It's been a quiet week up here. I've spoken with several people about what I posted here last weekend, but I haven't gotten any questions answered, either - except from a book I've been reading for the sunday school class I'm taking this winter.
"The Christian life is lived by the supernatural power of God. According to Romans 8:10-13, as we have just seen, living this life required the resurrection of a spiritually dead body. God's Spirit alone can perform this miracle."
"Six Secrets of the Christian Life" by Zane Hodges
This is where I misunderstood. I took "God's Spirit alone can perform" to an extreme. I thought that God didn't need, or want, my efforts to change. God didn't even want me to try to be a good Christian. I thought that God would simply change me from sinful to sanctified whenever He felt like it. I was in some kind of "Christian holding pattern" until God called me for some work, at which time he would call me out and start making me holy and a good Christian.
In brief, I thought that since I was saved, it doesn't matter what I did anymore - I could not make myself into a good Christian. NOTHING I did was helping; It was ALL God's doing, and I could just sit around and twiddle my thumbs until He called for me personally.
"But how does the Spirit of God do this? Naturally, one answer is "by His power." But how does He bring this power to bear upon a Christian individual?"
"But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord."
2 Cor. 3:18
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2 comments:
I hope you find the answers Randy.
The Bible is full of verses promising us that if we seek we will Find.
Here is a passage from Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It is from the chapter on sexual purity, but it covers all kinds of virtues, as the passage itself notes. It has been encouraging to me and will hopefully be encouraging to you as well.
"We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity-like perfect charity-will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection."
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