On our Romans 7 discourse, Expositors comments, “…it is the cry of a human soul, if ever there was a personal cry. the passage betrays a kind of conflict far deeper and more mysterious than merely that of “I ought” with “I will not.” –It is a conflict of “I will” with “I will not”; of “I hate” with “I do.” Romans 7:19 illustrates this, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. “ Troublesome, the divided mind looks like this: On one hand, we want to do good. On the other hand, however, evil over-rules the good intentions, resulting in injurious or bad actions. Perhaps we determine harder to do the good we want. Before long we witness the weakness of our will as we surrender again to that troublesome, pernicious, destructive, baneful display. We need an…
Tag: <span>law</span>
Romans 6 teaches us “If we be dead with Him, we believe we will also live with Him.” Dead men can believe? Only dead men, who have died in Christ have access to “the faith of the Son of God” as described in Galatians 2:20. We live and believe through Christ, who is our life. The book of Paul to the Galatians speaks of many obstacles to this faith, mostly self-motivated philosophies, some of natural faith. First of these, Paul mentions in Galatians chapter 1:6. “I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel.” The referral to “removed” means simply to “change sides.” The Galatians left off the faith that pleases God and took on a “man pleasing” substitute. Read Gal 1:1-10. Next in Galatians 2:21, they “frustrated” grace. They sought righteousness through the Law. They “disesteemed”‘ the…
The believer walks (in dependence), on the Spirit, so does not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. We can grieve the Spirit through unconfessed sin. We can quench the Spirit by operating outside of His will. The power of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus makes us free from the power of sin and death. If we be carried by the Spirit, we are not under the Law. The power of sin shall not dominate us; we are not under the Law, but under grace. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. Against such there is no Law. The strength of sin is in the Law, but we have victory through Jesus Christ. We live by the faith of the Son of God. Faith is the under-establishment of things expected, the convincing of things not seen. So, where does Bible language…
Some folks are sane, others insane. Lined up on one side of the field are health, healthy mind and heart, single-eyed, balanced, and whole. On the other team; divided, double-minded, sick, unbalanced and ignorant are the terms. “Holiness” for man speaks of set-apart-to-God; the other guys can be referred to as “profane.” This second term meant originally, “outside the temple.” The Hebrew brings out these definitions also: “exposed, common, wounded, break a word, dissolve.” Ephesians 2:14-15 teaches: “For He is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace.” “He” is Jesus and His Peace creates a buffer of protection for the soul against internal division. What was the middle wall? Enmity, the law of…
Good coaching goes this way: “back to fundamentals boys, back to the basics.” The hidden word here is “foundation,” and any team going anywhere has to build from the bottom. When that group forgets what got them to their present successes; they need to go back and do a revisit now, (I mean Right Now!). Hey, if the Bettenhausen Lady-birds’ softball team drift too far, they lose sight of the nest, and the chickadees ain’t gettin no food! Its time to get back to business! This is a comic picture but true. “We need more unity, we gotta get together, we ain’t sticken together as a unit.” What happened? Well, it happened in the hearts of the individuals first, manifesting itself second in the “lean mean fighting machine.” The synchronized power-generator started disintegrating because of the parts breaking down. For the Mannheim Sheep Dogs, maybe, the wolf in sheep’s clothing…
New Mexico Scene “What is grace?” I asked God. And He said, “All that happens.” Then He added, when I looked perplexed, “Could not lovers say that every moment in their Beloved’s arms was grace? Existence is my arms, though I well understand how one can turn away from me until the heart has wisdom. ”St.John of the Cross Christ’s coming brought grace. The law came by Moses but grace and truth by Jesus Christ. O happy day! The subject of grace presents a vast topic but essentially grace means favor; a disposition to grant something freely. Christ releases the Father’s disposition to grant something freely, having died in our place as our representative man. Any “worthiness” aspirations by us to gain a thing, would eliminate grace. Self-merit can only conjure a wage. Grace earns no paycheck, neither becomes one; grace stands outside of this rationale as screened. A…
Dedicated runner (me) in Belle Vernon cemetery, late 70’s We practiced examining our conscience before going to confession when fourth and fifth grades came. Basically, assigned a copy of the Ten Commandments, we mulled over them one by one. My hardest of all was: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. I certainly didn’t, but the Catholics listed sub-points under the big point. “Impure thoughts” logically followed as a major sub-heading, and this complicated a lot of things. Outspokenly, a million things could have comprised an “impure thought,” and since self-examination was a subjective exercise, I ended up confessing these 9 or 10 times per, and even more. Somehow, this variety of sin extracted more guilt than other sins. As we moved to 6th and 7th grades, it became impractical to repeatedly confess these kinds of sins; we had reached pure evil now, I guess. Moses delivered, to the children…