Tag Archives: holy

Chosen, Holy And Dearly Loved

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CHOSEN, HOLY AND DEARLY LOVED

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with one another and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity (Col. 3:12-14).

Imagine wearing an identity like that – chosen, holy and dearly loved! Who, me? Yes, you. You were once . . . but now you are . . . That’s how Paul described the erstwhile idolatrous, promiscuous and sin-loving Colossians. That’s how he describes everyone who has been rescued from the dominion of darkness and transferred into the kingdom of God.

You have been delivered from the clutches of the one who insisted that you belong to him and that you could only live under his control. You are now free to become who you are, God’s chosen, holy and dearly loved son or daughter. Oh how we need to get hold of this truth; think it, believe it and live it until it infiltrates every fibre of our beings so that we become who we are!

Close your eyes for a moment and think about Jesus. He perfectly matched Paul’s description of a child of God. Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiving, loving – don’t these qualities all fit Him perfectly? How amazing that you are now free to become just like Him! He was the perfect model of a true son and He made it possible for us to become just like Him, true children of God.

Why is it so important that we clothe ourselves with these virtues? What difference does it make whether or not we live holy and pure lives in this world now? Are we not destined to be changed into the likeness of Jesus when He comes or calls us home?

Yes we are, but there are several good reasons for us to change our ways from self-centred living to becoming like Jesus now.

1. Jesus rescued us from a life of selfishness. We are no longer citizens of this world system which is based on getting everything we can for ourselves. What drives the world? Money!

2. Living for ourselves alone leads to death and hell and not only in the hereafter. It’s about death and hell now. We cannot have fellowship with God and live greedy, self-centred lives now. The two are incompatible. When we live only to take care of ourselves, we are dead. We create hell through the selfishness that drives people apart.

3. God’s children have been given His nature – God is love and God is light. God’s children resemble Him, not the devil who is responsible for the chaos in the world.

Through these (His own glory and goodness – verse 3) He has given us His very great and precious promises so that, through them, you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world cause by evil desires .

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith, goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control perseverance; and to perseverance godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .

Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort to confirm your calling and election. For if you do these things, you will never stumble, and you will receive a rich welcome into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ (2 Peter 1:4-10).

How do we ‘clothe’ ourselves with these virtues? We are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. By replacing our ways of thinking with the thoughts of God, we change our beliefs and our behaviour. Do you believe that you are chosen by God and holy and beloved? Then remind yourself of this truth until you become who you are.

By becoming who we are, we will fulfil God’s highest purpose for His human family, to become one as God is one.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

Once . . . But Now

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ONCE . . . BUT NOW

Once you were alienated from God and enemies in your minds because of your evil behaviour. But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation – if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel. This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant. (Colossians 1: 21-23.

If Paul had not brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to the Colossians, he certainly intended that they get it loud and clear through this letter! He wanted to be sure that they had it straight, that there would be no doubt in their minds about who Jesus is and on what grounds they could be assured of their salvation.

The Gnostics had tried to lure them away with their airy-fairy ideas about emanations, demiurges and special knowledge only accessible to a select few. Paul’s message was good news for everyone without exception, even the inanimate world and the world of creatures, because Jesus came to set everything right by sacrificing Himself for all of Creation.

Like the entire universe which was thrown off course by Adam’s disobedience, the Colossians were at enmity with God until they heard and believed the good news. Jesus’s message, which became Paul’s message when it was entrusted to him, was a message of reconciliation and hope; not hope as in ‘I hope it will happen,’ but hope as in ‘I know it will happen because God has said so, but not yet.’

What is the hope of the gospel? Holy, without blemish and free from accusation! But how can it possibly be that we, fallen and mortal beings, can ever hope to be perfect, like Jesus? Everything that Jesus is has been given to us as a free gift – His nature, His sinless perfection, His righteousness and His holiness are all ours now, and that’s how the Father sees us. Paul used a little two-word phrase to describe our standing before God – ‘in Christ’. Until we understand the significance of these two words, we will always be insecure, based on our unstable behaviour.

God does not judge us by our behaviour but by our standing – which Paul described as a ‘standing in grace’ (Romans 5: 2). We would never dream of rejecting our two-year-old child because of his immature behaviour. He is our son; he has a standing in the family which he can never lose. It is our responsibility as parents to bring him up to be a mature adult. With love and patience we teach him, correct him and discipline him towards the goal of who he is – our son.

And so it is with God and us. We are His sons and daughters. We have a standing in His family which has been secured by the death of His Son. Since He is God, He already sees the end result, perfect and complete in Christ, and He guides us towards the goal to become what we already are, replicas of Jesus, through discipline and training (Romans 8: 28-29).

There is a question which believers often ask and to which Paul gives a clue here, something to consider seriously. ‘Can I lose my salvation?’ He does not give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. The issues go much deeper than that. However, he does use the little conditional word ‘if’. He does not envisage believers skating as close to the edge as they can. Why would we want to do that?

We cannot be in Christ and in the world at the same time. If we are ‘in Christ’ it means that we have chosen to enter through the narrow gate and to make the day-by-day, moment-by-moment choices which keep us going in the right direction (Matthew 7: 13-14). Wrong choices will take us off course and lead us to the wrong destination.

he solution to going the wrong way is to ‘continue in the faith, established and firm, and not move away from the hope held out in the gospel.’ Jesus called us to follow Him. As long as we keep following, we will not be in danger of getting lost, but if we lag behind or wander off course, who knows where we will land.

Apostle John puts it even more clearly.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever (1 John 2: 15-17).

SCRIPTURE TAKEN FROM THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

From God’s Perspective

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FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE

“Through Him we received grace and apostleship to call all Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for His name’s sake. And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

“To all at Rome who are loved by God and called to be His holy people: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 1:5-7.

What a power-packed greeting — the whole gospel in a nutshell, packed into two paragraphs!

In his address, which was the typical way in which ancient letters were written, Paul gave his own credentials; the subject of his letter; and the credentials of his recipients.

Since he was not personally known to the Roman church, he introduced himself to them as a servant and an apostle, set apart by God to deliver His good news to the world. But was Paul not a son of God, like everyone else who believed in Jesus? Of course he was. That was his standing before God, but from his point of view he was a servant. In another letter he described himself as a servant of God, a servant of the gospel and a servant of the church.

Paul was not subservient. He was as an apostle, one sent by God with a message and with authority, but he served God, the gospel and the church in his capacity as an apostle. It was not his right to do things his way. Since his apostleship was a calling from God and his authority delegated by God, he was first and foremost accountable to God for the stewardship of his calling and gifts.

Everything he had and did came from God, both the calling and the grace to carry it out. He was in a partnership with the Holy Spirit. It was not his right to call the shots; to make the decisions about where to go and what to preach. If he encountered trouble and persecution on the way, he was to stick to his calling and trust God for the grace to obey.

His apostleship gave him the right to declare and explain the gospel to the Roman church. He stood alongside the other apostles to whom Jesus had given the commission to place His yoke on those who believed in Him, His way of interpreting and living out the Torah — God’s teachings about Himself, them and the way to live.

The subject of his apostleship was the Lord Jesus Christ. He was the centre of everything, wherever Paul went and whatever the circumstances for him. Unfortunately for Paul, Jesus was a hot potato in the Jewish, Greek and Roman worlds.

To the Jew, Jesus was hated as an imposter and blasphemer because He said He was the Son of God. He angered the Romans because He challenged Caesar’s claim to be the son of God and the Greeks despised Him because He just did not fit their philosophical system. Their gods were powerful and despotic, not weak like Jesus who died on a Roman cross. That was nothing but foolishness to them.

And what of Paul’s readers? However they viewed themselves in the middle of all this antagonism and suffering, from God’s point of view they were His holy people, called and passionately loved by Him, the objects of His special attention, who provided both grace — everything they needed to be who they were — and peace — the outcome of being justified, declared not guilty because Jesus paid their debt.

How much both they, (and we), needed Paul’s reassurance in a world gone crazy! It is easy to doubt that we are God’s beloved children in the filth of the world around us. Just like the believers in Paul’s day, society is rotten with violence, greed, promiscuity, corruption and every other kind of wickedness, and it is only getting worse.

Like lilies blooming in the swamp, we are God’s beautiful recreation, and we need to keep it in mind constantly lest we also be sucked into the cesspool of sin around us. In the midst of it all we are called to be obedient to God because of our faith in Jesus. Much more than an intellectual assent to some teaching or other, faith in Jesus has brought us into fellowship with a holy God and requires us to be separated from sin and separated to Him.

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

Glimpses Of The Great God: Day Five

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DAY FIVE

In the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of His robe filled the temple.

Above Him were seraphs, each with six wings:

With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying.

And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty;

the whole earth is full of His glory.”

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.

With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips;

your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

Isaiah 6:1 – 7

 

Isaiah was exposed, in his vision, to the awesome holiness of God.  In the light of God’s purity, he became painfully aware of his own impurity. What is God’s holiness?  The best understanding I have is that God’s holiness is the guarantee that He will always be who He is, in nature and in action.  He is totally separated from sin and impurity. He can never change or think or act differently from who He has revealed Himself to be.  He is absolutely consistent with Himself. His holiness is not something to fear but rather it is our security and our hope because He has promised to make us holy because He is holy.

Glimpses Of The Great God – Day One

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BEYOND OURSELVES

….into a new way of living

 GLIMPSES OF THE GREAT GOD

DAY ONE

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law,

the priest of Midian,

and he led his flock to the far side of the desert

and came to Horeb, the mountain of God.

There the angel of God appeared to him

in flames of fire from within a bush.

Moses saw that, though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up.  So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight – why the bush does not burn up.”

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look,

God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

“Do not come any closer,” God said.

“Take off your sandals,

for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

Then He said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob…”

At this, Moses hid his face because he was afraid to look at God.

Exodus 3:1-6

What do you think Moses felt when he was confronted with this strange sight and when he heard the voice of God speaking to him?  Read this Scripture passage through aloud two or three times and allow yourself to feel what Moses felt.  Put yourself in Moses’ place and listen to the voice of God speaking to you.  What is He saying to you?  Allow yourself to soak in the awesomeness of this moment.  You are actually, now, in the presence of the living God.  He loves you and wants to speak to you.  Give yourself time to listen and keep a record of what you think He is saying to you.   As you work through all the Scriptures you will be reading this month, God will be revealing Himself to you again and again.