Friday, August 29, 2008
Divine light
Thank God that when we come to Him we come to a God who knows the beginning from the end or that He intimately knows all things. For He opens His hand all all the creatures are fed.
And since our lives begin when we are called to Him from all eternity, then our past sins are not brought to our account, since He has taken care of them for all eternity, they are not declared to be in our account as if time had a principle that could hold us down in our guilt and shame. We have busted out of time and now we stand in eternity before the all seeing eyes of God. And now we see with eyes that are beyond the past in time and our future is beyond time. Now our experience in this life is declared to be real in our position we hold in eternity. Our past is remembered no more since we are always looking to our calling, and that reality is our calling into a new view of our past. We have connections to the pre existence of that word spoken about us from the counsel of the Father into all eternity. We hear that divine call as if He is standing there telling us in a voice we can hear with our physical ears.
We know that our understanding of the present circumstances and our future plans are only as good as we can hear Him calling us into fellowship with the Spirit from our being cause to be raised up above this earthly kingdom to that heavenly kingdom where we receive from His providence. Now our future is far greater than we could ever imagine. We hear Him determine to teach us the absolute safety of all that we will need and do in the future. Since He has shown us His goodness by how He has made all these things to work in the universe, we know that if He has care for the smallest particles and the number of all of these very small things, that we being able to have a reflection of ourselves as being called from eternity past, then we are far more able to see that we are going to receive gifts far greater than we could ever imagine. So that what happens in this life is only a very small gain to our knowledge compared to growing in the knowledge of Him in all eternity.
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Joy
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Means and ends
Friday, August 8, 2008
Coalescing into the mystical union with Christ
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Justification by faith
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
The scorn of the self righteous
If the law was the principle way of experiencing freedom of the will, then how could we mortify that addiction to self righteousness? So that there is a cause of learning to live in Christ that is the opposite of the ordinary way of law keeping. The opposite way is training our desires by grace.
Substitution is the way of learning to think in a way that is beyond our understanding as a definition of having spiritual assurance and confidence in a dispositional way. It is that which in our newness of life , that we cannot focus on as our natural view of overcoming our dispositional consciousness of our legal trust. In this way we are always having a queer and odd collusion in our self reflective awareness. The truth is that we are so identified with Christ that we no longer are aware of our legal reflective habit. But we have many voices in this newness that are so familiar as having a false confidence by the physical eye toward those who are mis applying this secret habit, as the world and even the Christian world hardly ever come to the understanding of living without condemnation in the inward disposition of grace. And since there are very few examples, then we are left to overcome this disposition through many dangers and toils. This is the natural war of a liberated believer.
The purpose of the law
If man would have not eaten of the tree, then he would have been able to enjoy the tree of life as being righteous without the ability to sin. But when man gave into the temptation then he became corrupted in all of his parts and died spiritually. And in his new view of himself after his corruption man was self conscious under a new power. He was under the power of guilt ,shame and fear as a result of falling under the power of sin. Instead of seeking God out, man was thought for the first time that he could hide from God. Man was darkened in his understanding and now thought that he could live by the law. Man tried to live by the law apart from Gods forgiveness. Man became self righteous. He was so blinded by sin that he actually thought that he could and did fulfill the requirements of the law by his own works in making his own garments.
This is the state of man in his blindness. He really believes that he can be righteous by keeping the law. But God says that the law only has one function for man since man no longer has the moral ability to do moral good. The law only shows man his sin. The law works death in man. The law is made to show man his sin by awakening his conscience to its requirements condemning him by the conscience voice of condemnation. The law an the conscience bring sin to be alive. Since man really believes that he is good, the law and its requirements bring man to understand that he is not good.
Man tries to feel sorrow for breaking the law, but the law only makes man feel as if his apologies are useless. The law and the conscience work to keep man from seeking forgiveness by grace. Because man is dead in sins and trespasses, then man cannot obtain grace in order to be able to meet the requirements of the law. Man only wants to keep the law by doing something to meet the requirements and then having a view of himself that he is able in himself to receive the good graces of others and of his god by doing the requirement or something to reconcile himself that he made up for breaking it.The more he tries to obey the law the more he must quiet his conscience since the conscience can only be quieted by grace and not by works.
Man is always trying to get into Gods good graces by this work. This work apart from the Spirit of God is the cause of all false religions in the world. Man obtaining righteousness by his own way in his own time. Man cannot obtain real righteousness apart from the saving work of Christ. So that the more self righteous man tries to live by the more he is obnoxious to the work of Christ. If you live by the law you will die by the law.
Thats why man must turn to Christ, or be regenerated and made righteous by grace through faith. The only way man can enjoy true freedom is apart from the works of the law. Christ has come and has made man completely righteous by imputing His righteousness to mans account. There is no work by the law that is good enough to obtain this righteousness. This righteousness is imputed once for all. It is not given out over time, it is not according to each work of man, it is not making man righteous in himself, it does not give man the ability to obey the law. It is only by grace through faith.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Practical Atheism
We can even act the part of a fool even tho we could never be a fool since we are united with Christ. So that since our position of being in Christ is by grace, then our sins are covered by Christ, even the times when we stray and sin greatly. And since our new life is by being identified with Christ, then we are given the power to persevere by being under His authority. We are so closely related to Him in His death and resurrection by that identity, that we no longer fear punishment for our sins as those who have no hope. So that His name and authority protects us from thinking that we could ever stand in our sins as condemned even tho we are practical atheist.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Soveriegn Grace
If we believe in sovereign grace then it will have an effect on our knowledge of how we approach a holy God in our sinful condition. Since salvation is all of grace, then anything less is not true grace, but a counterfeit. And yet, it is determined by our sin in not having a true understanding of grace by our sorrow and weakness from sin, that we are not judges of the standard of scripture but that the scripture is our judge so that we all will be brought under a proper understanding of Gods sovereign grace. If you do not agree then He will show you, that is the apostles directive in the standard of the word of God alone that stands as the measure of all other truth and human relationships.
In our natural state in Adam we are not only unable to do any good but we are also dead to sin and trespasses. So that the only hope of our having a proper spiritual understanding of spiritual good is by the rule and Spirit of the word of God. We not only cannot reason our way into a spiritual understanding of grace, but we must be given a new divine knowledge in order to understand spiritual life by this sovereign grace. So that it is not by our faith that we are made alive since our human faith is dead faith. But we are also unable to will by human faith to believe. We must be given new faith in order to have a knowledge of Christ in order to place our trust in Christ as the object of our faith. Since the knowledge that is foreign to our natural state in adam, then our believing is only in our own ability. That is our object of affection is our own way. So that God must subdue our wills by destroying our old will, and make us alive through His work in order for us to be saved. It is by grace alone, that is not in anything of our selves that we are saved. We offer Him nothing accept our sin, and He gives us His grace that was determined apart from anything in us , from all eternity.
So that we see that it is not according to our own righteousness that He saved us, by according to His mercy in Christ Jesus. And in our understanding of this grace then we are made completely new by a will that was not ours, but was given to us by grace in order for us to believe in an object that was not available to us in our unregenerate state. There is no other way for us to avoid the temptation to think in all of our lives of how we approach God, to submit to Christ as the most beautiful object of our affection and to be able to worship God unfeigned as the supreme ruler of the universe if we do not completely come to hearing His voice say Who are you oh man to talk back to God ? There is no real assurance unless we are convinced of sovereign grace.
Sins deception continued
So that man loves what he creates in his own mind. And since his desire to cherish a lust has been his daily delight then man loves himself as a god. Every man has the potential to die in his atheism , if not as living without God, but practicing sin by his idols.
But the way of God is having power to exercise His will in spite of mans attempts to dethrone Him. God has spoken from eternity everything that comes into being. Since He has left us His revelation of Himself, that is natural revelation as well as special revelation, then we are only able to resist sin in these areas of casting down idols by that new life we have by His supernatural call from eternity , and not by any idea that we make to replace God as the cause of all things that come into being. If we are not totally unable to create an idea out of our own minds, then we are not able to resist the evil of an idea in ourselves. So that we rejoice in God as the cause of willing into existence all events past present and future for His own purposes of being good, for the purpose of giving Him glory. We know that He speaks nothing into being in the pleasure of our being enabled to glory in His work so that we will remain totally dependent on Him for everything.
We are saved for His glory, because He has given us a righteousness that is imputed to us as supernatural. Since we receive everything by His power over all things by Him exercising His will to do as He pleases, then we glory in that He willed our acceptance to not be anything in us, but only by the value of Christ life and death gaining the rite to rule all things. So that God might be exalted since anything that we design is always from a thing that already exist and is natural to a cause that exalts us by our pride of taking that causal glory from God. For God does not share His glory with man. And what ever good we have an understanding by is what God has declared and given by grace to us in the nature of who He is. The value of any good thing is in the nature of that thing.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Sins deception
If sin is missing the mark, then the teaching of our conscience by the law is going to lead us astray as the means to obtaining righteousness. Since temptation by the world, flesh and the devil does not only involve the attraction of the beauty of the object, but the law of the flesh in order to obtain victory over that sin as well. The world tries to convince the believer of the way of the flesh in order to obtain acceptance by God by a pride in thinking that God will reward us apart from Christ or that we bring goodness in our corrupted state.
Spiritual Desire
I am not interested in creating a blog where doctrine is impersonal. Every truth in life has a natural determination in its working on our hearts. First, we can only do according to our understanding of a particular action. And even though we are rational thinking beings and we do not always do what we know and understand is right. Yet as having a will that has a cause from desire, we follow our desires to either do the moral right or the wrong. The standard of being able is not from our resistance or our determination. The standard is our loving Him with all of our hearts and minds and wills. If we think we can accomplish anything by our resistance to the wrong, then we will be ignoring our thinking of the standard of loving Him as God. All of our lives essentially are coming before a perfectly holy God and living in the light of His will.
What is essential to our understanding of Him will determine our understanding of who we are, and what we are, as sinners with one another. Every action comes from a power that is either seen or unseen. We love Him with a power of desire that becomes our action before we actually use the means to obtain our view of our willing to work by those means, i.e. scripture work, prayer or the local church. We are being acted upon since we are fully passive in our being saved by faith and not by works, and we are fully active from the internal thought of desire. This is why we not only are saved by grace but we are enabled to do good in all of our lives by grace.
Faith is the means by which we know Him and are growing in our knowing Him more. So that in His light we see light. If we know Him, we know that we cannot do one thing without Him. Our life is living in Him by being connected to Him as a vine to the branches. We draw our life from Him in the flow of the engrafted word to our souls. Without faith it is impossible to please Him, because in believing we see how distressed we are, and how simple grace is in receiving life by Him. So we see that doing anything good comes from the nature of our relationship to Him, and our understanding of His nature in enabling us to will that which is good.
The Psalms
I have memorized the majority of the Psalms and have a practice of praying them for many years. I have learned through personal experience that the psalms are given to us so that we might keep our hearts on matters that are important and eternal.
The psalms are a relief in times of trouble, not just in experiencing the promises. We are reminded of God’s faithfulness. At the same time, there are all of these workings in our souls that we do not see, that create a working power to persevere in the promises with a longing to return for more. In this sense you will never be bored in prayer.
One of the purposes of praying and meditating on the psalms is that we are not always aware of what is really going on inside of us as the point of our anxieties, fears, or doubts. What the cries and the promises and the praises do is that they are determined to work in us by His power of will to bring out of us the reality of believing by receiving. We are always in need of these different realities of faith, in which we begin to enter His presence through the process of longing graces. Longing graces are longings that are natural to our experiencing regeneration and on to renewal. These spiritual longings are never satisfied on this earth, but rather increase. We long to see Him. We long to know Him. We long to have all of the things that come into our lives, be made straight and whole. God has given us these spiritual desires so that we might increase them. So we will not fall into sin and be tempted above that we are able.
The psalms are a place where we can take our anger, our problems, and all of our inner trials, and place them in the care of God. The psalms keep us from thinking that we can take care of these things in our own power. Since He says, when we are in trouble, we should pray. Then there is a perfect convergence of our burden to His care in the experiencing of His power by being reminded of His faithfulness by many different avenues of the accumulation of the experience of His power to longings in our past and present. By having a certain application of His assurance, our present longing is being satisfied. Praying the psalms is an experience as if I went in with a burden and came out feeling relieved.
My last explanation is very mysterious. I don’t think we can take credit as if we were fighting a personal devil by them, but we do not fight against flesh and blood. So these Psalms are given to us for our own spiritual protection and our family’s salvation and protection. And in this sense there are some very impersonal things that come as a result of these powerful cries. Since we do not know who the enemy’s minions are, or where the enemy is present, we are offered a fight that is only ours to resist and His to destroy. When we think of the attack as being in a given situation or a particular person, we have not been ridden of our personal anger in the battle. The psalms are the place where we fight by resistance and yet our heads are protected by knowing that He is taking care of all of our troubles in our defensive manner. Here is the experience of having a very strong resistance or being able to pin the enemy on a regular basis. It depends upon what the test is. And so the test becomes more and more resistant the more we are moved forward by His work. The Psalms are not an answer to our getting a victory by our own understanding. We are resisting knowing that He has a greater vision of what needs to be done and what is going to be best to protect us. He works through the means of prayer.