The Old Things are Passed Away

           

          I am thanking God today for 28 years of victory over the devil.  I have a new life, a new heart; I am a new creation in Christ Jesus.  I was born into the family of God in August of 1982.  I spent my first 19 years not knowing God at all.  I was person that was hostile to Christ.  Of late, God has brought back to my mind my old life, how bad off I used to be and it only makes me rejoice about the change in my life today.  My old life is passed away—gone.  The scripture talks of walking in the “newness of life”.  When you go to the store and they say something is new, you expect that it has not been used by anyone else; it is fresh from the factory.  If you found out you’d bought a used product that you thought was new,  you would take it back.  I would.  New means new.

       A new life is not something that can be manufactured or imitated it has to be given through Jesus Christ.

     As I said, I was hostile to Christ.  If someone were passing out bible tracts, I would purposely go the other way, not because I was ashamed of what I was doing, but because I thought they were silly and beneath me, I did not want to talk with anyone about God or hear any of their testimonies—waste of time to me—embarrassing fanatics. There was a young girl I went to high school with who was saved in the next block.  One day I was riding my bike on a Sunday morning.  She yelled out to me, “You should be in church, Renee.”  She was right, but “how dare she” was my attitude, “It’s none of her business what I do with my time”.  I did not want to talk about God, period.  My sister gotten saved before me, and she used to try and talk to me about the bible and quoted scriptures.  I hated being around her.  When she started talking about God, I would get angry and go to my usual hide out—my room.  One day I was so angry, about something she said, I was in tears.  God said to me, “why do you hate me?, why do you hate your sister?”  I couldn’t answer the question as I lay there in my bed, with tears in my eyes.  Why did I hate her and not want to be around her?  She had not really done anything wrong?  I did not realize it at the time but the Word of God she was using was shining the light on my sins, sins I was not willing to repent of.

     I told God that night that I had things I wanted to do.  I was 16 and didn’t want to stop doing anything wrong and sinful because well that would be embarrassing to be a “holy roller”, as they used to call them back in the day. I turned God down that day, and rolled over in my bed crying.   However, in the next three years my life went downhill, got worse and not better.  I did things I said I would never do and went places in my heart and in my life, I said I would never go.  The devil took away my resolve and any integrity that I thought I had.  I was embarrassed about some of the people I was hanging around in college, drug dealers and users, some medical students started their pharmacy classes early if you know what I mean.   I was educated but full of sin.

      Sometimes, you think you will be embarrassed by being so dedicated to God, but I realized the devil was the one really embarrassing me.  The more I followed my own ways and did what I wanted to do, the more stupid mistakes I was making, bad moves in my personal life and definitely not getting closer to God at all. Often people think that just because they have made some good decisions and done some good things, that everything is alright spiritually, that is not always the case.  We need to look into the Bible and see how God feels about how we are living, not our own assessment.

     So, I struck a deal with God, which you really can’t do on equal terms, but to make myself feel better, I played a game with God.  “Ok.  I’ll start going to church.  I may even get baptized again”, which I promptly did.  There was church down the street from my house.  I walked in and told them I wanted to get baptized again, because I thought that would solve this problem between me and God.  You see, I grew up in house full of lies and was taught to lie from an early age, so it was really nothing for me to lie to myself.  So now that I was baptized, I’m a Christian right?  Wrong!  Now that I am a member of a fine upstanding church and joined a few clubs, I’m ok now.  Wrong again.  God was so merciful to me, because he was patient.  I did not have Christ, and He did not allow the devil to take my life in this unsaved, deceived state I was in, thinking I had done a great job by joining church.  God just gently started to deal with me over the next 2 years that there was more to salvation than this.  I started to look around me one Sunday and the choir was rockin’ and the church was beautiful and preacher fiery but I was not saved.  God began to bring to my mind one question that kept bugging me “how do you live holy?”  I would ask people who were long standing members at church and they would say “I don’t know what you’re looking for, no one is perfect”.  So I started to figure there was not much more, but I could not really believe that this is all there was to serving God because on the inside, I was not satisfied with my life.  Oh yeah, the sin thing.  I was still sinning away from church, I didn’t smoke the drugs but I was still doing a WHOLE LOT of other things.  I had just become a religious sinner.

     I asked God was there anyone living right and God answered by prayer and I met a girl in college who was truly saved, she led me to Christ.  I was in my room at home, by myself, I told God that I was tired of being shackled by my sins.  As I sat on the bed, god told me “I’ll keep you free from sin”.  Then the Lord showed me two scriptures I did not know were in the bible. I John 3:8-9 and I John 1:7.  I yielded to God at that moment, repented of my past life and sins and God forgave me and gave me this new life and I have been living for Christ. Not once did I ever have to go back to my old life, old sins, old friends,  God cleansed me and gave me power to live right and say no to wrong.  He took away from me the spirit of lying that I had so much trouble with, and He will do the same for whatever sins you are dealing with.    If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, the old things are passed away, and behold all things are become new. Praise the Lord!

 

 

Good Old Fashioned Repentance

In a house with three noisy children, somebody seemingly always has to repent. As a mother, I am constantly forcing, teeth-grinding apologies out of my children.  I have heard from some parents, that they don't bother to make children apologize if they're not really sorry. Whether I am using the Dr. Phil method of child raising or not, I'm not sure, but I can get answers quicker sometimes just praying for and communicating with my children.

My middle child who is the most inquisitive of my three children, asked me about this "forced" apology thing one day.
.
"Why do I have to apologize, if I'm not even sorry?" My son asked glaring sideways at his little brother.

"Because you hurt his feelings" I said. " It's as simple as that.  The issue is not you all the time, it's sometimes just the right thing to do." I said, surprised that I actually had an answer--well --to anything this boy asked. It was a stimulating question.  Should you do what you feel (leave his brother hanging) which may be more honest, or just do what is right, and maybe feel dishonest?

My son with his usual smirk said "But Mom, isn't this lying?  Are you a precious saint of God, telling me to lie? I'm not sorry, he's a crybaby".


"Okay smarty, do we always do things based on how we feel?"  I said."When you hurt someone, you owe them, even if you feel they are a crybaby. Am I right?"

Then I launched into a list of things that I did not "feel" like doing either, picking up his clothes, reminding him about homework, and oh, I don't know, cooking his dinner---and this was more trouble than it was worth to him to keep this argument going. So.....case closed. This is a lesson in how to win an argument by guilt--Mothering 101.

This conversation  though (he did grudgingly apologize) made me think.

If I get angry and knock a plate out of someone's hand, I owe them an apology even if I think I am justified.   Have you ever heard someone say about a former inmate, "they paid their debt"?  Joe Jailbird can be unremorseful, he's not quite feeling the repentance thing,  but society (the law) said he owed a debt.
Now about us and God.  We may not feel we owe a debt to God, but the debt still exists every time we do wrong. The debt is piling up.   President Obama did not create the debt, but the debt became his responsibility once he took office. We become debtors  and take on responsibility for that liability once we realize that we are doing wrong. 

 A child may take cookies from a forbidden cookie jar and proudly come into the room with cookie crumbs all over his shirt.  He does not understand his actions. He is not trying to hide.  But once that child tries to hide what he is doing, he has become aware of wrongdoing and needs to apologize for his wrong.

We are responsible to God for our sins once he notifies us of the wrong we have committed against him.  Actually this happens pretty early in our life, so most of us are living off of credit. Unfortunately, we inherited this balance which only the blood of Christ can pay off for us.  It gets cleared by repentance.  The old chapter 7 bankruptcies used to do this.  God has something better.

In the bible, repent is to"turn" from wrong to do what is right; to turn so completely that I stop the action that led to the debt and go the opposite way.  No one would believe that a person has repented or is sorry if they continue to perform the offense...would you? 

Something to think about...


---Let's Live Holy---

What is the Old Path?

So I guess you are wondering exactly what is the Old Path?  

The Old Path is what all Christians need to get back to! 

We live in the American age of the "mega church".   A mega church can have 100,000 members, but if none of them is living a holy life, what is the point? 

God calls people out of sin to a holy life.  He takes them from the kingdom of darkness to the light.  The old path is holiness.

Do you have to be Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama or a monk in a monastery to be holy?  Not according to the bible.  Being holy is obtained through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.  Many churches teach the St. Augustine view that holiness is something imputed to us through Christ's work on the cross.  In other words  YOU CAN'T REALLY BE HOLY.    But God never asked anything that was impossible.   Christ is our righteousness, but  he also gives us power to actually live right and overcome wrong.   Holiness is not just something we dream of as a believer, but it is imparted to our lives through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

MY TESTIMONY

The Lord saved me in 1982  while attending the University of Chicago, (a hot bed of agnosticism) and to top things off,  I was a member of a mega church on the South Side of Chicago under a now infamous Pastor of national fame. Still, I found no peace.  Why? I was still carrying a load of sins. I had a whole barn full of things I was doing in my non-church life.  I think they call this "hypocrisy". 

The point is, I was going to a church where holy living was something that no one  seemed to expect nor was it taught as being a reality.  However,  through all of this, God started dealing with me about living a holy life.  I asked people at church who had been Christians longer than I had, "how do you live holy?"  None of them seemed to know.  Their response was, "nobody can be perfect", which was not what I was looking for. My soul was at stake and I needed answers.  I would have settled for staying out of trouble with God for one day.   That would have been good enough for me.

Well, before I gave up on holiness as a pipe dream, I asked God to show me someone that was living right, because frankly, I was tired of getting on my knees every night about the same sins.  "There has to be something better than this" I thought.  I was so frustrated with myself "why can't I stop doing things that I know are wrong?  Why do I keep giving in?"  God was faithful to me and heard my prayer for help.  I met a young lady in my Calculus class  who was serious about being saved--unlike me.

She was not the "I just go to church, attend bible study but I have two boyfriends and some weed in my pocket" saved", but REALLY saved from her sins.  I wanted what she had, so I followed her up.  I heard messages that convicted me of my sins.  I told God that I was tired of living this double life and that I wanted real salvation.  Mind you,  I thought I was a Christian anyway because I believed in God, Christ and all that,  and went to church; but God showed me three scriptures that I did not even know were in the bible:

I John 3:8-9 (He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.  Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.)

and

 I John 1:9 (If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness)

God saved me in my room at home, and no one had to tell me that a change had taken place in my heart.  I knew God had cleansed me, forgave and delivered me from my sins.


Come back again and I will tell you more....