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New Years Best of Countdown

Good Enough

Originally published on 5/19/2009

Have you thought that you were not doing enough, or not good enough for God.  Well, that’s a trap where we can find ourselves.  We can never do enough to be good enough for God.  Once we accept his gift and put on Christ, we will be continually transformed to be more like him.  We will strive for good works.  We will attempt to eliminate sin from our lives.  We will hold up the banner of righteousness.  However, we will never be good enough – without the death of Christ.

With Christ in you, and his grace and mercy washing you, you don’t have to try to be good enough.  You are! Christ has made you that may. And boy, when you can free yourselves from the bondage of works to achieve salvation – you are free.  So works – YES- works to honor, works to serve, works to glorify God.  But not works to repay, or works to earn.  And these works don’t have to be great spiritual events.  They can simple.  The way you interact with someone in the hallway.  The way you reach out to a child that is hurting.  The way you listen to you friends struggles.  You don’t have to be a ‘spiritual giant’ to be a recipient of his forgiveness.

Let the grace of God wash over you today.  Accept his gift. Live free, and serve the master.

The Message (MSG)

Romans 12

Place Your Life Before God

1-2 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

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Daily Post

The Dilemma is Resolved

Its one week away!  Schools out!  And this is my last day of work for the year, no not the year, the decade!  The big day is just a week away.  Its time for more classic 80’s Christmas from Josh. Today, its back to the early days of MTV  Bill Squier and Christmas Is the Time to Say I Love You.  Nice!  Merry Christmas!

Yesterday’s post centered on the frustration of living with sin and duplicity of mind, so it seems just right today to keep going in Romans right in to the next chapter.  Romans 8 is one of my favorite chapters – the way it begins, the way it ends.  It tells the entire story in one chapter. I find it so rejuvenating.  So lets take a look today right at that beginning.

1Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, 2because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. 3For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.[c] And so he condemned sin in sinful man, 4in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.  Romans 8:1-4 (NIV)

Thats right now condemnation.  and then the Message.  Wow it brings it straight home

1-2With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

3-4God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. (Romans 8:1-4, The Message)

The Dilemma is Resolved!  Wow, those are great words.  The Law is gone, Forgiveness has arrived – full of mercy and full of grace.  This is why Christmas is so excited.  Its not just the presents and the time off work with family, but the arrival of Grace, the arrival of Mercy.  The arrival of the resolution of the matter!

Rejoice, rejoice Emmanuel.