G
gideons300
Guest
Two steps? That;s it? C'mon, brother, what have you been smoking? But it is true. Consider....
The hardest thing man has to do to enter His rest and put on the new man is to see that we do not have the strength, the determination, the ability, the sticktoitiveness to do it. Man's lower nature, our flesh, finds it impossible to break and admit this. Pride dies hard. So God uses situations, our failures, the hounds of Heaven if needs be, to get us to the point He needs to get us to. And what is that?
It is the point where we have NO strength. And the scriptures tell us this clearly:
"and unto them that have no strength, He shall increase might"
The hardest part about dying to self is dying to the self effort we always exert in attempting to die to self! LOL.
How does a man crucify himself? It is impossible. Oh, we start out fine, nailing our feet, Then we get our first hand taken care of. Our other hand holds the hammer and the spike, and we then get this confused look on our face. We cannot do it, yet how hard it is for us to admit it, or stop trying. When we finally het frustrated enough, we quit, which is good. Byt then we make a mistake. Instead of looking for Jesus to lift us up to fulfil the standard of holiness into the Lord, we lower the standard and say "Well, of course I can't. I am, after all, only human, No one is perfect, right"? So we alter the promises of God, downgrade them, gut them, spiritualize them to not actually mean what they plainly tell us.
"Free indeed? Well, it does not actually mean we are freed from committing sin as Jesus says, it means we are forgiven, and our sentence is commuted, and one day this jail cell door is going to swing open when I die and I will be free, right?"
And all the while, our cell door sits wide open and Jesus marvels at our unbelief.
Like the children of Israel in the wilderness, we wander around, always moving, never making true progress, always trying something new. We try abstinence from sin. We try scripture memorization, We try church attendance. We try fasting. We try prayer, or giving up TV. We try everything we know of til we run out of resolutions to do better and fall at the feet of God and cry out to Him "What must I do to work the works of God??" God has an answer, Are we listening?
"Believe on Him who he has sent."
Note what He did not say. He did not say to work harder. He did not even say for us to believe IN Jesus. He told us to believe ON Him, throw ourselves full onto the grace of God, believing that God's grace is that good, that to him that worketh not, but believe on Him who justifieth the ungodly, to him it shall be counted for righteousness.
Want to hear something neat? That word "count"? It is the same word as "reckon", exactly what God told us to do in Romans 6. God asks us to add it to our inventory by faith alone, not by works lest any man should boast. It is all HIM. Beginning with forgiveness, ending with purified natures, He does it all. We are asked only two things, both things of abject weakness.
1) Yield ourselves fully to the potter's skilled hands.,
2) Believe that once the potter has full access to the lump of clay we call ourselves, He can fashion us into something that will amaze us.
Brokenness, hunger, frustration with ourselves..... these themselves are gifts from God, though at the time we are there, it feels not like gifts at all, but a curse. Our fallow ground is being plowed though, by a faithful husbandman, and you can know one thing. Good seed will follow the plowing, and it WILL grow, and it WILL produce fruit and lots of it.
Stay the course, fix your eyes on Jesus, not your failures. He is already aware that we cannot do it, and He loves us anyway. The hard part for us is that WE do not know we cannot do it yet. When we finally learn that most valuable of lessons, faith is ready to sprout and what seems to us to be this little speck of a seed is fixing to grow into a tree so large that birds will come and lodge in our branches, others will rest in the shade we provide.
Blessings,
Gideon
The hardest thing man has to do to enter His rest and put on the new man is to see that we do not have the strength, the determination, the ability, the sticktoitiveness to do it. Man's lower nature, our flesh, finds it impossible to break and admit this. Pride dies hard. So God uses situations, our failures, the hounds of Heaven if needs be, to get us to the point He needs to get us to. And what is that?
It is the point where we have NO strength. And the scriptures tell us this clearly:
"and unto them that have no strength, He shall increase might"
The hardest part about dying to self is dying to the self effort we always exert in attempting to die to self! LOL.
How does a man crucify himself? It is impossible. Oh, we start out fine, nailing our feet, Then we get our first hand taken care of. Our other hand holds the hammer and the spike, and we then get this confused look on our face. We cannot do it, yet how hard it is for us to admit it, or stop trying. When we finally het frustrated enough, we quit, which is good. Byt then we make a mistake. Instead of looking for Jesus to lift us up to fulfil the standard of holiness into the Lord, we lower the standard and say "Well, of course I can't. I am, after all, only human, No one is perfect, right"? So we alter the promises of God, downgrade them, gut them, spiritualize them to not actually mean what they plainly tell us.
"Free indeed? Well, it does not actually mean we are freed from committing sin as Jesus says, it means we are forgiven, and our sentence is commuted, and one day this jail cell door is going to swing open when I die and I will be free, right?"
And all the while, our cell door sits wide open and Jesus marvels at our unbelief.
Like the children of Israel in the wilderness, we wander around, always moving, never making true progress, always trying something new. We try abstinence from sin. We try scripture memorization, We try church attendance. We try fasting. We try prayer, or giving up TV. We try everything we know of til we run out of resolutions to do better and fall at the feet of God and cry out to Him "What must I do to work the works of God??" God has an answer, Are we listening?
"Believe on Him who he has sent."
Note what He did not say. He did not say to work harder. He did not even say for us to believe IN Jesus. He told us to believe ON Him, throw ourselves full onto the grace of God, believing that God's grace is that good, that to him that worketh not, but believe on Him who justifieth the ungodly, to him it shall be counted for righteousness.
Want to hear something neat? That word "count"? It is the same word as "reckon", exactly what God told us to do in Romans 6. God asks us to add it to our inventory by faith alone, not by works lest any man should boast. It is all HIM. Beginning with forgiveness, ending with purified natures, He does it all. We are asked only two things, both things of abject weakness.
1) Yield ourselves fully to the potter's skilled hands.,
2) Believe that once the potter has full access to the lump of clay we call ourselves, He can fashion us into something that will amaze us.
Brokenness, hunger, frustration with ourselves..... these themselves are gifts from God, though at the time we are there, it feels not like gifts at all, but a curse. Our fallow ground is being plowed though, by a faithful husbandman, and you can know one thing. Good seed will follow the plowing, and it WILL grow, and it WILL produce fruit and lots of it.
Stay the course, fix your eyes on Jesus, not your failures. He is already aware that we cannot do it, and He loves us anyway. The hard part for us is that WE do not know we cannot do it yet. When we finally learn that most valuable of lessons, faith is ready to sprout and what seems to us to be this little speck of a seed is fixing to grow into a tree so large that birds will come and lodge in our branches, others will rest in the shade we provide.
Blessings,
Gideon
