Have you ever imagined yourself standing before Christ trying to defend yourself and answer truthfully such “awkward” questions? Really? I believe that such a thought never crossed your mind and nobody explained to you or gave you any picture about those court proceedings and possible judgments rendered to each of us. You may be totally unprepared! The Holiness, Righteousness and Principles of God are not annulled or modified by His Mercy or Forgiveness! (Jam. 2:13) Do we understand this statement? The truth is: WE DO NOT! Consider the following.
GOD, IN HIS ALMIGHTINESS, COULD HAVE SAVED ALL MANKIND, FORGIVEN ALL OUR SINS, RENEWED US AND MADE US ALL HIS SONS AND DAUGHTERS WITHOUT SENDING HIS SON TO THE CROSS! COULD HE HAVE DONE IT? YES!
HE COULD HAVE DESTROYED SATAN ANY TIME HE WANTED AND ANNULLED ALL HIS WICKED WORKS OF EVIL. MANKIND DID NOT HAVE TO GO THROUGH 6,000 YEARS OF HISTORY FILLED WITH BLOOD, WARS, MISERY AND DEATH. MAN DID NOT HAVE TO CONTINUE THESE SIX MILLENNIA AS A COMPLETE SPIRITUAL IDIOT AND THEN FACE HIS JUDGMENT. SO, WHY GOD DID NOT DO IT THAT WAY?
BECAUSE HIS WAYS ARE NOT OUR WAYS, AND HIS THOUGHTS ARE NOT OUR THOUGHTS (Is. 55:8,9)! HIS PRINCIPLES ARE NOT OUR PRINCIPLES, HIS CHARACTER IS NOT OUR CHARACTER AND HIS PURPOSES AND DESIRES ARE NOT OUR PURPOSES AND DESIRES. THAT’S WHY!
GOD ESTABLISHED HIS PRINCIPLES OF CREATION AND OF THE SALVATION OF MAN AND NO MAN CAN CHANGE THEM, MODIFY THEM, IGNORE THEM, BYPASS THEM, NEGLECT THEM OR ANNUL THEM THROUGH PRAYER, FASTING, CONFESSION OR BY ANY OTHER MEANS! THERE ARE HUNDREDS OF HIS PRINCIPLES AND NONE OF THEM WAS ANNULLED OR MODIFIED EVEN BY THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF CHRIST JESUS.
Some examples:
a) The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ez. 18:4b).
b) He that believeth not shall be damned (Mk. 16:16b).
c) He that does not deny himself and takes up his own cross cannot follow the Lord (Mt. 16:24).
d) He that does not abide in Christ shall be cast into the fire and burned (Jn. 15:6).
e) The soul that has no love is nothing (has no value to God – 1Cor. 13:2b).
f) He that loves not the Lord Jesus Christ shall be accursed at His coming (1Cor. 16:22).
g) Every man shall give account of himself to God in all details (Rom. 14:12).
h) No flesh shall be justified by the works of the law (Gal. 2:16b).
i) If a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he deceiveth himself (Gal. 6:3).
j) Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap (Gal. 6:7b)… without exceptions.
k) Without shedding of blood is no remission of sins (Heb. 9:22b).
l) If ye (believers) be without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards, and not sons (Heb. 12:8).
m) Without holiness, no man (no believer) shall see the Lord (Heb. 12:14).
n) He that hears the Word of God and is not doing it, has deceived himself (Jam. 1:22).
o) He that showed no mercy, shall have judgment without mercy (Jam. 2:13).
p) To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin (Jam. 4:17).
q) We must all cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God (2Cor. 7:1).
r) If we don’t confess our sins (or forgive men their trespasses against us) they won’t be forgiven us either, and we won’t be cleansed from our unrighteousness (1Jn. 1:9// Mt. 6:15).
s) He that loveth not his brother abideth in death, and he that hateth his brother is a murderer and no murderer hath life eternal in him (1Jn. 3: 14b,15).
t) If a man say, I love God, and hateth (and doesn’t talk to) his brother, he is a liar (1Jn. 4:20a).
u) He that will not overcome, I (the Lord) will blot his name out of the Book of Life (Rev. 3:5)!
v) I (the Lord) will spue thee (church of the Laodiceans) out of My mouth because thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked … and you do not even know it (Rev. 3:16b,17b).
w) Whosoever was not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire (Rev. 20:15).
x) He that overcomes (and not he that only believes) shall inherit all things and I will be his God, and he shall be My son (Rev. 21:7).
I could fill further pages with God’s Principles clearly stated in His Word and absolutely unchangeable, which form the Way of our Salvation set up by the Father in Heaven. How do we truly measure up to His Principles? The Lord advices us in His Word saying: “Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth TAKE HEED lest he fall.” (1Cor. 10: 12) Do we take this heed during our Christian life? or do we always think that we are “fine and cannot fall”?
In my experience every proud believer thinks only the best about himself; he always knows the best, understand everything and can hardly admit that there could be something he does not know. His “knowledge and wisdom” is fixed and there cannot be any alternatives to what he knows or believes. Educated people, including theologians, are seldom open to anything that would add, subtract or otherwise correct or modify their great knowledge, beliefs and convictions. Their mindset is fixed permanently and, being blind, they do not see how it could be unfixed and modified.
The Word of God comes again to resolve the issue, to help and determine the simple truth in saying: “And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth NOTHING yet as he ought to know.” (1Cor. 8:2) Tell this to a proud believer and see how he will respond. In fact, in these last days before the Lord’s coming, people of this world, including believers and highly educated individuals, are slowly losing their mind, even common sense. Apostle Paul declared 2,000 years ago: “the god of this world has blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious Gospel of Christ, Who is the Image of God, should shine unto them” (2Cor. 4:4). This does not apply only to pagans, but also to believers who do not believe the passages of the Word of God, which they do not like or cannot understand, and thus ignore them. If this truth was known 2,000 years ago, how much more applicable it is today just before the End of the world? How many born-again believers truly see and understand the above? And how many believe the above facts or have experienced them in their own Christian life? I do not know.
Who is then the true servant of the Lord useful in His hand and serving Him according to His will? The one whose knowledge and wisdom has not been “cast in concrete”, but to whose soul the Spirit of the Lord has a continual free access to form and mold it, because it is meek, moldable and keeps increasing its true knowledge of truth, and wisdom without ceasing or stopping. If a wise man learns, the more he knows the more he sees and admits how little he knows.
The spiritual powers of darkness and evil do influence our soul through pride, fears, stubbornness, unwillingness, selfishness, self-righteousness and other “virtues” of sinful flesh. They influence our physical world, including the weather (Eph. 2:2), and also our soulish world – our minds with their thoughts, imaginations, plans, reasonings, speculations, beliefs, lusts, etc. They form a barrier for the Holy Spirit to access our soul, influence it, renew it and form it into the Image of Christ’s Soul. And they definitely influence our spiritual world – conscience, intuition (discernment – Mt. 16:2-3) and communion with the Lord or with brethren. We may also say that they influence our spiritual senses making us spiritually blind, deaf (Rev. 2:7,11,17,29 + 3:6,13,22) and insensitive (touch, taste, smell). In other words, we become spiritually dead not sensing the spiritual world at all.
It must be declared and emphasized that no man can help and change anything in this area. Only the Lord can give us the spiritual eyesight, spiritual hearing and spiritual sensitivities (touch, taste, smell). Though we receive all these at our spiritual birth, in most believers they remain dysfunctional since they were seldom or never exercised. Such believers then remain spiritual toddlers unable to eat “strong meat” but keep drinking spiritual “milk” (Heb. 5:12-14) and that irrespective of their physical age or how long they have been attending “their” church or “serving the Lord”. This is definitely a TRAGEDY of believers.
In conclusion, I desire to touch some typical problems of our natural soul as it goes through its transformation from a natural-carnal one to the spiritual one.
Perhaps the best tool that I could use to explain this process is a computer. Every computer is hardware, and if it is to run and do its work properly, it needs software. Without software, every computer is dead! True? Our mind, heart and will are like “hardwares”, they need “softwares” to do their work. The “softwares” in each of these three organs of our soul are SPIRITS! Hence, how these organs function, or do not function, depends on the kind of spirits that “drive them”. They are either from God or from Satan or they are mixed in our own human spirit (1Thes. 5:23). Before the fall of Adam, all spirits in his life were from God. After the fall, they were polluted by the spirits from Satan and ceased to be pure, holy, righteous and wise and became mixed.
MIND – before our redemption, the mind of every one of us was natural-carnal without any exceptions. Our minds were blinded by the god of this world – Satan (2Cor. 4:4). After our redemption and baptism, we were supposed to start the process of renewing THE SPIRIT (software) of our natural mind (Eph. 4:23), thus building up our new spiritual mind. Let us repeat and realize that we are not supposed to “change our mind” as the organ of our soul, but to change its software – its spirits – from the filthiness, darkness, stupidity and evil of Satan to the purity, holiness, righteousness and wisdom of God. The goal is the perfect Mind of Christ, which also Apostle Paul claimed to have had (1Cor. 2:16b).
It might be surprising to many believers to learn that there may be a mind, which is much worse than a carnal mind as such, and it is called a REPROBATE mind. It was not created by Satan, but those believers, who BY THEIR OWN WILL did not like to retain God in their knowledge, who changed the truth of God into a lie and worshipped and served creature more than the Creator, these were given over to a reprobate mind by God Himself (Rom. 1:21-28-32)! So, after our redemption, we may get a mind which is much worse than the carnal mind which we all had before our redemption, IF we then disregard God’s Word and keep Him and His Truth out of our knowledge. Only the Lord knows how many believers belong to this damnable category.
Let us realize that the nature of our thoughts, ideas, reasonings, imaginations and even of our common sense depends on the nature of the spirits that “run our mind”. It should explain the situation pretty clearly. Since our mind is run by a “mixture” of spirits, we may sometimes have wise thoughts and sometimes foolish thoughts, a clear mind or a foggy mind, logical reasoning or illogical reasoning, fearful or immoral imaginations or bold or moral imaginations, right solutions or wrong solutions, righteous judgments and unrighteous judgments, etc. Sometimes we are aware of these “products of our mind” and can tell the difference, sometimes we are not aware and cannot tell the difference. Then somebody else has to tell us what was wise and what foolish, what was right and what was wrong, what was righteous and what was unrighteous.
Though the thought of foolishness is sin (Pr. 24:9a), the Lord allows our mind to produce foolish thoughts, which further produce unrighteous judgments or fearful scenarios or wrong decisions or imaginations or other negative effects. Why? We are supposed to learn to live by faith (Hab. 2:4// Rom. 1:17// Gal. 3:11// Heb. 10:38) and not by our thoughts. Only the just–righteous live by faith, others are not righteous yet. Once we are just-righteous, we do not produce unrighteous thoughts, and if by chance they do “appear” in our mind, we do not follow them, but reject them promptly.
Now imagine that there are millions of Christians in the world and every one has a different “mixture” in his/her mind. If this mind then directs our Christianity, our churches, our ministries, what a chaos, what a division, disunity, unrighteousness and thus sinfulness it can produce? Where is the true faith, the ONE FAITH authored by ONE LORD? (Eph. 4:5) NOWHERE! Do we see this great problem?
How many times have you been tortured by your fearful thoughts? Disgusted by your unrighteous judgments? Enraged by your wrong decisions? Embarrassed by your foolish conclusions about yourself or about others? Misled by your stupid assumptions? Sinned by your presumptions? (Ps. 19:13) Trying to understand your errors (Ps. 19:12) and misgivings? Upset for not being able to find good solutions? And so on, and so on? Our mind is a mystery in itself.
HEART – is defined in the Word of God as “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9) I am sure that this definition is “acceptable and welcomed” by all humanitarians and psychologists! And though it is in the Bible, it is hardly preached and explained from any pulpit. Why? Because it does not apply to pagans only, but to ALL BORN-AGAIN BAPTIZED BELIEVERS INCLUDING THEIR LEADERS! If the heart could not be deceitful and desperately wicked, the church today could not be wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked and the Lord would not have to spue it out of His mouth (Rev. 3:16,17). True?
Now, what does our “software” produce in our heart? All emotions, good or bad, that includes love and hatred, all the issues of our life (Pr. 4:23), all likes and dislikes, desires, preferences, lusts, intentions, all thoughts that determine who we are (Pr. 23:7), all judgments and purposes both good and bad, wise and stupid, righteous and unrighteous, all self-deceptions, unbelief (Heb. 3:12), disobedience, laziness, lust for comfort, self-satisfaction, selfishness, and so on.
On the other hand, all the fruit of the Spirit of God is produced in the heart (Gal. 5:22,23). Only our heart understands faith and is able to act upon the faith, not our head. Our redemption starts in our heart and our heart determines whether we shall be baptized and walk toward our salvation and perfection, or not. Our destiny is not in our head but in our heart! CLOSED HEART IS A DOOMED HEART! And doomed heart brings us to our doom where we may lose even our redemption and salvation.
Our heart determines with whom we fellowship and speak to and whom we shall abandon and shun. If the heart is “run” by wicked spirits, the above decisions are made with respect to the desires of that heart and not according to the “common sense”, which is in the head. The heart prevails and is able to hate what it loved just a short time ago and reject without any valid reason why it has suddenly stopped loving or appreciating something or somebody. The heart that remained mostly wicked and deceitful even after its redemption, hates pressures, conflicts, problems and suffering of any kind, it hates even the Cross of Christ (Phil. 3:18, 19) never mind its own cross (Mt. 16:24).
We should thus not be surprised that the Lord desires first to get an access to our heart (see also pages B2-B4 in “Truth about Salvation[13]”). Our salvation starts with our heart and ends with our heart since it starts with our faith and ends with our faith (1Pet. 1:9). This certainly shows the absolutely vital importance of our heart and how the Lord works in it and changes its “mixed & evil spirits” to His Spirit Alone. Also, no other organ of our soul understands and produces love. And if we do not love the Lord, we shall be accursed at His coming (1Cor. 16:22) rather than taken by Him to the Marriage Supper and to the Kingdom of Heaven. This fact alone should make a definite difference in the thoughts and desires of our heart (and mind).
I have to add a very important fact from my ministry and years of experience. A majority of believers cannot recognize what comes from their mind and what comes from their heart! This may lead to great errors since the disunity of our mind and heart is not apparent. We may be convinced about our honorable and righteous intentions and plans in our head and make promises accordingly and not know that the “software” of our heart may be “dead set against it”! What will show this fact is time and also our fruit. We may continue repeating precisely what we promised never to repeat and we either do not see it or are ashamed to admit it. And even if others tell us and we see and admit it, we never dig down and expose the root of it. This means that there is no spiritual change – no change in the “software” of our heart. This then leads to 10-20-30 years of procrastination in our spiritual growth and progress.
WILL – is the Supreme Judge in our soul and EVEN GOD DOES NOT CHANGE ITS DECISIONS! It makes all the decisions required of it by our mind & heart. In difficult cases, our head is sometimes plaintiff and the heart is defendant, or vice versa. And we can be indecisive for a long time. Of course, many times they both agree and then we have no problem making a decision. Even this organ is under “mixed software” which influences the judge to make SELFISH decisions as much as possible. Therefore, God works in our will so we would be willing to do His pleasure (Phil. 2:13) and not always our own. But the Lord will never change this “software” without our permission and cooperation, which brings us to the precious verse where it is clearly written that we have to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12) This means that we are very much involved in whatever work God works in us and our active participation is required by Him, it is not optional.
Now, PRIDE and SELFISHNESS are the two most typical, most prominent, most evil and most damaging features of Satan’s character that we had inherited from him. They are so pronounced, even outwardly, that it is rather easy to observe them in people who were not delivered from them. These two always act “hand-in-hand” since PRIDE has built a throne for our SELF and is also its armor. We cannot be delivered from pride and remain selfish nor can we be delivered from selfishness and remain proud. Our SELF thus becomes our IMAGE and our PRIDE becomes its GLORY. We expect others to bow down to our image, or else, we do not deal with them. Any attempt from anyone to hurt our image or undermine our throne is repelled by our counterattacks and that either openly or sometimes thinly or even thickly veiled, depending on the “Height of our Majesty” and the degree of our spiritual intelligence, if any.
Pride and selfishness simply mean that we do not see and care about anybody else. YET, we consider ourselves humble, considerate, good hearted, loving, knowledgeable, wise, important and seldom appreciated by others as we should be! And this PROUD AND STUPID SELF rules our being as king Nebuchadnezzar ruled Babylon. And NOTHING, no words, no counsels or persuasions, no reasons, no wisdom of others can change this ruling of our proud self until God takes drastic measures and leads us into suffering, pain and also humiliation! He must humiliate us beyond belief making us into “oxen eating grass” for the necessary length of time! Only then are we able to look up and honor the King of Heaven and His ways and Judgments in truth (Dan. 4:24-34). Thus our PROUD AND STUPID SELF, which is the greatest enemy of God, is dethroned and we do not regard it or worship it and our selfishness any longer. This is our true and most important deliverance without which our salvation remains impossible! This simple spiritual fact is not preached to any congregation; on the contrary, believers are deceived that once they believed in Jesus, all is well!
But our belief in Jesus is insufficient as it is written: “He that believeth and is baptized SHALL BE saved” (Mk. 16:16). How does the Spirit interpret His Own Word?
Firstly, it is not written: “He that believeth and is baptized IS saved”. True? WHEN and HOW SHALL that believer be saved is not specified in this Word of God. It must be searched out in other passages of the Word.
Secondly, even the statement “shall be saved” is not unconditional! It is conditioned on a “continued believing” of that believer under all conditions where his faith may be severely tested. For example, the Lord is telling him that “he shall be hated of all men for His Name’s sake…”, etc.
Thirdly, the Lord enlarges and concludes the conditions for being saved far beyond just simple believing and a simple baptism by saying: “…but he that ENDURETH TO THE END SHALL BE saved.” (Mt. 10:22). In other words, he that becomes OVERCOMER shall be saved. The Cross of Jesus does not heal or renew or transform our “old man”, it crucifies him! And we must endure it! Period.
Pastors, preachers, teachers, do not deceive your sheep by your carnal interpretations of the Word of God since you are responsible for their future destiny. Read to them Mk. 16:16 together with Mt. 10:16-22+34-39 and with many other passages of the Word dealing with Overcomers, and then explain to them the true depth of God’s Truth.
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To be continued next week in chapter 4 – part 1
brother Hanola
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