Tag Archives: holy

A PERFECT HIGH PRIEST

December 30, 2021Bible Studyblameless, holy, pureLuella Campbell

A PERFECT HIGH PRIEST

Such a high priest truly meets our need – one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, He does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for His own sin, and then for the sins of the people. He was sacrificed for their sins once for all when He offered Himself. For the law appoints as high priests men in all their weakness but the oath, which came after the law, appointed the Son, who has been made perfect forever (Heb. 7: 26-28).

What confidence we can have in our high priest!

Unlike the Levitical priests who went before Him, He does not have to offer another sacrifice, not for Himself or anyone else – “It is finished!” No one will ever succeed Him as high priest – He lives forever. No one is more qualified than He – He is the Son of God, no less. He is a perfect high priest in every way – holy, blameless, pure set apart from sinners and exalted above the heavens.

How can a Levitical high priest ever come anywhere near Him in fitness for their office?

When we consider Jesus, who He was, how He lived, what He did, what He said, how He treated people, how He loved and obeyed the Father, how He stood for and upheld the truth, how He suffered and died without resistance, how He rose from the dead, it is difficult to understand why His own people did not recognise who He was. Both then and now, how can they ignore the evidence? How can they reject Him, and refuse to acknowledge that He is both Son of God and their Messiah?

There can be only one reason – prejudice. They have been deceived. Prejudice and blind unbelief caused the religious leaders to reject Him and to crucify Him. They refused to examine the evidence. Today we have a world of people who would rather believe the lies that are being propagated about Him as a substitute for the truth and the unsubstantiated claims that are made about Jesus and His word, than search for the truth for themselves.

Take the claim from the Muslim world, for example that the Bible has been corrupted. On what grounds can such as statement be made and where is the evidence? It does not become true because someone said it. What about those who deny that Jesus is God? When the religious leaders rejected Jesus’ claim, He pointed them to the evidence.

For this reason they tried all the more to kill Him; not only was He breaking the Sabbath, but He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God (John 5: 18).

This was His defence:

If I testify about myself, my testimony is not true. There is another who testifies in my favour, and I know that His testimony about me is true. You have sent to John and He testified to the truth . . . I have testimony weightier that that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish – the very works that I am doing – testify that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has Himself testified concerning me . . . You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me (John 5:31-33; 36-37a; 39).

On what grounds, then, can we have absolute confidence in the high priest God has appointed on oath to stand before Him for us? Our confidence lies in the evidence and witness of who He is. Whatever people may say about Him, based on their refusal to believe the truth, Jesus is, in every way, a perfect high priest, both the Son of God and representative of the Father and the Son of Man and representative of humanity.

Unlike the Levitical priests who all died and were replaced, Jesus died and rose again, and lives forever in an indestructible body as both sacrifice and firstfuits of the resurrection. We have every reason to trust Him. His blood speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. He ever lives to make intercession for us.

BE HOLY

December 25, 2020Bible Studyforeigners, holy, reverent fearLuella Campbell

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).

LOVE IS THE KEY

December 12, 2020Bible Studyblameless, Church, holyLuella Campbell

LOVE IS THE KEY

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself (Eph. 5: 25-28).

Paul concluded his instructions to the church with a call to mutual submission. He also prefaced his picture of family harmony with the same call – to mutual submission. The Bible does not teach wives to submit to their husbands without the husbands’ reciprocal responsibility towards their wives.

However, nowhere does the Bible insist that wives serve their husbands. Now isn’t that strange? Why do many husbands, even within the church, equate submission with service – in fact, slavery? The moment he walks in the door, she is his servant, waiting on him hand and foot. While he is out at work, she still acts like his slave, picking up his clothes, tidying his cupboard, putting away the litter he has left around the house, preparing his favourite meals and generally ensuring his well-being in every part of his life. His home is his castle and in it he reigns supreme.

If believers are followers of Jesus, our role is to imitate Him, not the caricature of Jesus which many sections of the church present as the substitute for the real Jesus. Church leaders even lord it over their people, insisting on fancy titles and expecting to be treated like the pet lamb instead of being the shepherd.

Jesus insisted that He came, not to be served but to serve. The Old Testament prophecies present Him as the Ebed Yahweh – the Servant of the Lord. First of all, He submitted to and obeyed the Father. He served the Father by doing His will. It was the Father’s will that He serve His children in His earthly life and die in their place to pay their debt of sin. He directed every moment of His life to please the Father.

“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:45

Jesus is the model of servant leadership for the husband. God intended marriage to be a visual aid of the oneness within the Trinity. The key to this unity is humility, and humility can only be fostered in the atmosphere of mutual submission – each person taking his or her place within the marriage, focussing on the well-being of the other without stubborn resistance, pride or rebellion towards one another.

It is pride and selfishness that ruin unity. It takes humility for a husband to serve his wife with sacrificial love and it takes the same humble submission for a wife to permit her husband to serve her without resistance or protest. God intended marriage to be, first of all, the union of two separate individuals producing, not uniformity but harmony in their relationship and fellowship with one another.

Children learn from their parents. They follow example before instruction. They will imitate what they see rather than what they are told. When they witness a continual power struggle between their parents, with each one attempting to control the other, with continual resistance and arguments, they will copy that kind of behaviour among themselves in the home and in their relationships outside the home.

Once again, divine wisdom paves the way for stable family life. Of course, human beings think they know better than God. They place the focus on what works (or doesn’t work) for them. Instead of following God’s pattern of protecting love, preserving unity and promoting contentment within the home by humility and mutual submission, they focus on what they believe to be the key to a happy marriage, their spouse. It is the other spouse’s responsibility to meet their need and make them happy.

The result? Discontented spouses, affairs and adultery, broken homes and rampaging divorce statistics. Men and women go from marriage to marriage to marriage in a desperate attempt to find happiness, only to have the same disappointment repeated over and over again. Their conclusion? Marriage does not work so let’s “shack up” instead so that we can go our separate ways if it doesn’t work out without having to go through the bother of a divorce.

Bending God’s rules or making our own is a recipe for disaster. God always gives His instructions and sets His boundaries to protect us from self-destruction. Within His prescriptions for living, we will find freedom and safety.

God’s pattern for a “successful” marriage is simple but not easy. Mutual submission and sacrificial service require “dying” to one’s own desires, needs and demands. We have both Jesus’ example to follow and the Holy Spirit within us to guide and empower us to do God’s will. In the doing, we will discover that, after all, God knows best. We will find peace and the harmony in the home which we desire and which is the outcome of doing life God’s way.

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

The Power Of The Cross – Made Holy By The Blood

October 24, 2015Gospelholy, own blood, people, sufferedLuella Campbell

THE POWER OF THE CROSS

MADE HOLY BY THE BLOOD

The high priest carries the blood of animals into the Most Holy Place as a sin offering, but the bodies are burned outside the camp. And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through His own blood. (Heb. 13: 12)

Holiness is a scary subject, even for believers, if we don’t know what it means. We lower the volume when we sing about it in church as though holiness is something mysterious about it and we daren’t say the word too loudly!

The Bible declares that God is holy. What does it actually mean? God is absolutely and utterly disconnected from anything that is less than perfect. He is set apart from sin and set apart to Himself because there is no one greater than He. Habakkuk was well aware of this when he said:

Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing. Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves? (Hab. 1: 11)

God is holy because He always acts towards His creation in righteousness and justice. He is always consistent with who He is. His holiness guarantees that He will always be faithful to who He is and what He has said.

If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot disown Himself. (2 Tim. 2: 13)

God’s holiness is our security. Therefore, God’s holiness should make us shout, not whisper!

However, because He created us in His image for fellowship with Himself, He requires that we be holy, that we be set apart from sin for His exclusive possession. But why should we be holy?

Firstly we are because we are to be holy because we are His sons and daughters, and He requires that we be like Him as members of His family.

Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. (Heb. 2: 11)

Secondly we are to be holy because there can be no fellowship between light and darkness.

What do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? (2 Cor. 6: 14)

But we are sinful, born in sin and spiritually dead. How can we approach a holy God as we are, polluted with sin? Since it was impossible for us to remove our guilt except through the penalty of death, God provided His own solution to remove the barrier of sin and reconcile us to Himself.

For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering . . . (Rom. 8 :3)

By dying in our place, Jesus paid the debt for our sin once for all, and brought us back into the family of God as His beloved children, guilt-free so that we are once again set apart from sin to God to live for Him under His authority and for His glory. By dying in our place, Jesus changed our status from sinners to God’s holy and beloved children (Col. 3: 12).

For by one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy. (Heb. 10: 14)

But that’s only the first step. We also have a part to play in becoming what we already are. Potentially, we are holy. We have been set apart from sin to God through Jesus’ death. But how do we become what we are? It’s a process and a partnership between us and God, through the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed – not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence – continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfil His good purpose. (Phil. 2: 12-13)

The blood of Jesus has “washed” us clean of our sin and guilt if we have responded to God’s word. By faith we received and believed the message, and God responded to our faith by removing us from the dominion of darkness and transferring us into the kingdom of His Son, under His authority and rule.

Our responsibility now is not to make ourselves holy by trying to keep rules, but to remove ourselves from the corruption and pollution of the world, and to respond to His discipline by trusting Him in our trials and hardships and by submitting to and obeying Him because He is our Father and His love is perfect.

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as His children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined – and everyone undergoes discipline – then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all . . . They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good.in order that we may share in His holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. (Heb. 12: 7-8; 10)

Hardships expose our doubts, insecurities and fears, and reveal the level of our trust in God. He wants to bring us into the place where we trust Him and live in His perfect love, without fear and absolutely secure in Him so that we can enjoy uninterrupted fellowship with Him.

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), 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.

For more details, check my website:

http://luellaannettecampbell.com/

Have you read my blogs on www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com ?

No Fear Of Death

February 18, 2015Bible Studyfamily, fear of death, flesh and blood, holy, humanityLuella Campbell

NO FEAR OF DEATH

Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. He says:

‘I will declare your name to my brothers and sisters; in the assembly I will sing your praises.’ And again, ‘I will put my trust in Him.’ And again He says, ‘Here I am and the children God has given me.’

Since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity so that by His death He might break the power of Him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil – and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. (Heb. 2: 11-15)

No fear of death! Wow!

Why does the believer in Jesus no longer need to fear death? Because he no longer fears punishment! Jesus shared our humanity and took our punishment so that we are free to come home to the Father and to His perfect love.

There is no fear in love. But perfect loves drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4: 18)

Death has lost its terror since Jesus faced death for us and overcame. Death was the devil’s trump card because he knew that death was final and sealed the fate of all humanity. There was no escape and no return from death. Jesus took death on the chin for us and came back in a resurrection body that can never die again to tell us that He conquered death once and for all.

The devil went one step too far by having the Son of God put to death. He thought he would destroy Him forever and the chance for mankind to be rescued from his clutches. Death is the penalty for sin, but Jesus did not sin. Therefore death could not hold Him forever. He passed through death and returned to declare that God’s estranged children were free to return home. The Father’s wrath against sin had been satisfied. Satan no longer had the power to hold us in death.

This was God’s final and most powerful act of perfect love. What seemed to be folly and weakness was the most powerful power in the universe – the power of love. Love accepted the worst that sinful people could do to an innocent man without retaliating. Jesus bore the injustice, the insults, the physical agony and even the horror of being abandoned by the Father with nothing but perfect love. He forgave in the midst of His pain and died without a murmur or a word of rebuke or a threat of revenge.

When they hurled their insults at Him, He did not retaliate; when He suffered, He made no threats. Instead, He entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly. (1 Peter 2: 23)

Everything Jesus accomplished through the cross culminated in one thing – God’s children are free to return home. The implications are huge. Home! That means back to the Father’s dwelling place where we are safe in the Father’s care and eligible to participate in all the benefits and blessings of family life together with the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

God is a family. He made us to be part of His family. He gave us His name; we are free to live with Him in His home; we have an inheritance with the Son; we share in all the resources, privileges and blessings of life in the family of God and we have the responsibility of representing the Father to the unbelieving world by demonstrating what it is like to live in God’s kingdom.

How amazing that we are actually brothers and sisters of Jesus and, what’s more, He’s proud to call us His brothers and sisters! How can that be? Because, through His death He has made us holy! Holy? Yes, holy, set apart for and belonging to God. We have share in the nature of God (2 Peter 1: 4). We have the same nature as the Son. We are part of a new race made in the image of the last Adam, our elder brother Jesus.

And we are free! Free to live life to the full because we have no fear of punishment or death. When death comes, we go home to the Father’s house to dwell with Him forever. And we die in the hope of resurrection because our Brother, Jesus, rose from the dead – and He is the firstfuits of the resurrection and the guarantee that we, too, will rise again.

Ebenezer Family Church

HE IS RISEN!