Thought of the Day: I think we all know that doing bad things is bad. You know lying about our age, ladies, lying about how big that fish was, men. Driving faster than the speed limit, getting “free” cable and kicking the dog when we’re mad. There’s more but I think that runs the gamut. That’s all external stuff, the stuff that we do. When we regulate our lives based on what we externally or physically do we fall into this line of thinking and way of life called legalism. Our faith ends up based on the rule of God rather than the grace of God. Yet it’s so easy to fall into it, because it’s the physical or the external that we and others see. That’s one reason given for the increase in born and raised Americans converting to Islam; Islam, at its core, is a legalistic religion. But Christianity is not. Christianity at its core is a grace based religion that recognizes that there are only two ways to live: under the law or under grace. You can’t have it both ways. We either live by the rule of God or the grace of God. Yet even if we live under grace, we need the Holy Spirit to change us into the people that God saved us to be; namely into the image of the Son, Jesus. That’s not necessarily, right off the bat, an outward change. The Spirit’s work is primarily and inward subjugation of the sin that controls us. One of the Spirit’s primary jobs is to sanctify, or clean us up inside. From a clean inside, our external actions become sanctified, or cleaned up as well. When this happens we are living in the Spirit under the grace of God. It’s nothing we do, but the Spirit who lives in us doing his job. The writer of Psalm 19 hits the nail on the head when he says, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” When the heart is aligned and acceptable to God, the words that flow will also be acceptable. Therefore (from yesterday’s post, if you read it), we need to encourage others to look as God looks. Not on the outside, but on the inside, allowing people to be sanctified by the Spirit, rather than be held to our legalism of rules. Where are you? Are you living under the rule of God? Or under the grace of God? Grace is a lot better and the rewards are a lot more fulfilling. A song by Casting Crowns called “Does Anybody Hear Her” speaks to this need to encourage the inward cleaning, rather than the outward rule holding. Check out the link below. youtube/watch?v=OEhRucEVzH8
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 15:27:28 +0000