Sunday Report
This Old Testament passage carries New Testament doctrine! Did you notice how the top is like a choral refrain in heaven while the bottom is a response from earth? There is a relationship connection!
The eye of our living Lord is upon us who have His living hope in our hearts. Our hope is because we have received His love poured into us so that our faith may be renewed in hope since we have now been joined, His Spirit to our spirit, and redeemed.
This verse is like our view of the Redwoods. There is much more than meets the eye. Sin cannot overwhelm neither can circumstances be so impossible that grace is not waiting on scene to do “so much more.” Grace is a personal relationship working inside-out as well as outside circumstances - in. It is about two persons in relationship! One person is you and the other person is too amazing to describe!
The other side of our grace relationship is God Himself. Not the image of God who is in our mind, nothing that small. It is The Eternal Reality of God Himself. The I AM Who creates out of nothing! This is the person on the other side of our personal relationship because we are in Jesus Christ. It is not only GOD, it is The Holy Spirit, it is The Lord Jesus Christ, it is the Triune Godhead Person! I know! How can it be? Yes, it is the God of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and the God of Jesus. Our grace is from out of God, our personal God, who provides power for us to accomplish His will ... and so much more! This grace, the Grace of our Triune God, is “this grace in which we stand,” Romans 5:2. How glorious is our God!
We took a look at this verse last time as an introduction to faith. It suggests by context both living and walking are different, living does not necessarily equate to walking. The scriptural record is clear, our faith links the resurrection power of Jesus to both living and walking. Faith not only establishes us in righteousness but also provides the power to bring Jesus into our very soul so that we can live and walk in the Spirit.
The question becomes, why do we want to move mountains and mulberry trees? Faith not only moves mountains, it does much more, it makes us righteousness. The task of making us righteous is greater than moving mountains and this is exactly what we are called to do. We have been given the power to be righteous by faith.
Our anatomy discussions have been focusing on discernment, not just good v. evil but spiritual “things” exposed in our temporal and corporeal experience. In Adam, we are spiritually dead and totally bonded to time and space references. This all changes when we are born again. Our essence becomes eternal and we are faced with dilemmas of blending spiritual realities into corporeal experience.
Our spiritual “things”, however, turn into genuine, quality realities as we move from drinking milk and begin digesting spiritual meat. The “things” in our life turn out to be elements of deep relationships and the “things” become tools in growing out of circumstances into grace by faith.
Paul tells us in Romans 5 that since we have been justified by faith we not only have peace with God but we also have access by faith into grace in which we now stand. It is this moving into our grace relationship by faith that changes circumstances into opportunities for moving from milk to maturity. The important “things” in our natural life, our temporal and corporeal life, becomes a smaller part of a much bigger reality challenging our comfort zones.
