Tim Hayes – Page 57

Not Under Law

Of all the phrases used by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, “not under law” may be the most misunderstood. Most think it means God’s laws in the Old Testament are obsolete, but context implies something very different: Paul says, “sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” (Ro 6:12-14)

Not being under law is what causes us to overcome sin … yet sin is breaking God’s Law. (1Jn 3:4) Paul isn’t telling us we can sin all we want now, but how being in Christ causes us to sin less and less.

The key appears to be in the contrasting phrase – under grace: experiencing the power of God as He transforms us into the likeness of Christ. (Ep 2:8,10)

As God works in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure (Php 2:13), we are no longer under law, trying to obey in our own strength, feeling only the duty and command but no empowering life, with no inclination to obey, always failing, rebelling and feeling the terror of our condemnation. Rather, we have Christ in us, the hope of glory (Col 1:27), Who delights in the law of God within us, moving in us to obey Him in spirit as well as the letter, that the righteousness of the law might be realized and fulfilled in us as we obey it from the heart. (Ro 8:4)

Jesus Christ overcame the world (Jn 16:33) and is doing it all over again in every one of His children (1Jn 5:4), delivering us from both the penalty and power of sin, giving us grace unto glory. (Php 1:6)

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My Feasts

As we approach a new year in God’s calendar (Ex 12:2), I am looking forward to celebrating with my King as He invites me to His table again … to seven glorious, heavenly feasts of the Lord.

When Jehovah calls them “my feasts” (Le 23:2), He seems to be saying that these eternal appointed times are for Himself as well as for us; each one an invitation to dine in person with the Almighty.

As He Himself rested on the very first Sabbath day (Ge 2:2-3), and as He promises to celebrate Passover again with us in His kingdom (Lk 22:15-16), and as all activity in the Jerusalem temple during each biblical feast mirrors that of God’s heavenly temple (He 8:4-5, 9:23), it is evident that God Himself participates in His own feasts, along with the hosts of Heaven — and that He invites us to join Him.

We can see Jehovah’s heart here in His insistence that we come to His house to participate in His feasts (Ex 34:22-24); and as it has been from the earliest days so shall it always be. (Zec 14:16) As He invited the Apostles of old (Jn 21:12), what an awesome privilege to be invited by God to come and dine with Him! (Mt 22:8-10)

Further, in characteristic fashion, these appointed times with God are not just for satisfying our fleshly appetites, but each feast is rich in spiritual food, simply chock full of spiritual and prophetic symbolism to engage our minds and hearts in His ways. (Col 2:16-17)

The message could not be any clearer: in His feasts God is inviting us into an awesome fellowship with Himself; He enjoys sharing Himself with us and engaging us in what He is doing. In this coming season of God’s calendar, let’s take every opportunity to enjoy and delight in God as He has so graciously invited us.

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Edify One Another

Why go to church? I find hiking in the mountains and looking at sunsets more worshipful; I can listen to uplifting music and sermons any time, and I learn so much more about God from just reading my Bible.

As I see it there’s only one reason to go, yet I can’t find a single church set up for it! I think we’ve totally missed God’s purpose for church and it’s hurting us all. I go and make the best of it, but I’m afraid these aren’t the churches Jesus is building (Mt 16:18); I long for His design.

God’s churches are spiritual families of brothers and sisters regularly assembling for one unique purpose: to help each other follow God. (1Th 5:11, He 10:25) It’s an extension of God Himself on Earth. (Ep 5:30) I think the early Christians got this, and it’s why they were powerful.

If we started meeting for the right reason we might find we need to change a few things … lose the fancy buildings, stop hiring musicians and pastors to entertain and sermonize us … and diluting the message so we can get people who aren’t seeking God to help pay for it all.

Maybe we’d start building relationships with people who challenge us to grow, who love us enough to humbly confront our sin … and invite us to humbly challenge theirs. Maybe we’d come to meetings with more of a sense of responsibility, more prepared to give than receive. (1Co 14:26)

Maybe we’d start teaching each other about things that matter … how to overcome sin and walk joyfully with God. Maybe we’d pray for and comfort each other more, and ask for prayer more, and maybe we’d think more soberly about salvation, eternity and holiness.

Then maybe we’d even find God Himself living in and through our churches like He used to, Christ in us, showing up in our meetings and filling us with faith and power to glorify His name. (1Co 14:24-25)

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Saved by Hope

Hope: an expectation that something good will happen, the delightful foretaste of blessings not yet seen, the heart’s response to God’s faithfulness. Hope is a cornerstone of spiritual life, intrinsic to all godliness. (1Co 13:13a) Life can be unbearable without it; Jehovah says we are saved by it. (Ro 8:24)

Hope saves by rescuing us from anxiety, worry, despair and despondency, giving us strength to live joyfully, to walk worthy of Him, with purpose and dignity even in the midst of our afflictions.

Knowing God is just and good keeps hope alive in this broken world. We must remember that YHWH has a glorious purpose in allowing evil and suffering. His Day will come: He will right all wrong; He will judge all in righteousness and truth. (Ps 9:8) In the end, as surely as we are, God’s children will exult in Him.

The Almighty makes no promise lightly; He puts His name and character on the line in every single one. He need not do so for Himself: He is giving us an ultimate opportunity to honor Him, to trust His heart before seeing His hand.

Will Heaven see any promise unfulfilled? to even one person? What have we to lose in acting out His faithfulness? Is there a better way to glorify Him? Or any other way … is it even possible to honor Him without trusting Him?

Let the world go its way, heedless of glory and judgment to come. Keeping our eyes on the heart of our King, let us count on Him; expect Him to fulfill His Word. Let our story be the joyful anticipation of heavenly reality … an abiding witness of God’s eternal faithfulness. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” (Ro 15:13)

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Ponder the Path

Jehovah says, “Ponder the path of thy feet.” (Pr 4:26) We should be thinking carefully about the course we’ve chosen so far in life, and where our path is leading. Our decisions comprise our path, and our motives determine its course.

There are paths of the righteous (Pr 2:20) and of the wicked (Pr 4:14) … and God is pondering all of them. (Pr 5:21) Every choice we make extends our path in one direction or another, towards God or away, and God is noticing every time; though we can always turn back and retrace our steps, we can never actually erase one.

When we walk in darkness and lies we can’t see what we’re stumbling over (Pr 4:19); it’s an unstable path that’s impossible to understand. (Pr 5:6) “But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” (Pr 4:18) Let’s choose each and every step of life thoughtfully, and well.

Staying on the right path ultimately distills down to just one thing: pleasing God. God give us grace, to know wisdom, to walk in in the light, in Your ways, in strength and power. (Pr 4:11-12) As we seek Him He is faithful to show us the path of life (Ps 16:11), and to walk with us along the way. (1Jn 1:7)

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None Good But One

When Christ is called, “Good Master,” He responds, “Why do you call me good? There is none good but one, that is God.” (Mk 10:17-18) This is helpful: God is good, and only God is good.

So, Man is not good; Man is bad; desperately wicked. Man has free will: God gives Man freedom to choose, and in choosing freely Man always chooses badly. (Ge 6:5)

We should not be surprised that people are evil and that God’s angry — it’s a miracle that any at all are good … indeed some are (Lk 1:5-6), a mystery hid in God restraining evil. (Pr 16:1, 9)

God can make us good, and only God can make us good. If He can make anyone good, then He can make you and me good, by replicating His nature in us.

Do we want to be good? This is the beginning of goodness, itself the gift of God, working in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure. (Php 2:13)

I seem to need a constant reminder that my hope is not in politics, or in religion, or in my family, my friends, my job or my country … or in myself … but in a sovereign God Who always does according to His own purpose and will … which is always good. (Ep 1:11)

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Keep My Commandments

Every heart responds to the Creator in one of two basic ways: thankfulness and joyful obedience (Ro 6:17) — or distrust and disobedience. (Ro 1:21)

We all start out in sin, as rebels hating God (Ep 2:3), but God transforms some of us so we begin loving Him, trusting Him, thanking Him and obeying Him from the heart; He quickens our spirits to delight in His Law, (Ro 7:22) and starts writing His laws into our minds and hearts. (He 8:10) We then begin to enjoy obeying Him: a transformed nature, a new creature, is evidence of our redemption. (2Co 5:17)

It is in obeying Jesus that we love Him: He said: “If ye love me, keep my commandments;” (Jn 14:15) we love Him by keeping His Laws (1Jn 5:3), those laws within Torah, which are all spiritual (Ro 7:22) and eternally good. (Ro 7:12)

Unfortunately, most Christians are consistently taught that certain parts of the Mosaic Law are obsolete, no longer relevant, but Jesus didn’t abolish any part of Torah and He specifically told us not to think this way (Mt 5:17-19); it’s still God’s definition of sin. (1Jn 3:4)

Though we aren’t justified by obeying God’s Law, we’re deceived in thinking we’re in a right relationship with God if we’re still willfully disobeying Him. (1Jn 2:4) We’re far from salvation if we aren’t seeking to know and obey God’s statutes (Ps 119:155); we can’t worship in truth until we’ve learned His commandments (Ps 119:7), or even be earnest in seeking salvation if we aren’t already obeying Him the best we know how. (Ps 119:176)

As we seek to make our election sure, here’s an easy litmus test: if there are parts of God’s Way we still don’t like, that we disdain and deliberately refuse to obey, then we’re deceiving ourselves, carnal, still out of step with God. (Ro 8:6-7) Though there’s definitely room for sincere ignorance (1Ti 1:13), the stubborn, willfully disobedient soul has yet to be redeemed. (Ro 2:7-9) In other words, What’s the point in pretending to be transformed … if we aren’t acting like it? (1Jn 3:7)

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The Voice of God

Many of us long to hear the whisper of God’s Spirit guiding us in life’s journey. Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if God would just tell us what to do? Perhaps we need to learn to quiet ourselves, wait on the Lord, and listen to the voice of the Spirit for supernatural guidance.

Yet Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (Jn 10:27) If we belong to God, He says we will hear His voice and follow Him; Christ never says this is something we need to learn. In fact, the idea that God’s children will miss doing His will because they don’t hear His voice seems to me foreign to scripture. (Jn 10:2-5) Perhaps we don’t yet understand the spiritual realm and what it’s like to hear the voice of God.

Following God seems to me simpler than we think. (Mt 11:29-30) As we walk in the light, He wills in our wills, speaks in our thoughts, and works through our acts. (Php 2:13) It isn’t complicated, yet most of us who call Christ Lord aren’t doing what He said (Lk 6:46): hiding His Word in our hearts and seeking to know wisdom as a manner of life. (Ja 1:5) If we aren’t even doing the basics, is it any wonder we’re struggling? If we aren’t careful, seeking supernatural guidance rather than doing what He says, we might open ourselves up for deception and hear the voice of strangers seeking to counterfeit the divine. In my experience, when we are obeying what He’s already told us, that hunger to hear a supernatural voice is fully and completely satisfied.

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He Learned Obedience

Joyfully obeying God is perhaps the highest form of worship. (1Sa 15:22b) It’s love acting out, “God, You’re worthy; You’re supremely important; Your desire is my only priority.” Those who love Him need not know why He commands, only that He does; “for this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” (1Jn 5:3)

ChristInGethsemane2 — The Passion: Christ Praying in Gethsemane

The greatest example of obedience ever may be Christ praying in the garden, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.“ (Lk 22:42) As He’d planned from eternity past, His will was to ransom those He loved. Yet He could not be self-willed in dying for us: He was willing to give that up and die an eternal failure in the garden, lying on His face in the dirt, if that was His Father’s will. It was the ultimate submission, where He Himself learned obedience and revealed His perfection. He was then fit to author eternal salvation for all who obey Him. (He 5:7-9)

So often God gives commands without telling us why, yet the quickened soul implicitly knows God is good. Like Christ, the Author and Finisher of our faith, we obey, not always knowing what blessing will come, but that there is blessing in any and all obedience. (He 12:1-2) Yet it is not for blessing we obey, but simply for Him, because He is worthy.

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Subtlety to the Simple

Of all the things I’ve admired in Jesus Christ, it’s never occurred to me that He is subtle.

Subtle: not obvious, and therefore difficult to notice; difficult to detect or grasp by the mind or analyze; indirect in a way that prevents people from noticing what you are trying to do; showing an ability to notice and understand small things that other people do not; able to make fine distinctions; delicate and complicated in an attractive way

As God, Christ does not present Himself to the world in splendor and power, but in weakness and poverty. There’s so much He doesn’t say; He seldom answers clearly or directly. He drops clues and hints, hides truth in stories we struggle to understand, and answers our queries with even more questions, questions which expose our hearts and motives.

Yet I’ve been living so differently inside … so very un-subtly … wanting to be heard and understood, arguing, reasoning, being as compelling and as thorough as I can be, frustrated when others do not see. Evidently, God’s not like that.

I’m beginning to see beauty in His obscurity now, in His matchless humility, in divine subtlety. Perhaps it’s because we cannot yet bear His fullness that He veils Himself so. Yet He’s about sharing even His subtlety with all who seek Him. (Pr 1:4)

Transformation is amazing, becoming something we never thought we could. Christ being formed in us means becoming like Him in every way. (1Jn 3:2) He who began a good work in us will perform it until the Day of Jesus Christ, (Php 1:6) who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. (1Co 1:30-1) This is hope indeed!

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