No One Should Want to Be Compromised
We are compromised. The body of Jesus, His church, is compromised. We haven't only begun to treat Holy Spirit-led scriptures like the world is supposed to understand without the leading of the Holy Spirit, and without the leading of a good shepherd, but we've also begun to give many a good shepherd over to the world's leading.
Instead of remaining more than conquerors in the Spirit, we've begun to acquiesce to countless ways the world is viewing the Bible, and we're ignoring how we are supposed to be saving persons out of the world, not giving ourselves over to the world's will.
One pitfall in all this, is divisiveness IN the church, in the body of Jesus. Some of our world has a view of different parts of the church as like different religions, because we do differ or have unsettled leadings toward some of God's word, from one demonimation to another, one flock to another, even one person to another. But it's when we stop listening to one another, in the body, that we run into the kinds of dissention or quarrels the Holy Spirit has counseled against. More pointedly, when quarrels go far outside the Holy Spirit, it's as if we're all losing our home in the body.
Dissent in matters between world and church are a given. But fighting like the world and not in the Spirit, or, on the other hand, willingly giving ourselves to what the world sees as godly solutions, doesn't help but hurts all of us (1 Corinthians 12:26).
Right now, we're not maybe in the last of the church age. We're definately in the ends times. And so much is lording over us right here in the U.S.
We've known much more faithful and God-fearing times than this. And considering life abroad and here, we know there are Christians in prisons all over our world — even prisons of thought and soul.
If I were not a witness to a lot of what is happening to us today, I would think crazy people were out there mocking the church. And, indeed, there is a mocker in Satan. But, when hell says a child has died because his mother didn't "obey lawful orders," or when the hell in someone publishes on the internet that "Romans 13 emphasizes that the government wields the sword — a symbol of execution — to punish the wrongdoer," hell has too much authority. (Hebrews 6:4-6)
When Romans 13 speaks of a sword, that's the Holy Spirit speaking of the sword of God's word. (Scriptures breath too deep for me to write about that.) But Romans 13 has to be taken not only with a heart in the Spirit, but also with Romans 12.
Chapters of the Bible were not there 2,000 years ago. We have Bible chapters today, but we have to feel our way through Bible passages, often looking past the chapter divisions, to find God's whole meaning.
We should be able to rest assured: Government rests on our Savior's shoulders. All the hell the Romans had to give this world, rested on Jesus in form of a cross and in form of everything that went before the cross, including the killing of the Hebrew children by a Herod so insane that he had his wife and sons killed.
In contrast, government rests on Jesus's shoulders. God can't lie about that. And when the world wants to challenge that through its own thinking, that thinking is trying to undo everything Jesus has done for the world.
"For God so loved the world, that He gave" (John 3:16) His own flesh, the only Son conceived by Heaven alone and infilled by the Holy Spirit completely, enabled to live sinless in the flesh, to commune the majority of His walk in earth wholly in God (Isaiah 7:16) and as God with us (Matthew 1:23, John 1:1) — that He gave Himself (even though He knew doing so would cause Him to grieve how flesh isn't inherently "good" — Matthew 19:17), that whosoever believeth in Him, should not perish but have everlasting life as God defines the everlating. God so loved the world, that He made Himself, through Jesus, the way to be saved out of the world.
The world the New Testament speaks of is the world that doesn't really accept Him as He is. It's the world that misuses 1 John 1:8: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."
The word God gave Paul is not to say that the church is supposed to go around saying we are sinners who never have been saved, or that our testimony to the world is that everyone is a sinner, that we all sin the same, and all sin is the same.
Yes, Christians sin. We pray not to let the sun set, not to let a day pass, with there being an ungodly way of anger in heart. We trust God for patience, but we sin impatiently or grievously. We sin, because, yes, we are sinners.
But we are sinners saved, convicted in the Spirit, by grace. We thank GOD for deliverance from sins of the long ago. We thank God for deliverance from past blindness to sins. We thank God for deliverance from guilt of those sins of the past. We thank God He never intended iniquity to rule forever.
And God assures us, for that faithfulness, this side of eternity is best lived in the body, in the church. And He warns against one, particular snare of Satan that we cannot acquience to.
He says, "Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body." (1 Corinthians 6:18) In today's world, the devil in people has made that sin especially difficult to escape.
And that sin is especially grievous to the church. One Spirit-led letter to the church says,"Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, (spiritual) impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." [Galatians 5:19-21, New Revised Standard Version (emphasis added)]
It's about factions in the church.
Another word I feel a need to home in on in Galatians 5 is "carousing." When I think carousing, I think going out looking to get into sin. And that's how some want to live, even as some of us have stood ground and tried finding peace.
We've coped more and more with a world that only understands wordly power, so that nothing is sacred and nothing is peace among many. One terrible way that world reads words from the book of Romans, is in thinking there is no word from God that tells us not to consent to ungodly rule.
But out of His mouth directly, we know God meant us to dust off our feet and leave unworthiness, if possible. But for those left behind in slavery, needing to patiently wait for deliverance, God sent word by the Holy Spirit to Paul, saying that those under Jesus's yoke should submit, not in sin, to their earthly masters or shepherds. "And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them, because they are brethren ... ." (1 Timothy 6:2)
How many pastors, how many overseeers, have held up God's word and said that everything we need in order to find the way in life, is in the Bible — and that wayfinding includes Israel's difficult ancient history, which we're not to repeat but to learn from?
In Jesus, we are governed by the Holy Spirit and by knowing God's word with understanding. God gave us sound minds to know what He means. (Acts 5:29)
"For sin shall not have dominion over you ... . Are we going to sin, because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid." (Romans 6:14-15)
One of my most encouraging Bible verses, Romans 13:11-14:
"Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we (first) believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof."
I don't know all things. Only God does that. But I'm thankful for what's really true and convicting in Jesus.
This is my personal journal, but, unlike my foolish childhood journal (1 Corinthians 3:13), I hope it can speak to someone.
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