A graphic look at the operation of grace in our lives. I was reading a Seedbed publication, This Is How We Know. that we used this last spring for a Lenten study. I was reviewing it before I move into Lent next month…. On page 128 I saw this again:
“Many of us prefer to stay at the threshold of the Christian life instead of going on to construct a soul in accordance with the new life God has put within. We fail because we are ignorant of the way we are made, we put things down to the devil instead of our own undisciplined natures. Think what we can be when we are roused!” (A quote from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest on May 20)
As JD Walt observes, “This captures the very essence of discipleship…the retrofitting of a human being with eternal life….. the people of God are arrested in development, as Chambers put it, stuck at the “threshold of the Christian life”, between the first half and the second half…
1 John 5:18- “We know that anyone born of God does not continue to sin; the One who was born of God keeps them safe, and the evil one cannot harm them.”
“It comes down to two possibilities: (1) either the New Testament is wrong, or (2) we aren’t getting it.” JD Walt, Seedbed. It is as if we profess faith in Christ and are continually yanked back and forth across the dotted line at the foot of the cross – moving back and forth in our behavior as if moving before that profession and after that profession across an imaginary line- giving into the condemning work of satan upon our emotions… feeling “saved” when we are doing well with our conduct and feeling “unsaved” when we are not…. like we’re being played back and forth the way a little rubber ball is at the end of a rubber band attached to a bolo paddle…. It’s time to put the past in the past…to know whose we are and what he has created us to be…. AND LIVE INTO IT!
