Tag Archives: foreigners

PROVE THEM ALL WRONG

Bible Study, ,

PROVE THEM ALL WRONG

Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us. (1 Peter 2: 11, 12)

Peter spent some time encouraging his readers to understand who they were in God: elect, holy, God’s people, accepted and beloved with a great and glorious future ahead of them. However, they still had to live their lives in the real world where they were rejected, persecuted and falsely accused of doing wrong.

‘Unfortunately,’ said Peter, ‘that’s how it is! Since you are being treated as foreigners and exiles, live like that – remembering that you are not part of this present world system.’ As Paul would remind them, your citizenship is in heaven. God’s kingdom functions on different principles.

The world system is governed by the prince of this world. He has the human race under his influence – and it’s all about looking after number one first, satisfying the whims and desires of the selfish nature at the expense of others. The believer, on the other hand, has been given a new nature, the nature of God who is first and foremost, pure love.

The problem for us is that our old nature is still very much alive within us and wants to drag us in the direction of self-centred lives which leads to self-destruction. It’s war all the way; not war with the devil as we are so often erroneously taught, but civil war within. The spirit, which is infused with the Spirit of God, is at war with our fleshly and nature and our sinful desires at war with God’s desires.

If so-called ‘spiritual warfare’ were against the devil, we would always be the losers and the victims of his evil power. This idea negates Jesus’s victory on the cross. Apostle John declared categorically that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3: 8b). Jesus both disarmed and overcame all the evil powers through the cross.

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Col. 2: 15)

We do not need deliverance from the devil – Jesus has already delivered us through His death. We need discipline. Our job is to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God and, through the Sprit, to put to death the deeds of the flesh so that we might live to God.

Jesus broke Satan’s power to lie to us. The devil wants to lead us to believe that he is Lord and in control of us. He is not! Jesus is Lord. The Holy Spirit in us leads us to the truth so that we believe what Jesus says and not what the devil says. No one can control our will. We alone have the power to choose and we have the Spirit who enables us to do what we choose.

The battle that rages is us is the battle of our desires. The sinful nature desires to indulge our fleshly appetites. The Spirit desires us to be holy, and living for God. Which one wins? The one we feed, of course. It comes down to the nitty-gritty of what we choose to indulge, the flesh or the spirit. If we indulge the flesh, we will die. We will lose our appetite for God. We will drift from Him until we are right back under the world system and on the way to self-destruction.

It’s not about going to hell when we die. It’s about living in hell now, living a life that has no boundaries, no purpose and no hope. The problem with living in hell now is that we have no appetite for God. Put us in a room full of earnest believers and we will feel uncomfortable and out of place. For a person like that it’s real hell!

What we desire we will do, and what we do we will become. The solution is simple but not easy – focus and grow your desire for God and His kingdom and the desires of the fleshly nature will lose their pull.

David wrote of the Messiah:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come – it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.’ (Psa. 40: 6-8)

When you choose to live like that, you will prove all your critics wrong by your godly life!

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.

BE HOLY

Bible Study, ,

BE HOLY

But just as He who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written, ‘Be holy because I am holy.’ Since you call on a Father who judges each work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear (1 Peter 1: 15-17).

‘Holiness, reverence and fear’ are not very popular words among believers in Jesus today. We prefer words like ‘relationship, friendship, family’ which are all true but we need to put them in their right perspective.

Before Peter had anything to say about relating to God as our Father, he put it into the context of a correct attitude towards Him – reverential fear. In this generation, the pendulum has swung from legalistic fear and distance from God to the kind of closeness that lowers the standards He requires until we treat God as our buddy and forget that He is still a holy God.

The very word ‘father’ is intended to include honour, respect and obedience. Take Jesus, for example. He came to earth as the Son of God. Was He not always, from before His incarnation, the Son of God? Not according to the Scriptures. Psalm 2 makes it quite clear that there was a specific moment when Jesus became the Son of God.

I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: He said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have become your Father.’ (Psalm 2:7).

God chose the father/son relationship to model the relationship He wanted between Himself and those who come to faith in Him through the Son. Jesus emptied Himself of every right and privilege as God in order to become a reverent and obedient Son. It had to be so that He could live as a perfect son in the place of the rebellious human race that had opted out of sonship to become renegades instead of rulers. He had to do this in order to die in our place. He also modelled and taught us how to be sons.

In order to become true fathers to their own offspring, sons have to learn to be servants to their fathers. According to the Bible, a son’s role is to serve his father until he is mature enough to have his own sons and daughters who will, in turn, serve him – and so on down the generations.

‘. . . Have the same mind set as Christ Jesus who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to His own advantage; rather, He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness (Phil. 2: 5b-7).

Jesus’s call to His disciples, ‘Follow me,’ included the call to be a son like Himself. What are the qualities He modelled and taught?

The first requirement is holiness. That’s enough to scare us, isn’t it? What is holiness? We tend to think of holiness as something mysterious; God is so holy that we dare not whisper or even breathe in His presence let alone approach Him. In the Old Testament era, the people were not permitted anywhere near His visible presence in the Holy of Holies, only the High Priest, once a year and then after he followed strict rules and approached God with the blood of an animal sacrifice.

How can we approach God now? We come through Jesus, the perfect son who became the perfect sacrifice to take away our sin. In God’s eyes. we are already holy because He sees us through Jesus. But that also means that, just as Jesus has removed our sin and blotted it out, it is now up to us to remove ourselves from sin and be set apart to God and for God.

Reverential fear is the second requirement. God is not our buddy. He is our God and our Father. He is our life source and our authority. The fear of the Lord is based on two fundamentals; who He is and what He does. He is the almighty, all knowing and everpresent God. He sees and knows everything. Solomon put it like this:

Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind. For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil (Eccles. 12: 13-14).

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.

The Power Of The Cross – Brought Near By The Blood

Gospel, , , ,

THE POWER OF THE CROSS

BROUGHT NEAR BY THE BLOOD

. . . At one time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.  But now, in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. (Eph. 2: 12-13)

What is Paul saying? Does he mean that all Jews are “in” and all Gentiles are “out”? Not at all. In his letters to the Romans and Galatians, he stated quite clearly that not all Israelites are true Israelites. Only those who are the children of Abraham by faith in Jesus are the true Israel. They have completed the process which He began when He called Abraham to be the father of His people, by recognising and receiving Jesus as God’s promised Messiah and His gift of righteousness to which the old covenant pointed.

However, Gentiles were not even in line to be a part of the Old Covenant because God had called only the natural children of Abraham to be His special people. They received God’s Torah, His instructions for living and His promises, so that they could show the pagan nations around them the nature of the true God. It was through them that the Messiah would come, and they were to live in anticipation of His coming – prophesied over many centuries in uncanny detail so that they would recognise Him when He came.

According to the prophetic fingerprint in their sacred writings, He would come as both Suffering Servant and King, but their exile and repeated occupation by enemy forces because of their unfaithfulness to the covenant, aroused in them a longing to be free from their enemies and to rule their own country without interference from outside. The other side of Messiah’s purpose to recuse them from sin was either forgotten or ignored in favour of a king who would rule over them in justice and peace, as did their great ancestor, David.

When Jesus came, the Jews did not recognise Him because He did not fit their expectation of a political deliverer. What was even worse for them was that those who followed Jesus and preached that He was indeed their Messiah, had opened the door of faith to the Gentles. Their hatred for and prejudice against the Gentiles was so strong that the followers of Jesus were to be exterminated for daring to preach that their God was the God of the Gentiles as well.

In spite of the message of their prophets that God would call the whole world to obedience to Him, they resented the intrusion of Gentiles into their exclusive right to worship God. There were many “God-fearers” scattered across the Roman Empire in Paul’s day, Gentiles who worshiped the true God without actually embracing Judaism with its tedious rules and ritual. It was this group that were more ready to receive the good news about the Messiah than God’s own people.

In his letter to the Ephesian church, and the other churches in Asia Minor which also read his letter, Paul reminded them that, without the message of Jesus which they had heard and embraced, the Gentiles had not hope of reconciliation to God or participation in the promises of the old covenant made to Abraham and his descendants.

It was through Abraham that the whole world would be blessed. His descendants would receive and were to preserve the revelation of God given to them through His covenant with Abraham and expanded in the covenant He made with them at Mount Sinai when He espoused them to Himself as His bride. In the Abrahamic covenant was the promise that they would be a blessing to all nations.

The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’ (Gen. 12: 1-3)

Through Jesus, God fulfilled His promise, opening the door to the Gentile world to embrace everything that He had promised His own people in His covenant. It was through Him that they were “brought near”, giving them access to the Father through the forgiveness He made possible, and allowing them to be a part of the promises that guaranteed their acceptance with Him and everything that the death of Jesus made possible.

Through faith in Jesus everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, becomes a part of God’s new race, no longer categorised as “Jew” and “Gentile” but by their new status as sons and daughters of the Father.

For through Him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of His household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the chief cornerstone. In Him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in Him you are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by His Spirit. (Eph. 2: 18-22)

When we consider how strong and how damaging the issue of racism is in our world, and no amount of external pressure can cure, we can only marvel at the miracle of reconciliation which Jesus made possible by His death.

This is the power of the cross.

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.

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Prove Them All Wrong

Bible Study, , , ,

PROVE THEM ALL WRONG

Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day He visits us. (1 Peter 2: 11, 12)

Peter spent some time encouraging his readers to understand who they were in God: elect, holy, God’s people, accepted and beloved with a great and glorious future ahead of them. However, they still had to live their lives in the real world where they were rejected, persecuted and falsely accused of doing wrong.

‘Unfortunately,’ said Peter, ‘that’s how it is! Since you are being treated as foreigners and exiles, live like that – remembering that you are not part of this present world system.’ As Paul would remind them, your citizenship is in heaven. God’s kingdom functions on different principles.

The world system is governed by the prince of this world. He has the human race under his influence – and it’s all about looking after number one first, satisfying the whims and desires of the selfish nature at the expense of others. The believer, on the other hand, has been given a new nature, the nature of God who is first and foremost, pure love.

The problem for us is that our old nature is still very much alive within us and wants to drag us in the direction of self-centred lives which leads to self-destruction. It’s war all the way; not war with the devil as we are so often erroneously taught, but civil war within. The spirit, which is infused with the Spirit of God is at war with our fleshly and nature and our sinful desires as war with God’s desires.

If so-called ‘spiritual warfare’ were against the devil, we would always be the losers and the victims of his evil power. This idea negates Jesus’s victory on the cross. Apostle John declared categorically that Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3: 8b). Jesus both disarmed and overcame all the evil powers through the cross.

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Col. 2: 15)

We do not need deliverance from the devil – Jesus has already delivered us through His death. We need discipline. Our job is to reckon ourselves dead to sin and alive to God and, through the Sprit, to put to death the deeds of the flesh so that we might live to God.

Jesus broke Satan’s power to lie to us. The devil wants to lead us to believe that he is Lord and in control of us. He is not! Jesus is Lord. The Holy Spirit in us leads us to the truth so that we believe what Jesus says and not what the devil says. No one can control our will. We alone have the power to choose and we have the Spirit who enables us to do what we choose.

The battle that rages is us is the battle of our desires. The sinful nature desires to indulge our fleshly appetites. The Spirit desires us to be holy, and living for God. Which one wins? The one we feed, of course. It comes down to the nitty-gritty of what we choose to indulge, the flesh or the spirit. If we indulge the flesh, we will die. We will lose our appetite for God. We will drift from Him until we are right back under the world system and on the way to self-destruction.

It’s not about going to hell when we die. It’s about living in hell now, living a life that has no boundaries, no purpose and no hope. The problem with living in hell now is that we have no appetite for God. Put us in a room full of earnest believers and we will feel uncomfortable and out of place. For a person like that it’s real hell!

What we desire we will do, and what we do we will become. The solution is simple but not easy – focus and grow your desire for God and His kingdom and the desires of the fleshly nature will lose their pull.

David wrote of the Messiah:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but my ears you have pierced; burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, ‘Here I am, I have come – it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.’ (Psa. 40: 6-8)

When you choose to live like that, you will prove all your critics wrong by your godly life!

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.