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Whatsoever
Things Are True
by Dan Coburn Pastor, Emmanuel Baptist Church pastordan@mtida.net Selfishness is definitely In. The very first thing the Holy Spirit will reveal to a Christian is not heaven. It is not his/her potential, inheritance, or gifting. It is his -wait for it, -- Sin. AKA self or flesh. Self defined = the carnal life of nature as described in Eph. 2:1=3, Gal. 5:19-20 and Romans 7. This begs the question: "Is this me?" and is not popular. Plato had it right: "know thyself". Application: For someone to get past the knowledge "of" Jesus and into a relationship, he must first come to know himself through the lens of God's Word. We have to reach the "Not I" to get to "but Christ". Nugget: We are being conformed to the image of Christ. Phil. 2:5 says: "Let this mind be in you..........." So what is His mind? "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth (remains) alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." John 12:24. A continuing theme in the New Testament is Dying to self. 2nd Cor. 4:11-12 = "For we which life are always delivered unto death for Jesus sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you." Paul said "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live...." Gal. 2:20 Question: Which comes first? It's death. see Romans 6:5-6 and 13. All Resurrection life springs from death. Not the Guyana Koolaid death, but that which brings forth new life (born again). For a couple hundred years, evangelism has been dominated by a "commitment conversion" (works vs faith) which Miles Stanford called: "spiritual miscarriage". Listen to Dr. C. I. Scofield. "Not everyone, by any means has had the experience of the 7th of Romans, that agony of conflict, of desire to do what we cannot do, of longing to do the right we find we cannot do. It is a great blessing when a person gets into the seventh of Romans and begins to realize the awful conflict of its struggle and defeat; because the first step toward getting out of the struggle of the seventh chapter and into the victory of the eighth, is to get into the seventh. Of all the needy classes of people, the neediest of this earth are not those who are having a heartbreaking, agonizing struggle for victory, but who are having no struggle at all, and no victory, and who do not know it, and who are satisfied and jogging along in a pitiable absence of almost all the possessions that belong to them in Christ." The answer to the above question is this - A person who truly receives Christ with joy over the forgiveness of his sin, will sooner or later come to the shocking realization that All is Not Right within him. He will hit the wall that is the realization that He himself does not meet the standards that he has set for others. This is the Crisis of a Messy faith which we will explore later. Meanwhile, for those of you who struggle with chronic sin, praise God and hear this: If you had not the Holy Spirit, there would be little or no struggle. "but I would let none have mastery over me". Fight fiercely. |
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