Tag Archives: disobedient

ONCE DARKNESS – NOW LIGHT

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ONCE DARKNESS – NOW LIGHT

Let no one deceive you with empty words for, because of such things, God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore, do not be partners with them. For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord (Eph. 5:6-10).

What are the ‘empty words’ of which Paul speaks? ‘Empty’ simply means that these words have nothing in them – no substance – which implies that they are lies. What kind of words are empty of truth? Words that man speaks in contradiction to God’s Word have no truth in them. Satan is their source because he wants to lure people away from God and from the truth.

Satan spoke empty words to Adam and Eve and, when they believed him and did what he tempted them to do, they discovered that it was God who had spoken the truth, not the devil. The outcome, just as Paul had written, was the wrath of God on them for their disobedience. Scientists and philosophers who deny the existence of God, speak empty words. Those who disregard God’s moral requirements, living impure and wicked lives, are under the dark cloud of Gods’ wrath because they have believed the ‘empty words’ with which the devil has deceived them.

Deception is one of the devil’s most potent weapons. He deceives through lies which contradict God’s truth and he deceives through fear – a powerful emotion that drives people to ignore or disregard the character and promises of God.

Paul counsels his readers not to partner with people who, under Satan’s influence, propagate his deception both by their words and by the way they live.  God has preserved in written form over thousands of years, His directions for living lives that please Him and that protect us from the effects of His wrath. God’s wrath is not capricious outbursts of anger but a settled disposition of displeasure. To be under God’s displeasure is to be subject to the consequences for choosing to disobey Him He clearly describes in His word.

There is no small print in God’s Word. He hides nothing from His people. He takes no pleasure in meting out punishment to those who are disobedient. The devil has spawned the lie that God is a hard taskmaster, waiting with His rod of punishment to catch anyone out who transgresses His laws. God has clearly warned everyone who cares to take notice, of the consequences of disobedience but He has endless mercy for those who repent and return to His way.

Why should His people not be partners with those who contradict and disobey His Word? Not only is such association detrimental to our wellbeing, but it also cuts across everything we are and have been taught as children of God and citizens of His kingdom. Loyal citizens of a country are bound by the constitution of that country. Should they step outside the boundaries of that constitution, they will be prosecuted. Our prisons are crammed with people who have transgressed the laws of our land.

Likewise, those who belong to God’s kingdom have voluntarily placed themselves under the constitution of His kingdom. They have committed themselves to loyalty to Jesus as the king and have placed themselves under His authority to obey His Word because His Word has substance – it is the truth.

Light and darkness cannot co-exist. Darkness disappears when a light is turned on. Darkness has no substance; it is merely the absence of light. Light exposes the furniture in a room which would be potential obstacles in the dark. Light enables us to see what is in our environment. In the light we are able to avoid tripping over things we cannot see in the dark. In the same way, the light of God’s Word enables us to avoid falling prey to devil’s lies and destroying ourselves by believing his deception.

It is our responsibility as children of the kingdom of light, to live out in our daily lives who we are. The fruit of our lives reveals the root. Paul insists that God’s children bear the fruit of lives that live in the light – for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth. It is impossible to live in the darkness of disobedience and, at the same time, bear the fruit of light. What we do reveals what we are.

And find out what pleases the Lord. What is it that pleases God? The Bible gives us the answer. God gave King David a title He gave to no one else. Preachers and theologians often make heavy weather of this one simply because they have ignored the context.

After removing Saul, He [God] made David their king. God testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’ (Acts 13: 22).

Did you get that? Obedience to His Word pleases God more than anything else. It is not our service or our sacrifice which pleases Him. It is our prompt and complete obedience. Obedience to God’s requirements is the one thing, above everything else, that indicates whether we fear Him or not.

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

Have you read my first book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!

ISBN: Softcover – 978-1-4828-0512-3, eBook 978-4828-0511-6

Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or Kindle version, on www.takealot.com  or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.

My second book, Learning to be a Disciple – The Way of the Master (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing), a companion volume to Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart, has been released in paperback and digital format on www.amazon.com.

DEAD AND STINKING!

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DEAD AND STINKING!

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit which is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were all by nature objects of wrath (Eph. 2: 1-3).

Have you ever smelt the stench of rotting flesh? It is not pleasant, to say the least. If dead flesh smells bad, what do you suppose a dead spirit smells like to the Father? From God’s point of view, we were dead in our sinful nature and lifestyle – dead to Him because our sin created a chasm between Him and us and left us lifeless and alone.

What a gloomy picture of the people in the world who have nothing to do with God and are therefore nothing more than empty shells with no real life in them! Paul vividly describes all of us in our state of alienation from God – selfish, ungodly, and living only to gratify every craving and desire with no thought for the way our lives and behaviour affect others.

The world of entertainment and what it dishes up, including the filth that Hollywood spews out and everything that flows from the mass media – scandal, violence, illicit sex, crime and every form of unsavoury behaviour – is the diet we feed on, and then we wonder why the world is so bad. Sin is like a snowball. The more sin we feed on, the more sin we practice.

Paul makes no excuse for anyone. Whoever we are, if we are not in “Christ”, we are all in the same boat. It’s just the degree that varies. Even the most respectable of people are separated from by God by their sin.

Unfortunately for us, unlike the belief system of some religions, God does not weigh our sin and our good deeds in the balance. We were infected with a sin nature from our conception, which we inherited from Adam and which makes us dead to God before we took our first breath. No one has to teach a child to sin. It is as spontaneous as breathing. Even if we teach him to live a moral and upright life, the nature within him pulls him towards sin. No one can see the sins of the spirit – greed, selfishness, lust, jealousy, resentment, bitterness – and the list goes on, but they are there in all of us.

Paul calls us all “objects of wrath”. How can we be under the wrath of God? How fair is that when we were born in sin? Unfortunately, we had no choice in the matter because we are all descendants of Adam. As representative man, he chose to defy God’s instruction and brought condemnation on the whole human race. But not only that. Every time we do what is natural to us, we confirm our own status under God’s wrath. God must punish sin because it is a violation of His holiness.

But, because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved. And God raise us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages, He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2: 4-7).

Out it comes in a rush! It’s almost as though Paul enjoyed painting as gloomy a picture as he could about our sinful state so that he could pour out in lavish language, the magnitude of what God has done for us in His Son. How sad that many so-called preachers of the gospel miss it altogether. They present Jesus as the cure for all ills. They preach a message and issue an invitation that makes it sound as though we do God a favour by “accepting Jesus as our personal Saviour”.

God was not obliged to do anything for us. His wrath falls on us because we are responsible for everything we have said and done.  We can blame whoever we like but, in the end, whatever we do and however we live is our choice. We decide how we will respond to whatever life dishes up for us.

God stepped in with a masterful plan to rescue us from our plight, and it had nothing to do with us. In fact, He didn’t even do it because He felt sorry for us. He did it to put His glory on display. It was His opportunity to reveal His true nature to the devil and his minions who are at war with God. He sent His own Son as a substitute for man, to take the rap for what we have done in rebellion against Him, so that we can go free. No more debt. No more guilt. No more barrier between Him and us.

He made it possible for us to have life, to forgive our sin, change our hearts and embrace us as His beloved sons and daughters. Who in their right mind would not respond in love to someone who did that for us?

It’s all about Him from beginning to end. God does not beg us to accept His offer. He graciously extends it to us, in fact, He commands us to repent and believe the gospel… but the response is ours. We can come home to Him and live under His authority and in His family, or we can remain in our dead and stinking state. He will not choose for us.

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

Have you read my first book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!

ISBN: Softcover – 978-1-4828-0512-3,                                                                              eBook 978-4828-0511-6

Available on www.amazon.com in paperback, e-book or Kindle version, on www.takealot.com  or order directly from the publisher at www.partridgepublishing.com.

My second book, Learning to be a Disciple – The Way of the Master (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing), a companion volume to Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart, has been released in paperback and digital format on www.amazon.com.

Without Excuse

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WITHOUT EXCUSE

“But I ask: Did they not hear? Of course they did: ‘Their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world.’

“And again I ask: Did Israel not understand? First, Moses says, ‘I will make you envious by those who are not a nation; I will make you angry by a nation that has no understanding.’

“And Isaiah boldly says, ‘I was found by those who did not seek me; I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me.’

“But concerning Israel he says, ‘All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and obstinate people.'” Romans 10:18-21.

So that’s it! Why did God turn away from His own people and open the door of faith to a people who were not in a covenant relationship with Him? As much as they hated the Gentiles, from a human perspective, they only had themselves to blame for rejecting their Messiah and opening the way for the Gentiles to become part of God’s family of believers.

In their zeal for God, the Jews believed that their way of attaining righteousness through observing the law was the right way. They refused God’s invitation to receive the righteousness of Christ by faith as a gift, and forfeited their place in God’s family. Instead of simply believing the message about Christ, which is the way in which faith comes and grows, they stubbornly persisted in trying to do it their way.

There was no lack of opportunity to hear the message – it was proclaimed all day and all around them, but God’s judgment was on them because they were obstinate and disobedient. God does not arbitrarily condemn anyone without giving him an opportunity to believe in Him at the level at what they can see, hear and understand. Even if they never hear the words about Jesus, creation itself speaks of His power and deity to anyone who will listen.

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress that truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse.”  Romans 1:18-20.

But God is determined to have a family. Since the Jews both refused to obey Him and refused to be His messengers to the Gentiles about Him, He opened the door to the Gentiles anyway, every though they did not purposely seek Him. Such is the love and mercy of God that He offers His free gift of grace to anyone who will receive it. He does not force Himself on those who do not want Him. The message is clear, even in the world around, but if people choose to believe that the universe just happened, or that it was produced by some hypothetical explosion caused by who knows what, then it’s up to them to believe the lies and take the consequences.

Truth can neither be altered nor destroyed. Truth is truth, whatever humans may say. People may decide that the Bible was corrupted or that it is myth or fable or untrue or whatever else they may think about it, but they cannot change the fact that it is the Word of God and that those who believe it are transformed by what they read.

God has mercy and grace for everyone who hears the message and receives Jesus Christ as Messiah and God. For “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Romans 10:13.

Acknowledgement

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