Category: New Testament

God Is Love

~ A Prayer Life ~ Leave a comment

“God is love” ~ 1 John 4:8

God will always be most holy, most just, all knowing, all powerful, all sovereign, infinite, immutable, and eternal but if God is not love – how do any of those other glorious attributes relate to us? Without God’s love, how would fallen man come to experience any of His other truly majestic attributes? It is the attribute of love that brings God down to His creature. It is His love that moves Him to deal with us through the work of redemption, not only according to His justice, wrath and judgment, but also with forgiveness, mercy and grace.

In 1 John 4:8 we read God is love. Love is not so much an attribute of God as it is His very essence.  It is not so much a moral perfection of His being as it is His being itself. He would not be God were He not love. God has loved His people from everlasting, and therefore nothing about the creature can be the cause of what is found in God from eternity. He loves from Himself:  “according to His own purpose” (cf. 2 Tim. 1:9) and it was His purpose to reconcile sinful people to Himself through the atoning death of His Son.

It is one thing to talk about God’s love in an academic or intellectual manner, but I think it is also vitally important to know God’s love experientially. I know we don’t want to base our faith on our feelings, but at the same time, we don’t want to neglect such a great blessing as actually experiencing God’s love in our life. Remember, Jesus wept. It’s ok to be moved mentally emotionally and spiritually by the thought of God’s precious, sovereign gracious and everlasting love.

~ apl

Saved By Works

~ A Prayer Life ~ 1 Comment

“Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.”

~ Matthew 5:17-18

Jesus spoke in many different ways about His divine purpose in coming to this earth. He spoke in terms of offering salvation and eternal life. He talked about gathering His people together, shepherding His sheep, tending to His flocks. But what He says right here in Matthew 5:17-18 is possibly the most important aspect of Christ’s redemptive ministry on earth – that is His perfectly fulfilling God’s Law. Because, without that, without the fulfillment of the Law, there is no redemption and therefore no salvation. So why then was it imperative that Jesus fulfill the Law of God in order to save sinners?

The reason why all are now under the curse of sin as a result of Adam’s Fall is because God did not set aside His law simply because of our failure. God did not destroy His command simply because of Adam’s inability and unwillingness to keep it. God’s holy Law abides and remains as our great moral standard. Why? Because God’s perfect Law is a reflection of His own perfect character. Therefore as through one man’s disobedience to God’s law we were all lost, it is through another man’s perfect obedience we have the way of salvation. Or to put it another way, we are most certainly saved by works, they are just not our own works, we are saved through the work of Jesus Christ in perfectly fulfilling the Law of God on our behalf.

Yet salvation, we must confess the Bible teaches is also by grace through faith too, isn’t it? And how is this? Because when you come to faith in Christ, God who is rich in mercy takes the perfect obedience of His Son to His Law and graciously imputes or accounts it as your righteousness as if as if you yourself had perfectly kept God’s Law your entire life. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t it impossible to fathom? Yet, that’s the grace God in of salvation – that the perfect unblemished work of Christ is applied to you when, by faith, you embrace Jesus Christ and His saving work.

We are saved by good works unto good works. As much as possible we are to imitate Christ. We are saved by Christ’s good work of perfect obedience to God’s Law which He came to fulfill and that He graciously imputes to us that we might in turn and with the help of the Holy Spirit, strive, however imperfectly, to do the good works of obedience ourselves. And we know we will never keep God’s law perfectly as Christ did, but God knows our heart, and He sees our motives and to Him, what the Scriptures seem to teach is that God earnestly desires from His people, not heartless cold outward conformity, but lives that are moved from a deep abiding heartfelt desire to love God and to fulfill all His Word.

~ apl

We Mistake

~ A Prayer Life ~ 1 Comment

“The church used to be a lightning bolt, now it’s a cruise ship. We are not marching to Zion – we are sailing there with ease. In the apostolic church it says they were all amazed – and now in our churches everybody wants to be amused. The church began in the upper room with a bunch of men agonizing, and it’s ending in the supper room with a bunch of people organizing. We mistake rattle for revival, and commotion for creation, and action for unction.”

~ Leonard Ravenhill

Apart from Him

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“I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from Me there is no Savior.” ~ Isaiah 43:11

Advent is a wonderful occasion to be reminded of the exclusivity of Christ as our Savior. God the Father sent His only Son into this world, to be born of a virgin, to live a perfect life, to die a perfect death and to be raised from the dead as the sole means by which mankind could be redeemed from their sins and have the curse of their iniquity lifted. Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life. And He would go on to say no one comes to the Father but by Him (Jn. 14:6). So that what was foretold in Isaiah hundreds of years before the Messiah arrived is true… Jesus is Lord, and apart from Him there is no Savior.

~ apl

Perfection and Preservation

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– 1 Thessalonians 5:24

What will He do? He will sanctify us wholly. See the previous verse. He will carry on the work of purification till we are perfect in every part. He will preserve our “whole spirit, and soul, and body, blameless unto the coming of our LORD Jesus Christ.” He will not allow us to fall from grace, nor come under the dominion of sin. What great favors are these! Well may we adore the giver of such unspeakable gifts.

Who will do this? The LORD who has called us out of darkness into His marvelous light, out of death in sin into eternal life in Christ Jesus. Only He can do this: such perfection and preservation can only come from the God of all grace.

Why will He do it? Because He is “faithful”–faithful to His own promise which is pledged to save the believer; faithful to His Son, whose reward it is that His people shall he presented to Him faultless, faithful to the work which He has commenced in us by our effectual calling. It is not their own faithfulness but the LORD’s own faithfulness on which the saints rely.

~ Charles Spurgeon, Faith’s Checkbook

Peace With God

~ A Prayer Life ~ 1 Comment

“Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ”.

~ Romans 5:1 (NKJV)

May we never minimize so great a peace! May we never discount what it means to be at peace with God. We may long for peace here and now, but may we ever so much long for peace in eternity. May we remember how far we have fallen away from the grace and favor of God and how far He has come to turn away His great wrath and grant us His peace. We now have the privilege of serving the Price of Peace. He who declares to the storms “Peace, be still”. He, who is Jesus Christ, and brings to us this peace which Scripture describes as surpassing our understanding. God’s peace does surpass our understanding, doesn’t it? Who can comprehend such mercy? Such love? That the sovereign and eternal God of heaven and earth, He who is holy, blameless and pure – He who the Bible says is comprised of unapproachable light – would justify poor sinners through the sacrifice of His own Son – and reconcile, that is join together, His lowly creatures back to Himself through and by His eternal and everlasting peace.

Amen

If At Any Time

~ A Prayer Life ~ 1 Comment

“I will not leave you comfortless. I will come to you.”

~ John 14:18

If at any time a soul be brought into a state of orphanage, and seem to itself separated from all grace and power and hope; let it lay hold of this word. It may have been fitting that it should have a taste of the misery of being without Christ, under a sense of the need of Christ; but a taste suffices: ” I will come unto you,” says Jesus.

~ George Bowen, Daily Meditations

All Are Welcome Here

~ A Prayer Life ~ 1 Comment

The cross of Jesus displays the most awful exhibition of God’s hatred of sin and at the same time the most august manifestation of His readiness to pardon it. Pardon, full and free, is written out in every drop of blood that is seen, is proclaimed in every groan that is heard, and shines in the very prodigy of mercy that closes the solemn scene upon the cross. O blessed door of return, open and never shut, to the wanderer from God! How glorious, how free, how accessible! Here the sinful, the vile, the guilty, the unworthy, the poor, the penniless, may come. Here too the weary spirit may bring its burden, the broken spirit its sorrow, the guilty spirit its sin, the backsliding spirit its wandering. All are welcome here.

~ Octavius Winslow (1808-1878)