Reckoning the reality

Here are a few takeaways from the messages this morning at my church:

Worldly sorrow will lead us to, “I promise to do better. I promise I’ll never do it again.” It will lead us to this perception that, “God, I have done wrong, and you know what? I’ll pay for the sins that I’ve committed.”

If your sorrow leads you to think that you have to trust in your own efforts to get things right . .  . There are a lot of Christians out there when they’re struck with sorrow, they think they’re going to figure all this stuff out.  Worldly sorrow is deadly.

We so subtly, so carelessly adopt a response when we sin where the flesh says, “That’s what God wants from you.” Guilt, shame, sackcloth, ashes. “I won’t let you down this time, God. I promise.”

*****

You need to take religion, trying to get to God through what you do, and kick it to the curb because it only brings darkness and death.

You tell me, do you daily see yourself as striving to get God’s acceptance? Is it, “I’m going to do this so God will be happy with me; I’ll do this to serve Him”?

Or do you see yourself, accept yourself, in the grace of God and His invitation to be in fellowship with Him?

Our helplessness is really the lever into God’s grace. When we accept the current reality of God’s supernatural life living in us (“For me to live is Christ”) we have victory and don’t need religion.

Maybe you don’t bow to a statue somewhere or have some priest put some stuff on your head, but you can do it sitting right here in a group like this, where you live based upon your identity instead of your identity in Christ.

When you live by your identity in Christ, in decisions you make, you take the internal thinking process and think through what God’s Word says about it and if you don’t know, stop and find out.

You’ve heard me say for decades, every time I have a question or an issue, I go to Romans 12 because that chapter is the first chapter in Romans Paul gives to apply the doctrine he’s taught you. There are five relationships you have in that chapter, and you’ll find the answer or the beginning of an answer to every problem you face in that chapter.

When you accept as the current reality of who you are in Jesus Christ, not who you’re trying to be, but who you are, then that truth begins to live in you day by day.

*****

Here’s an old post and will have a new article tomorrow:

Romans 6:17 says, “But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you.”

Can the heart obey? asks Alex Kurz. Doesn’t that express one’s capacity to exercise free will? What did Proverbs say? “As a man thinks in his heart.” The way we think about things, the way we’re processing, tabulating the information, the way we’re organizing it, prioritizing it—that’s what a software program does.

“Whatever program you have, it takes the data and it processes it and organizes it and prioritizes it. When God says we’re “alive from the dead,” we now have to make a willful, conscious choice to believe what God believes about us.

Romans 10:9 says, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

Can the heart respond “yes” or “no”? Yep, I can believe or not. Verse 10 says, “For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.”

Wait a minute, if we have regenerated life, we can listen to Him. I can hear Him. He’s teaching me. How am I going to choose to think about the material? Are we going to listen to it? Obey it? If God says that old guy’s dead; are we going to believe it?

Look at what Paul says in Romans 9:2: “That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.” What’s sorrow? It’s an emotion. The heart has feelings! When Christ gives us life, look at what God ultimately says we’re supposed to do.

Romans 6:11 says, “Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

What is the key? Are we reckoning the reality of our identity in Jesus Christ to be literally so? We’ve got to be renewed in the realm of the inner man day by day. Because the old man--God says, “I cut him off!” and yet we're allowing the voice from the past to exercise dominion.

*****

I always so enjoy word origins out of curiosity I looked up the word “reckon.” It’s an accounting term. The concept of reckoning comes from an Anglo-Saxon word that has to do with a garden rake! What does a garden rake do? Don’t you bring together and heap together?

God’s saying, “Listen, I’m providing you all of the information, the details, the data.” We’re supposed to now take that information and were now bringing it together into the realm of our thought processes, kind of like an algebraic or calculus equation.

God says, “Here’s the data. Here’s the truth. Here’s the reality!” We have to bring it together into the realm of our thinking. Are we going to yield to the NEW voice?

If the Lord Jesus is teaching us something and we’re supposed to be hearing Him, where do we go? You see why studying the Scriptures is just bedrock?! Your Christian life will never be powerful and effective, and you’re not going to be more than conquerors, if you’re operating based upon what you see, hear and intuitively believe in your own heart. We’ve got to go to the outside authority called God’s Word and all of that doctrine—let’s rake it in!

*****

Romans 12:2 says, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”

Richard Jordan explains, That’s saying, “I’m not going to let the world decide how I’m going to live.” All the things of the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, the pride of life. That’s what got Adam and Eve, those are the avenues the devil tried to tempt Jesus with . . .

The lust of the flesh is the issue of pleasure. “I want to have my desires, to feel; I want to be happy. I want to gratify my desires. I want to be pleased.”

The lust of the eyes. That’s, “I want to have things.” It’s the issue of security, control.

The pride of life is that super-charged passion to BE somebody; for significance, for status, for superiority. All those things that drive us, they are the things that carry on the course of the world. Paul said, “I’m not going to let those things decide for me! That isn’t how my value system’s going to work! Because of who I am in Christ, I’m not going to live like I’m not that!”

“The transforming of your mind.” You see, it’s really a battle for your mind. And if you’re going to be surrendered to God, then the next thing is you’re going to be separated from the values of the world and separated unto the way God looks at things. And I’m going to let His thinking become my thinking.