Monday, October 5, 2009

Devotional 051009

Dear brothers and sisters,
Good morning. Thank God for being alive and alert in His wonderful blessing. If we look around in His creation, it is not too difficult to realize how blessed we are to be His children. God does not only proof His existence through this beautiful Creation, God wants to proof His love for mankind by providing us this beautiful planet earth to enjoy. When we ignore the Creator, we ignore our divine assignment to manage the world as good steward. As a result, we suffer in our own self-destructions. Have mercy on us O Lord! Help us to repent and recommit ourselves to be good and faithful servants again.

"Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned" (Romans 5:12). The Bible does not say that God punished the human race for one man's sin; but that the nature of sin, which is my claim to my right to myself (self-centeredness), entered into the human race by one man (Adam), and that another Man (Jesus) took on Him the sin of the human race and put it away once and for all. The author of Hebrews said, “Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself” (Heb. 9:26) – this is an infinitely profound revelation. The nature of sin is not immorality and wrong-doing, but the nature of self-realization - I am my own god. This nature may work out in proper morality or in inappropriate immorality, but it has the one basis, my claim to my right to myself. When Our Lord faced men with all the forces of evil in them, and men who were clean living and moral and up right, He did not pay any attention to the moral degradation of the evil one or to the moral attainment of the other; He looked at something we do not see, which is the sinful nature of mankind – the self-centeredness.

Sin is a thing I am born with and I cannot do anything with it; God deals with sin in Redemption. In the Cross of Jesus Christ God redeemed the whole human race from the possibility of damnation through the heredity of sin. God nowhere holds a man responsible for having the heredity of sin. The condemnation is not that I am born with heredity of sin, but if when I realize Jesus Christ came to deliver me from it, I refuse to let Him do so, from that very moment I begin to get the seal of damnation. "And this is the judgment" (the critical moment), "that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light."

We are condemned not because we born with sinful nature. We are condemned because we continue to live in our own self-centeredness or self-realization - to be my own god, and ignore the redemption of Christ on the cross. Jesus did not come to condemn but to save. When we reject Him as our savior and Lord, we invite condemnation into our lives. That’s why Christian is not a moralist – showing how moral he is by his effort and discipline; Christian is a redeemed sinner – we have nothing to boast. If it was not because of the mercy of Christ that took away our sinful nature of self-centeredness, we will die in sins. Once we deal with the most fundamental problem of mankind by nailing our “self-realization of wanting to be our own god” on the cross with Christ, the rest of the behavioral change will automatically begin, as a part of the sanctification process through the work of the Holy Spirit, but no longer by our own “realization” effort. We learn to abide in Christ as the way to bear spiritual fruit.

May God grant you divine wisdom to see your hereditary problem and seek the Holy Spirit to heal you from deep within!

Love you because of His mercy,Lawrence

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