OzThoughts. Thursday 16th July, 2009

OzThoughts. Thursday 16th July, 2009

On Tuesday we closed OzThoughts with the chorus “To be like Jesus”:
(Unfortunately, I can not find a recording of it online)

To be like Jesus!
This hope possesses me,
In every thought and deed,
This is my aim, my creed;
To be like Jesus!
This hope possesses me,
His Spirit helping me,
Like him I'll be.
(SA Song Book: Chorus 107)

We have no hope of being like Jesus unless we have his Spirit helping us.

I remember two elderly sisters who lived together. One had never married and as her sister said “had always been good”. She had been a Salvation Army Soldier for some 70 years when I met her. The other sister had strayed quite far from the path of “good” mainly as the result, it seemed, of a disastrous marriage.

Now she wanted to be “good” but felt she was unworthy. She prayed but was not sure God had forgiven her sin. The problem was her memory of the past and a comparison with her sister. I think another problem may have been her sister’s “counselling” of her.

I prayed about it. I spoke to the Corps leadership and then I took a Soldier’s Covenant (Articles of War) for her to sign and offered her a place as a full member of the Army. She found through the acceptance of the Corps a demonstration of the acceptance of God.

She was living saved from sin and by the Holy Spirit’s help was living a good life. The day she was sworn in as a soldier, she witnessed to the Holy Spirit’s power in her life.

[Look and Listen: Hymn Tune – Dennis (or Blest be the tie that binds):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oti9_VZrJyE ]

Not what these hands have done
Can save this guilty soul;
Not what this toiling flesh has borne
Can make my spirit whole.

Not what I feel or do
Can give me peace with God;
Not all my prayers and sighs and tears
Can bear my awful load.

Thy work alone, O Christ,
Can ease this weight of sin;
Thy blood alone, O Lamb of God,
Can give me peace within.

Thy love to me, O God.
Not mine, O Lord, to thee,
Can rid me of this dark unrest
And set my spirit free.

Thy grace alone, O God.
To me can pardon speak;
Thy power alone, O Son of God.
Can this sore bondage break.
Author: Horatius Bonar (1808-89)
The Salvation Army Song Book: Song Number: 297

Romans 8 (The Message)

1-2With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ's being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

3-4God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn't deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
5-8Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn't pleased at being ignored.
9-11But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God's terms. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he'll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!
12-14So don't you see that we don't owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There's nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God's Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
15-17This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike "What's next, Papa?" God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what's coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we're certainly going to go through the good times with him!
(Read the rest of the Chapter here: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%208&version=65 )


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