God has been waiting in His patience to have the people He loves - actually love Him in return. He sent His Son (Jesus Christ) to pay the price for our sins. He sent His Word and His Spirit into the world to lead us to Him self and to enable us to be obedient to Him through a growing love for Him – a love which He provides through His Grace for anyone willing to repent and turn to Him. But now God is done waiting.
Instead of returning all our love to God as He requires, we (the church) have ended up loving ourselves and everything else more then Him. God wants to give us all the spiritual riches of Him self, but instead the church has chosen to love the riches of this devilish earthly realm. He wanted to give us authority over all the earth, but instead we have decided to go the easy way and be a slave to the devil’s authority. God wanted to give us an eternity of everlasting life in glory with Him, but instead the church has chosen an eternity of death by being satisfied with what only this life could offer – even these things are temporary and will parish in fire. The church has not been humbled before God and has not made Him Lord, but instead has chosen ourselves to be our own god.
Now is the time for God’s wrath! God will no longer hold back the great consequences of our sins. We have loved money and depended on money instead of depending on Him. God will now pull those mighty dollars right from under our feet – to show us all that we have been blind and deceived. The worldly church deserves an eternity in hell, unless we fully humble ourselves and repent of all our evil desires.
God wanted and made everything possible for a pure righteous church to brightly shine His glory to all the nations, but we have turned the church into a mockery of God. The church has turned into a religion of man’s likes and understandings, instead of a glorious lighthouse pointing to and serving Him. Instead of the church being set apart for God’s glory and purpose, it has become dark like the rest of this selfish and evil world. Today’s church on a whole has become the enemy of God, because it has become friends with the world and shares in its selfish, sinful and evil schemes.
James 4:4-5 - You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
The church has committed adultery – it has loved the world instead of staying with the church’s one true love, which is God. We say we love God, but almost all our time is spent loving the world and what it has to offer. We don’t only absorb ourselves into the selfish love with this world, but we also teach our children these same evil desires that God hates.
God is angry with the so called “church”. God is truth and all truth originates with God, but the church has turned His precious Gospel into a deception that is now preached from most pulpits to have people believe these lies as being the truth. Over the centuries the Gospel has been lightened up and changed so much that it no longer has saving powers. The Gospel was changed so that more people would come into the church and not be offended by hearing that their life style was filled with sin. Because these lies have been preached for centuries now, they have been believed as truth and have replaced the true Gospel – even though the Bible has many, many conflicts with this new fake gospel. This new gospel teaches that we don’t have to live a holy and righteous life by the power of God’s grace; instead it teaches that we just have to try to live holy and righteous. This new gospel teaches we can never live a holy and righteous life, so we can only try and when we try, we will fail. This makes God angry. God did not send His Son to die on the cross and send His Spirit into the world so we would still be bound to live a sinful life like the Old Testament Jews. Because of this false gospel teaching, most of our churches are filled with unconverted partial believers. What a blind worldly church we have become. The church has become an abomination to God.
The worldly church we see today no longer loves God’s Word. The church has taken and accepted the scriptures they want to believe in and have rejected all the rest of God’s Word. By doing this, we have rejected God. The Word and God are inseparable. The Word is God and the Word describes God. If we have the Word in our hearts, then we have God in our hearts. But because today’s church only believes a part of God’s Word, this results in people only having a part of God inside them instead of the fullness of God. The only way to heaven is having a fullness of God in your heart – not partial.
God says He will return to judge the world when it is like the days of the great flood.
Matt 24:37-39 - As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood , people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.
Before the flood, God could not find enough righteous people, so He killed them all except Noah and his family. Do you think all those unrighteous people He killed went to heaven? That is how it is now. There are so few people living holy and righteous lives before God. This is why God wrath is coming upon us. We have chosen death and that is what God is sending to us.
God sees a very small percentage of true believers in most individual churches. These believers have searched and found God even though they have been surrounded by lies. He is calling these true believers to study His Word and bring back the truth to the church or they might also be caught in the devil’s trap of lies and be lost forever along with the rest of their unrighteous friends. If these worldly churches are unwilling to listen to God’s truth, then leave those people. It is better to come out from under the lies of these worldly churches and become and stay a part of the true remnant church of God – even if this means you must stand alone for God by doing this.
2 Cor 6:14-15 - Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever?
God’s Servant,
Michael Reid
Showing posts with label dead to sin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dead to sin. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Our goal is to be Christ like
The Bible says we need to become Christ like.
Rom 8:29 NIV - For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.
How can we become Christ like in every thing we do if we are all sinners. I will try to show you by God’s Word how this is possible through God’s grace filling up and working in your life. With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
We can never be Christ because there is only one Christ. We will never be God, with all the infinite knowledge, wisdom, majestic power that God possesses, but from His Spirit we receive everything we need to live a perfected righteous life before God. We don’t need to be Christ to live a perfect Christian life. God sends just the right amount of grace we need to live the life God expects us to live. (This part of grace is the Holy Spirit working in and through us)
When someone has come to the point of being Christ like, it’s because God has filled that person with an extra filling of the His Spirit. It is this extra filling of the Sprit that enables them to ward off any temptation of sinning. This enables the Christian to live a sinless life before God and his fellow man as long as that person stays living by the Sprit. This perfection of our heart has been called “Entire Sanctification”, “Christian Perfection”, and “Victorious Living” depending on the denominational belief.
But, how can we still call ourselves sinners and live a life without sin? It’s because we realize we still live in this fleshly body which will continue to tempt us with selfish and prideful thoughts, but with the Holy Spirit’s empowerment in us we can stop any temptation before it manifests into a sin. You can think of this empowerment as the armor of God.
Eph 6:11 NIV - Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes.
Living our life without sinning is not of man’s nature but only of God’s nature in us. Think about this hypothetical example: lets take a man living a sinless life by the power of the Spirit and then if God would decide to take His Spirit away from this righteous man, temptation would easily overtake him and that man would be totally lost and a slave to sin as much as any unbeliever. This is why we have to live by the Spirit and only by the Spirit.
Rom 8:6 NIV - The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.
Our fleshly physical body will always be corrupted with the nature of sin and this corrupted body must end in physical death, but the body is only a temporary housing for our spiritual soul. If our spirit and soul has been totally cleansed and sanctified by God’s Spirit, we will have the power to take control over the body even though the body is spiritually dead in Christ.
Rom 8:10 NIV - But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.
What enables a person to live a life without sin is a full filling of His Spirit and living continually by the Spirit to persevere to the end. To be truly born again and receive this extra filling of the Holy Spirit, a person must become a true Christian by dedicating all of themselves to God. This extra filling of the Spirit is not the Spirit that comes upon an individual when they first believe (justification); where God’s seed is planted and with the Spirit’s help it grows to a mature plant. This extra filling of the Spirit happens after a person has let God’s Spirit sanctify them into a mature holy plant ready to produce Godly fruit. (I will talk more about this in another message, which is “Becoming a true Christian is a process”.) The Bible says that a person that is still struggling with sin has not yet come to the point of being a total living sacrifice for God. Where that person is not yet willing to spill his/her blood for His Glory.
Heb 12:4-5 NIV - In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
1 Peter 4:1-2 NIV - Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin.
Most people have been taught and believe that living a life without sinning is not a possibility in this life. I want to crush that deception and have people’s faith become full so everyone will not be hindered anymore by this lie of the devil. If anyone continues to believe this lie, they might not ever mature to the point of true and total faith in God. Faith in God’s truth is what unlocks the Spirit’s power. When a person does not have enough faith to believe in this “Entire Sanctification” concept, they are really saying they don’t believe in God’s Word or the power of God. The Bible says when a person is truly born again, that person will not sin.
1 John 5:4 NIV - For everyone born of God overcomes the world.
1 John 5:18 NKJV - We know that whoever is born of God does not sin.
1 John 3:9 NKJV - Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.
When we are truly born again believers, we will not sin because we no longer will have the desire to sin. The Holy Spirit changes our desires of our heart so our desires are no longer selfish and of worldly intensions, but only desires to love God and others exist in our heart. Selfishness is gone. When the only thing that exists in our heart is God’s love, there is no room left for wanting anything sinful. Because of this total change of desires from evil to good, we are then no longer controlled or slaves to sin, but have become slaves to loving God and others.
Rom 8:9 NIV - You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.
Rom 6:18 NIV - You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
Because we are no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to righteousness, we now have no choice but to live righteous lives. Just as before we were born again, we were slaves to sin, now after being born again we can’t help our selves but to do God’s good work he calls us to.
Rom 6:14 NIV - For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Luke 6:43 NIV - No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.
When we are true Christians or born again, we are no longer bound to the old self/sinful nature. We are set free from the power of sin. This is the great news of the gospel. We are finally able to be free from the bondage of sin. By our willingness to be totally devoted in obedience to God by the power of His Spirit, He is then able to nail our old sinful nature to the cross.
John 8:36 NIV - So if the Son sets you free , you will be free indeed.
Rom 6:6-7 NIV - For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin - because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Rom 6:11 NIV - In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
There are many, many more scriptures encouraging us that living a perfected life is possible in Christ. This life we are currently living on earth is the place God has setup for us to make the choice to follow Him and be sanctified to the point of Christian perfection that He requires to be worthy of His eternal kingdom.
Matt 10:38 NIV - anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
1 Thess 2:11-12 NIV - For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
May God’s grace be with you – Michael Reid
Rom 8:29 NIV - For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son.
How can we become Christ like in every thing we do if we are all sinners. I will try to show you by God’s Word how this is possible through God’s grace filling up and working in your life. With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
We can never be Christ because there is only one Christ. We will never be God, with all the infinite knowledge, wisdom, majestic power that God possesses, but from His Spirit we receive everything we need to live a perfected righteous life before God. We don’t need to be Christ to live a perfect Christian life. God sends just the right amount of grace we need to live the life God expects us to live. (This part of grace is the Holy Spirit working in and through us)
When someone has come to the point of being Christ like, it’s because God has filled that person with an extra filling of the His Spirit. It is this extra filling of the Sprit that enables them to ward off any temptation of sinning. This enables the Christian to live a sinless life before God and his fellow man as long as that person stays living by the Sprit. This perfection of our heart has been called “Entire Sanctification”, “Christian Perfection”, and “Victorious Living” depending on the denominational belief.
But, how can we still call ourselves sinners and live a life without sin? It’s because we realize we still live in this fleshly body which will continue to tempt us with selfish and prideful thoughts, but with the Holy Spirit’s empowerment in us we can stop any temptation before it manifests into a sin. You can think of this empowerment as the armor of God.
Eph 6:11 NIV - Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes.
Living our life without sinning is not of man’s nature but only of God’s nature in us. Think about this hypothetical example: lets take a man living a sinless life by the power of the Spirit and then if God would decide to take His Spirit away from this righteous man, temptation would easily overtake him and that man would be totally lost and a slave to sin as much as any unbeliever. This is why we have to live by the Spirit and only by the Spirit.
Rom 8:6 NIV - The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.
Our fleshly physical body will always be corrupted with the nature of sin and this corrupted body must end in physical death, but the body is only a temporary housing for our spiritual soul. If our spirit and soul has been totally cleansed and sanctified by God’s Spirit, we will have the power to take control over the body even though the body is spiritually dead in Christ.
Rom 8:10 NIV - But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.
What enables a person to live a life without sin is a full filling of His Spirit and living continually by the Spirit to persevere to the end. To be truly born again and receive this extra filling of the Holy Spirit, a person must become a true Christian by dedicating all of themselves to God. This extra filling of the Spirit is not the Spirit that comes upon an individual when they first believe (justification); where God’s seed is planted and with the Spirit’s help it grows to a mature plant. This extra filling of the Spirit happens after a person has let God’s Spirit sanctify them into a mature holy plant ready to produce Godly fruit. (I will talk more about this in another message, which is “Becoming a true Christian is a process”.) The Bible says that a person that is still struggling with sin has not yet come to the point of being a total living sacrifice for God. Where that person is not yet willing to spill his/her blood for His Glory.
Heb 12:4-5 NIV - In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
1 Peter 4:1-2 NIV - Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin.
Most people have been taught and believe that living a life without sinning is not a possibility in this life. I want to crush that deception and have people’s faith become full so everyone will not be hindered anymore by this lie of the devil. If anyone continues to believe this lie, they might not ever mature to the point of true and total faith in God. Faith in God’s truth is what unlocks the Spirit’s power. When a person does not have enough faith to believe in this “Entire Sanctification” concept, they are really saying they don’t believe in God’s Word or the power of God. The Bible says when a person is truly born again, that person will not sin.
1 John 5:4 NIV - For everyone born of God overcomes the world.
1 John 5:18 NKJV - We know that whoever is born of God does not sin.
1 John 3:9 NKJV - Whoever has been born of God does not sin, for His seed remains in him; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.
When we are truly born again believers, we will not sin because we no longer will have the desire to sin. The Holy Spirit changes our desires of our heart so our desires are no longer selfish and of worldly intensions, but only desires to love God and others exist in our heart. Selfishness is gone. When the only thing that exists in our heart is God’s love, there is no room left for wanting anything sinful. Because of this total change of desires from evil to good, we are then no longer controlled or slaves to sin, but have become slaves to loving God and others.
Rom 8:9 NIV - You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.
Rom 6:18 NIV - You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.
Because we are no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to righteousness, we now have no choice but to live righteous lives. Just as before we were born again, we were slaves to sin, now after being born again we can’t help our selves but to do God’s good work he calls us to.
Rom 6:14 NIV - For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.
Luke 6:43 NIV - No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.
When we are true Christians or born again, we are no longer bound to the old self/sinful nature. We are set free from the power of sin. This is the great news of the gospel. We are finally able to be free from the bondage of sin. By our willingness to be totally devoted in obedience to God by the power of His Spirit, He is then able to nail our old sinful nature to the cross.
John 8:36 NIV - So if the Son sets you free , you will be free indeed.
Rom 6:6-7 NIV - For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin - because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Rom 6:11 NIV - In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
There are many, many more scriptures encouraging us that living a perfected life is possible in Christ. This life we are currently living on earth is the place God has setup for us to make the choice to follow Him and be sanctified to the point of Christian perfection that He requires to be worthy of His eternal kingdom.
Matt 10:38 NIV - anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
1 Thess 2:11-12 NIV - For you know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls you into his kingdom and glory.
May God’s grace be with you – Michael Reid
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)