of righteousness,” Jesus Christ himself, and the rain of God’s word, which
reveal the grace of his Father in heaven toward sinners. Undivided, perfect
love is the act of the Father; it is also the act of the children of their
Father in heaven, just as it was the deed of God’s only begotten Son.
“The prayers of
neighborly love and of nonrevenge will be especially important in the struggle
fought by God toward which we are moving, and in which to some extent we have
already been engaged for years. On one side, hatred is fighting, and on the
other, love. Every Christian soul must seriously prepare for this. The time is
coming in which everyone who confesses the living
God will become, for the sake of that
confession, not only an object of hatred and fury. Indeed, already we are
nearly that far along now. The time is coming when Christians, for the sake of
their confession, will be excluded from ‘human society,’ as it is called,
hounded from place to place, subjected to physical attack, abused, and under
some circumstances even killed. The time
of a widespread persecution of Christians is coming, and that is actually
the real meaning of all the movements and struggles of our time. Those
opponents intent upon destroying the Christian church and Christian faith
cannot live together with us, because they see in all of our words and all of
our actions that their own words and deeds are condemned, even if ours are not
directed against them. And they are not wrong in seeing this and feeling that
we are indifferent to their condemnation of us. They have to admit that their
condemnation is completely powerless and negligible. They sense that we do not
relate to them at all, as would be quite all right with them, on the basis of
mutual blaming and quarreling. And how are we supposed to fight this fight? The
time is approaching when we—no longer as isolated individuals, but together as congregations, as the
church—shall lift our hands in prayer. The time is coming when we—as crowds of
people, even if they are relatively small crowds among the many
thousands-times-thousands of people who have fallen away—will loudly confess
and praise the crucified and resurrected Lord, and his coming again. And what
prayer, what confession, what song of praise is this? It is a prayer of most intimate love for those who are lost,
who stand around us and glare at us with eyes rolling with hatred, some of whom
have already even conspired to kill us. It is a prayer for peace for these
distraught and shaken, disturbed and destroyed souls, a prayer for the same
love and peace that we ourselves enjoy. It is a prayer which will penetrate
deeply into their souls and will tug at their hearts with a much stronger grip
than they can manage to tug at our hearts, despite their strongest efforts to
hate. Yes, the church which is truly waiting for its Lord, which really grasps
the signs of the time of final separation, such a church must fling itself into
this prayer of love, using all the
powers of its soul and the total powers of its holy life” (A. F. C. Vilmar,
1880).
What is undivided
love? Love which does not show special favor to those who return our love with
their own. In loving those who love us, our kindred, our people, our friends,
yes, even our Christian community, we are no different than the Gentiles and
the tax collectors. That kind of love is self-evident, regular, natural, but
not distinctly Christian. Yes, in this case it really is “the same” thing that
non-Christians[151] and Christians do. Loving those who belong to me
through blood, history, or friendship is the same for non-Christians and
Christians. Jesus does not have a lot to say about that kind of love. People
know all by themselves what it is. He does not need to light its flame, to
emphasize it or exalt it. Natural circumstances alone force it to be
recognized, for non-Christians and for Christians. Jesus does not need to say
that people should love their sisters and brothers, their people, their
friends. That goes without saying. But by simply acknowledging that and not wasting
any further words on it, and, in contrast to all that, commanding only love for
enemies, he shows what he means by love and what they are to think about the
other sort of love.
How are disciples
different from nonbelievers? What does “being Christian” consist of? At this
point the word appears toward which the whole fifth chapter is pointed, in
which everything already said is summarized: what is Christian is what is “peculiar,” περισσόν,
the extraordinary, irregular, not self-evident. This is the “better
righteousness” which “outdoes” that of the Pharisees, towers over them, that
which is more, beyond all else. What is natural is τὸ αύτὸ
(one and the same) for non-Christians and Christians. What is distinctly
Christian begins with the περισσόν, and that is what
finally places what is natural in the proper light. When this specialness, this
extraordinariness, is absent, then what is Christian is absent. What is
Christian does not take place in naturally given circumstances, but in stepping
beyond them. The περισσόν never dissolves into τὸ αύτὸ.
It is the great mistake of a false Protestant ethic to assume that loving
Christ can be the same as loving one’s native country, or friendship or
profession, that the better righteousness and justitia civilis are the same.
Jesus does not talk that way. What is Christian depends on the “extraordinary.”
That is why Christians cannot conform to the world, because their concern is
the περισσόν.
What does the περισσόν,
the extraordinary, consist of? It is the existence of those blessed in the
Beatitudes, the life of the disciples. It is the shining light, the city on the
hill. It is the way of self-denial, perfect love, perfect purity, perfect
truthfulness, perfect nonviolence. Here is undivided love for one’s enemies, loving
those who love no one and whom no one loves. It is love for one’s religious,
political, or personal enemy. In all of this it is the way which found its
fulfillment in the cross of Jesus Christ. What is the περισσόν?
It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, who goes to the cross in suffering and
obedience. It is the cross. What is unique in Christianity is the cross, which
allows Christians to step beyond the world in order to receive victory over the
world. The passio in the love of the crucified one—that is the “extraordinary”
mark of Christian existence.
The extraordinary is
doubtless that which is visible, which magnifies the Father in heaven. It
cannot remain hidden. The people have to see it. The community of Jesus’
disciples, the community of better righteousness, is the visible community,
that took the step beyond the orders of the world. It has left everything
behind to gain the cross of Christ.
What are you doing that is special? The
extraordinary—and that is what is most offensive—is a deed the disciples do. It has to be done—like the better
righteousness—and done visibly! Not in ethical rigor, not in the eccentricity
of Christian ways of life, but in the simplicity of Christian obedience to the
will of Jesus. This deed will prove to be what is “special” by leading
Christians to the passio of Christ. Such action itself is continuous suffering.
In this action Christ is his disciples’ passio. If it is not that, then this is not the deed which Jesus
intends.
The περισσόν
is, thus, the fulfillment of the law, the keeping of the commandments. In
Christ the Crucified and his community, the “extraordinary” occurs.
Here are those who
are perfect, perfect in undivided love, just as their Father in heaven is. It
was the undivided, perfect love of the Father which gave the divine Son up to
die on the cross for us. Likewise, the passio of the communion with this cross
is the perfection of the followers of Jesus. The perfect are none other than
those who, in the Beatitudes, are called blessed.[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
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
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My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
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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), 140–145.
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