Tenchi
Member
Love:
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (NASB)
1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
Love, godly love, is the ground out of which all obedience to God is to arise. To love God with one's entire being is the First and Great Commandment (Matthew 22:36-38). As the apostle Paul wrote in the quotation above, love (first for God and then for others) is so essential to godly living that it MUST serve as the prime motivation for ALL the Christian says, knows or does. If it doesn't, all the Christian does is useless spiritually.
Why is this? Why is love for God so necessary to a life that truly pleases Him? Well, part of the answer has to do with how God has made us: We follow our desires; the stronger the desire, the more we orient our lives around the pursuit of that desire. God wants us to desire Him; more precisely, He wants us to desire to know Him, and to live in fellowship with Him, and to serve Him joyfully, as He made us to do. But, we desire our own way, our own goals, and ideas, and self-gratification. In other words, we love ourselves. And when we do, we can't properly love God.
As Paul has explained, however, Christian living that doesn't arise from obedience to the First and Great Commandment, from a whole-being love for God, however moral and positive it is, remains spiritually useless.
Faith:
Hebrews 11:6 (NASB)
6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
If the disciple of Christ will not trust what God has said about Himself in His word, that what He has promised to His children He will fulfill, that what He has declared about the spiritual nature of His children is so, they cannot know and walk with Him. "We walk (with God) by faith, not by sight," Paul the apostle wrote (2 Corinthians 5:7). There is no way around doing so - especially since the One with whom we hope to commune is a Spirit, immaterial and inaccessible to our physical senses and thus to the testing and verification we constantly make of reality through them. In God's economy of things, too, we must always first believe and then receive. When the believer trusts in the "exceeding great and precious promises" God has made to all His adopted children (2 Peter 1:3-4), when they "continue in the faith, firmly established and steadfast" (Colossians 1:22-23), it is then that they come to experience, more and more over time, the truth of what they have believed. There is no other way to walk rightly with God.
Holiness:
1 Peter 3:10-12 (NASB)
10 For, "The one who desires life, to love and see good days, must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit.
11 "He must turn away from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it.
12 "For the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and His ears attend to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."
"If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me," the Psalmist wrote (Psalm 66:18). As the voice of God to Israel, the prophet Isaiah wrote, "Your sins have separated you from me so that I will not hear" (Isaiah 59:2). Any disciple of Christ who expects to have a deep, transformative, joyful experience of God cannot do so with a life crowded with sin, worldliness (James 4:4; 1 John 2:15; 2 Corinthians 6:14-18) and "weights" (Hebrews 12:1). Worship and service to God from a life of sin is rejected by God. It is all "smoke in His nostrils" (Isaiah 65:1-5). Too often, though, believers sing praises to God on a Sunday morning from lives that "stink," their praises foul lies flowing from unclean lips. Or they teach a Sunday School class, or volunteer at the local street mission, while their hearts are far from God, occupied with secret sins, or offenses and bitterness, or temper and pride, that they've indulged for years. Or they have lied to themselves and come to believe that their sin is no big deal to God, really, that He is okay with a little bit of wickedness here and there. But, as Peter wrote in the quotation above, "the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."
Submission:
James 4:6-10 (NASB)
6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, "GOD IS OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE."
7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
9 Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom.
10 Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.
The Christian can stand before God in only one of two basic states: rebellion or submission. If a born-again believer is not consciously, explicitly submitted to God throughout each day, s/he is in rebellion to Him. God resists the rebel (James 4:6-7; 1 Peter 5:5), and will not fill any rebel with Himself and all the amazing things that He is. Many times, however, Christians are "busy for God," pleading for His help, preaching His truth, and praying for others when they have never consciously said to God, as Jesus did in Gethsemane, "not my will but yours be done" (Matthew 26:39-42; Luke 22:42) presenting themselves a "living sacrifice" to Him (Romans 12:1; Romans 6:13-22).
These, then, are the essentials of the Christian faith, the necessary predicates to walking well with God. Are they well-established in your life, the "building blocks" of your walk with God?
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (NASB)
1 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.
Love, godly love, is the ground out of which all obedience to God is to arise. To love God with one's entire being is the First and Great Commandment (Matthew 22:36-38). As the apostle Paul wrote in the quotation above, love (first for God and then for others) is so essential to godly living that it MUST serve as the prime motivation for ALL the Christian says, knows or does. If it doesn't, all the Christian does is useless spiritually.
Why is this? Why is love for God so necessary to a life that truly pleases Him? Well, part of the answer has to do with how God has made us: We follow our desires; the stronger the desire, the more we orient our lives around the pursuit of that desire. God wants us to desire Him; more precisely, He wants us to desire to know Him, and to live in fellowship with Him, and to serve Him joyfully, as He made us to do. But, we desire our own way, our own goals, and ideas, and self-gratification. In other words, we love ourselves. And when we do, we can't properly love God.
As Paul has explained, however, Christian living that doesn't arise from obedience to the First and Great Commandment, from a whole-being love for God, however moral and positive it is, remains spiritually useless.
Faith:
Hebrews 11:6 (NASB)
6 And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
If the disciple of Christ will not trust what God has said about Himself in His word, that what He has promised to His children He will fulfill, that what He has declared about the spiritual nature of His children is so, they cannot know and walk with Him. "We walk (with God) by faith, not by sight," Paul the apostle wrote (2 Corinthians 5:7). There is no way around doing so - especially since the One with whom we hope to commune is a Spirit, immaterial and inaccessible to our physical senses and thus to the testing and verification we constantly make of reality through them. In God's economy of things, too, we must always first believe and then receive. When the believer trusts in the "exceeding great and precious promises" God has made to all His adopted children (2 Peter 1:3-4), when they "continue in the faith, firmly established and steadfast" (Colossians 1:22-23), it is then that they come to experience, more and more over time, the truth of what they have believed. There is no other way to walk rightly with God.
Holiness:
1 Peter 3:10-12 (NASB)
10 For, "The one who desires life, to love and see good days, must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit.
11 "He must turn away from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it.
12 "For the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous, and His ears attend to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."
"If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me," the Psalmist wrote (Psalm 66:18). As the voice of God to Israel, the prophet Isaiah wrote, "Your sins have separated you from me so that I will not hear" (Isaiah 59:2). Any disciple of Christ who expects to have a deep, transformative, joyful experience of God cannot do so with a life crowded with sin, worldliness (James 4:4; 1 John 2:15; 2 Corinthians 6:14-18) and "weights" (Hebrews 12:1). Worship and service to God from a life of sin is rejected by God. It is all "smoke in His nostrils" (Isaiah 65:1-5). Too often, though, believers sing praises to God on a Sunday morning from lives that "stink," their praises foul lies flowing from unclean lips. Or they teach a Sunday School class, or volunteer at the local street mission, while their hearts are far from God, occupied with secret sins, or offenses and bitterness, or temper and pride, that they've indulged for years. Or they have lied to themselves and come to believe that their sin is no big deal to God, really, that He is okay with a little bit of wickedness here and there. But, as Peter wrote in the quotation above, "the face of the Lord is against those who do evil."
Submission:
James 4:6-10 (NASB)
6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, "GOD IS OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE."
7 Submit therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
9 Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom.
10 Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you.
The Christian can stand before God in only one of two basic states: rebellion or submission. If a born-again believer is not consciously, explicitly submitted to God throughout each day, s/he is in rebellion to Him. God resists the rebel (James 4:6-7; 1 Peter 5:5), and will not fill any rebel with Himself and all the amazing things that He is. Many times, however, Christians are "busy for God," pleading for His help, preaching His truth, and praying for others when they have never consciously said to God, as Jesus did in Gethsemane, "not my will but yours be done" (Matthew 26:39-42; Luke 22:42) presenting themselves a "living sacrifice" to Him (Romans 12:1; Romans 6:13-22).
These, then, are the essentials of the Christian faith, the necessary predicates to walking well with God. Are they well-established in your life, the "building blocks" of your walk with God?
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