9361	Forums / Main Forum / Help For Recovering Legalists	on: March 17, 2006, 08:28:03 AM
I agree with you Joe, its really the deli-ma of the story of the prodigal son. If we go to one extreme we will become hedonistic, and if we go to the other extreme we will get back under the law and become legalistic and all of this christian life will become a burden.  I think the point of the story is what is our relationship with the Father? How do we view God, as Father. Now if we view Him as a hard task master even tho we are in the house we will develop a spirit of bitterness. If we view our Father as impersonal we will draw our joys from pleasures of the world and live it up so to speak. It is always about relationship, and in a sense all of this intellectual challenge is worthless unless we are changed from the inside and it flows out of us. The number one question  that we are not going to extremes is to ask what is my chief desire? What pleases me the most? Is it something other than my relationship with the Father? This is all so complicated and yet so simple. I mean we are in a state of eternal life in our relationship with the Father, that is we have been regenerated by the Holy Spirit. We have been given new life, real deep desires for God. And yet having existing sin we are in a war for subsisting in the reality of our relationship with the Father. So really our worse enemy is not any object, or person but it is ourselves, and how we view reality. We are to examine ourselves in all of this, and yet we are not to do it as if the law were our schoolmaster. We are to be joyful, but not as if it was our working up, we are to be holy but not in our own strength. We are to love others , but not as the chief desire or not in an idol way. So these things have a life of there own and the lives are really powerful in a produced way in all of us in all sorts of ways, past experiences, social status, depraved prolong lifestyles, or just lessons designed in a special way by God for our greater usage in the future. So then we here many exhortations to obey, and we all have different proclivities to react in different ways to these exhortations. And yet we are sorta thrown into different focuses based upon our proclivities mixed with just abiding sin. Yet this is all so simple, i mean it comes back to what we think about God first and then we view ourselves through that lens. The psychosis, and troubles we have in sin fade as we focus on the word and the Fathers love over shadows these trials, these inward wars, in which that focus sets us free. Once the Fathers love is experienced then we can begin to be balanced in all of this.