Struggling with Sin.
Jesus...God's answer to sin, was, is
and forever will be the ultimate sacrifice for sin. His death and
resurrection was sufficient for sin...past...present...and future.
What the ineffective and insufficient animal sacrifices and the Mosaic Law of the past
could not do, He did. He settled the sin question and brings hope to
the Community of Humanity and that hope is His Grace solution.
Romans 5:20 assures us that where sin
abounds, grace much more abounds. News Flash...JESUS DIDN'T COME TO
CONDEMN PEOPLE, HE CAME TO SAVE PEOPLE! Now...if Jesus believed in
and loved people enough to be their hope, should we as believers in
Him offer people hope rather than judgement and condemnation.
God's solution to sin was Jesus, Jesus
solution to sin is Grace therefore, the hope we should offer to the
Community of Humanity is Jesus the Grace One and His Grace message.
There is no hope in trusting in our own efforts to be good by keeping
the law and obeying religious rules...if there was then Jesus died in
vain. Humanities hope is not the Law nor religion...It is Jesus.
The Community of the Redeemed would reveal God better to the Community of Humanity if we stopped
focusing on people's sin, their weakness and their failures by becoming
God-conscious rather than sin-conscious by abandoning our futile
attempts to be a law-keeper and religious rule-keeper and simply
trust and rest in the finished work of Jesus...His Grace...for that
is the ONLY place where power to gain and maintain a relationship
with God is found. It is also the only place where the power to
forsake sin is found.
Being sin-conscious means we are
focusing on the Law, which makes us self-conscious because we take
our focus of Jesus and focus on ourselves which causes us to focus on
our weakness, our shortcomings and our sinning and we end up sinning
more.
Being God-conscious is the only way to
appropriate Grace-power to empower us not to sin because we stop
being sin-conscious, therefore we stop being me-conscious.
The answer to the struggle against sin
is not more will-power to obey religious rules and laws. The answer
to the sin struggle is Jesus and His Grace and the power for doing of
the do's and not doing the don'ts flows from His Grace power.
Too bad there wasn`t any grace teachers around to tell Paul what he should do with his problem in sinning. He said in Rom.7:18-21 that he had a struggle to do good. He said, For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
ReplyDeleteWe sin because we were born with a sinful nature and when we give in to it we fail. But thank God He is our advocate. He said if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.(1Jn.1:9)
8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
But sad to say many in modern day grace movement have done away with confessing our sins. They say to confess our sins is to be sin conconcious, something we must never do.
But 1 John was written to Christians.
Hubert, your struggling not to commit sin and obey the law reveals that you believe that Romans 7:14-25 shows that Paul had a sin problem as a believer. I assume your justification for believing so, is that Paul is speaking in the present tense in this passage, therefore he must be referring to the present of his saying it. Again, your contextual understanding is so flawed that you outside of the contextual ring. If you read Rom. Ch. 7 along with Ch. 6 & 8 and are familiar with what the book of Romans and the rest of the Bible say in context with what you read, it is absolutely clear that he is talking about his past self under the law and not his present self as a believer.
DeleteNow instead of me detailing the meaning of verses 14-25 of Romans 7, read 6,7 and 8 to see if you can contextually interpret the verses correctly. Explain what you see...It would be informative to me to see what context you come up with.
Then again, as with other suggestions of mine, you will ignore doing it... is it because you don't know how to do it , or you refuse to do it because it will screw up your theology?