Part II of the series I am working on through the New Testament. If you do not already know about the series this post is a part of, click here.
What is Christ to us? We saw earlier through the book of Matthew that Christ is the Son of God, and this is the most important aspect of Him. In Mark, we find that Jesus is our Ransom. Mark 10:45 - "For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."
This is how we are accepted into the Kingdom of God:. At first we are taken prisoner, slaves to sin, but when the Son of God comes down and ministers unto us, His Life is all that is needed to ransom us from our captivity. Are you weak, sick and tired, and trying to do it all on your own? Stop your struggle. Let the Son of God be your Perfect Ransom, and as He promised, you will find rest for your soul.
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Rights
When my brother and I were children, my mother would always attempt to settle our little spats by saying, "You both have the right to be wrong." Now, in the spirit of that sort of childish conceit that is especially magnified after one has just been contending with one's younger brother, I didn't understand what she said, and didn't much care to understand. But in the past two years or so, my eyes have been in the process of being opened by our Lord, sometimes in spite of me, and other times with my whole heart in it. I see now what it means to have the right to be wrong.
In Corinthians, there is a verse in chapter 6 that goes something like this: "Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?" And that last line, why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded? has been running through my head ever since I returned from my trip to London. Why, as Christians, do we hold so tightly to our "right" to win the argument? There is but one source from which this spirit flows: self-love. But so quickly we forget that we have been freed by the precious blood of Christ from the spirit of self-love! We have the Son of God Himself, the consummate Being of self-giving Love living in our hearts, and yet we allow our unrenewed minds to persist in the pride of always having to be right.
We say to others, "Read this Gospel tract; this News will change your life," or, "Let me tell you about a man named Jesus Christ; He is the one Who can turn your life around," and yet we "Christians" ourselves, who have already experienced this life-change do not exhibit the transforming Word we so often press on others!
Living rightly will be of no effect if one cannot love and suffer oneself to be defrauded. An exemplary life is but an eyesore if one always has to be right. As it says in James, Mercy triumphs over judgment. It may be true of us that we never swear, and abstain from media with corrupt content, and always tell the truth, and be transparent about our sins, and do all the right "Christianly" things, but if we cannot handle being wrong, it is of no worth. I am not saying that the commandments themselves found in the Bible are worthless. No indeed, the commandments are there for our benefit! But they are worthless if one performs them without the ability to admit one is wrong. Because to admit being wrong is to love someone more than yourself.
Can you attain that? Can you love someone more than yourself? "Peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die," but as soon as a man crosses us and makes us look as if we are wrong, or that we are less than perfect, our pathetic human love is snuffed cold and unrighteous anger quickly takes its place. No, we cannot attain that, but we must be willing to allow Christ out of us, Who can love more than Himself. After all, He died for you and me. We are not even very good people.
"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me," says Jesus to the young rich man who insisted he had kept all the commandments since his youth. "Come and follow me," says Jesus, but to do that, that young rich man has to not only sell possessions, but any rights and respect he had garnered in the world. And away he went, sadly. It is no different for us. To follow Christ, we must deny ourselves daily, especially our right to win the argument. Let us not turn away sadly.
Credit is due to Paster David Gibbs for inspiring me to finally post this.
Verses consulted:
1 Corinthians 6:7
Romans 6:18
Romans 12:2
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
James 2:13
Romans 5:7
Matthew 19:21
In Corinthians, there is a verse in chapter 6 that goes something like this: "Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?" And that last line, why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded? has been running through my head ever since I returned from my trip to London. Why, as Christians, do we hold so tightly to our "right" to win the argument? There is but one source from which this spirit flows: self-love. But so quickly we forget that we have been freed by the precious blood of Christ from the spirit of self-love! We have the Son of God Himself, the consummate Being of self-giving Love living in our hearts, and yet we allow our unrenewed minds to persist in the pride of always having to be right.
We say to others, "Read this Gospel tract; this News will change your life," or, "Let me tell you about a man named Jesus Christ; He is the one Who can turn your life around," and yet we "Christians" ourselves, who have already experienced this life-change do not exhibit the transforming Word we so often press on others!
Living rightly will be of no effect if one cannot love and suffer oneself to be defrauded. An exemplary life is but an eyesore if one always has to be right. As it says in James, Mercy triumphs over judgment. It may be true of us that we never swear, and abstain from media with corrupt content, and always tell the truth, and be transparent about our sins, and do all the right "Christianly" things, but if we cannot handle being wrong, it is of no worth. I am not saying that the commandments themselves found in the Bible are worthless. No indeed, the commandments are there for our benefit! But they are worthless if one performs them without the ability to admit one is wrong. Because to admit being wrong is to love someone more than yourself.
Can you attain that? Can you love someone more than yourself? "Peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die," but as soon as a man crosses us and makes us look as if we are wrong, or that we are less than perfect, our pathetic human love is snuffed cold and unrighteous anger quickly takes its place. No, we cannot attain that, but we must be willing to allow Christ out of us, Who can love more than Himself. After all, He died for you and me. We are not even very good people.
"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me," says Jesus to the young rich man who insisted he had kept all the commandments since his youth. "Come and follow me," says Jesus, but to do that, that young rich man has to not only sell possessions, but any rights and respect he had garnered in the world. And away he went, sadly. It is no different for us. To follow Christ, we must deny ourselves daily, especially our right to win the argument. Let us not turn away sadly.
Credit is due to Paster David Gibbs for inspiring me to finally post this.
Verses consulted:
1 Corinthians 6:7
Romans 6:18
Romans 12:2
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
James 2:13
Romans 5:7
Matthew 19:21
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Life
If you do not already know about the series this post is a part of, click here.
I shall today start the
vein of finding all the things which Jesus is to us, either through
statements of the apostles in their epistles, or through statements
from Jesus Himself (e. g. “I am the vine”). The first book I read
with this perspective was Matthew. Now, this is a book which tries to
prove that Jesus really is the Son of God through presenting the
prophecies that had been coming since the Garden of Eden. To be
honest, there were not a lot of statements made by anyone about who
Jesus is for us, who are His church. But one certainly gets the feeling that
Jesus really is the Son of God after reading Matthew. (Alright, so
Jesus is the Son of God regardless of how we feel about it, but you
know what I mean.) Maybe that doesn't seem like much, but being the only begotten Son of God truly is the single most important aspect of Jesus Christ. Why? Because in Him, God climbed down from Heaven to save us earthlings the only way we can be saved.
God created the human. When the first humans ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they incurred a humanly inseparable gulf between God and man. Suddenly, because sin and self-love had entered in, man could no longer commune with God the way Adam and Eve had been used to. So our first instinct is to measure up to God's standard ourselves in order to reclaim that communion enjoyed by the first humans, correct? But we never can, because of the nature of eternal life, and eternal death.
Eternal death is merely a separation from God. When we are separated from Him, sin is the natural outcome. But sin is not the root of eternal death. Eternal life can come only from God. Anything apart from Him is doomed to failure and death because He is the only Life in the universe. By Him all things were made, and by Him all things consist. How can life be imparted to a person by mere actions of right, when the whole man is wrong by separation from the Life? It is the syndrome of the young rich man, who insisted to our Lord that he had kept all the commandments from his youth. But it was not enough. Nothing short of complete surrender could grant him the life he sought. If we are to believe him that he had indeed kept all the commandments, he was still yet not good, because he had not surrendered and become indwelt by the only Good One of everything.
This is why the Son of God is the most important of all the things which Jesus is to us. For no one else could impart the Life which we so earnestly desire, and can never attain on our own wrongful foundation.
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