aiki
Regular Member
If God made me, why can't just being myself honor him?
Well, just being yourself is actually the core problem that God has with you - and with everyone else. In-and-of yourself, you are an offense to God. So am I. Without Christ, we're repugnant, wicked, foul creatures, deserving of eternal hell. Our hearts are "deceitful above all things and desperately wicked" (Jeremiah 17:9); there is "none righteous, no, not one" (Romans 3:10); apart from God, we are all bound under the power of our own flesh, the world and the devil (Ephesians 2:1-3); we are natural enemies of God, wanting our own way rather than His (Colossians 1:21; Titus 3:3-4; Romans 8:5-8). "Just being me," then, is why I need to be saved; "me" is horrible, evil and in rebellion toward God. The same is true for everyone else, too - including you. Do you believe it?
I need Christ to make me what I can't be by myself: pure, righteous, pleasing to God. He is the only way to God (Acts 4:12; John 14:6), the sole Mediator between God and us (1 Timothy 1:25), our salvation from the hell we deserve to endure (John 3:16-20; Romans 2:3-10). Do you believe it?
When I became a child of God, a disciple of Christ, I was no longer my own, free to live as I please:
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,
20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
Colossians 3:1-3
1 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.
2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.
3 For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.
Romans 6:22
22 But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.
This is what God is offering to us in Christ: a new life in him exchanged for our old, self-centered, God-denying life. Salvation isn't just a get-out-of-hell-free card, eternal "fire insurance," but a coming under the authority of God, made a slave of God, to serve Him as His ambassador of light in a world of darkness. Do you believe it? Will you live as His servant of light?
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