The Quest For Truth

Proverbs 16:6 says that by the fear of the Lord men depart from evil. After we experience the grace of God and overcome sin in our lives, we are warned not to take the grace of God lightly. Because now we are ones who have tasted the goodness of the Lord and experienced the resurrection life of our Lord. We are now mature believers in the Lord understanding the goodness of the Lord. If after experiencing all these, we return to a life of sin, then our plight is indeed miserable. Because the Bible says that it would have been better if we had never known the Lord. This is where the fear of the Lord comes. We have to fear the Lord as fear in a real sense because it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God. By the fear of the Lord, Joseph ran from Potiphar’s wife when she tempted him to commit adultery with her. We fear God because we know the goodness and the severity of the Lord. To those who have been given much, much is expected from them. Similarly we have to fear the Lord and depart from evil lest the day comes when we find no place for repentance. The Lord is merciful and gracious but let us not take His grace lightly.

Faith is one of the key ingredients of the Christian life. We are saved by grace through faith. We have to have faith in what Christ has accomplished for us on the cross. It is by faith that we accept that we have been made holy in Christ. And it is by faith that we overcome the world and sin and the devil. But why is it that so many of us fail so often? It is hard to give any concrete answer because only God can tell what it is that goes inside each of us. There are things that even we don’t understand about ourselves. And when we feel that we have overcome suddenly we fall. But failure in the Christian life has to be viewed like failure in any other area of life. It is all a learning experience. We learn from our mistakes and we enrich the body of Christ by our learning. We should not give in to despair when we fail but rather lean upon the Holy Spirit to teach us more about God and His ways. Salvation from sin is what Christ came to offer us and it should be our quest to be free from every kind of sin we may have in our life whether known or unknown. But there are many failures in our quest for a pure and holy life. One of the reasons being that our faith is many a time polluted with our own imperfections and thinking. But every failure is a step to the purification of our faith if we learn from our mistakes and each step takes us closer to the kind of faith that Jesus had. So, we live and we fail and then we learn until our faith becomes pure.

The Apostle Paul at the close of his life called himself the chief of sinners. In another place he calls himself the least of the Apostles because he persecuted the church. It is true that we have to look at Christ and what He has done for us on the cross. We are no longer sinners but saints. We have been made righteous in Christ and we are now a holy nation. Our experiences may say something different but we don’t look at them but rather look at the facts of God as found in His word. But after we overcome sin by faith and enjoy the victory of Christ there comes a tendency wherein we are tempted to be proud. So now we have to look at the past and consider our experiences and confess that we are sinners if not the chief of sinners and remember that it was by grace alone that we overcame. Not by works lest any man should boast. Our victory over sin is because of Christ alone and not because of anything in us. So, the Apostle Paul called himself the chief of sinners because he remembered how he persecuted the church. After you overcome, remember the life you lived and give glory to God for what He has done in you. The more grace that you receive the more you will see the sinfulness that was in you and you will be humbled more and more as you progress in faith.

Jesus was a friend to many sinners. He insisted that He came to save sinners and not the righteous. So how are we to relate to sinners? One way is to make friends based on your terms as found in the Bible and not giving in to their terms. Jesus never adopted any behavior of the tax collectors and publicans to win their friendship. It was always on His terms whether they liked it or not. And most of them did like it. They liked to be friends with a godly man and change their own ways.

Taking sin too casually is a cause of much sin in our life.There has to come a time in our life when we say it is enough and close our hearts to sin. We don’t do this in our own strength but in the power of God through the Holy Spirit. Closing our hearts to sin is a blessed experience.

If we are full of turmoil and stress and tension inside of us then there must be something wrong in our belief system. As Christians we are not supposed to live like that. In the temptation of Jesus we see that He fought with the enemy but it was from a position of rest. He could always maintain His composure when fighting calmly with the devil. He was deriving strength from the inner man through the Holy Spirit. This is fighting from a position of rest and victory. We don’t fight to win but we fight from a position of victory that Christ has won for us.

The Christing life is not a lifelong struggle against sin, the devil and the world. We are not supposed to live fighting but resting in Christ. Someone may say, “If I do not fight then won’t I lose the battle.” That is where faith comes in. Resting involves having faith in God. We do not worry whether we will produce fruit or not. We leave it in the hands of God. He is the one who is going to produce fruit in us through the Holy Spirit. We believe this fact in faith because Christ is the vine and we are the branches. We just abide in Him and He produces fruit for us. We do not even have to struggle to abide in Him because God in Christ has already made us to abide in Him. We accept this in faith. We may fall and sin at times but even through our mistakes we learn more how to abide in Him. We learn not to fight sin but to allow God in Christ through the Holy Spirit to fight our battles and so we rest in Him. This is the true meaning of faith and victory in Christ because the just shall live by faith. Our whole attitude should be of faith in God which is resting in Christ.

It is true that God blesses us when we give and give lavishly for the kingdom of God. But giving can become a manifestation of our greed when we give in order to receive more from God. We give away our possesions and money so that God will give us a hundred fold return on our giving and some preachers may even encourage that. But giving to receive more should not be our motivation for giving. We should give out of obedience to the Spirit of God in our hearts. When we feel the impressions in our heart to give a certain thing or amount to certain individuals or groups, we should give out of obedience to the Holy Spirit speaking to us. We should give generously and cheerfully and not out of greed. Many Christians have been disappointed when the hundredfold return did not materialise. They gave away so much expecting even more from God but ended up frustrated because God does not honour greed. He honours an obedient heart.

It is a blessed thing to realise how miserable and unworthy sinners we are without Christ. Jesus said, “Apart from Me you can do nothing.” Too many times our problem is a too high estimation of ourselves. We have to be defeated again and again until we come to the realisation in our spirit man that we are indeed wretched people with no hope in ourselves. Before his deliverance and triumph in Christ, the Apostle Paul cried out, “O, wretched man that I man….” We will keep trying to live the Christian life in our own efforts until we realise that we are indeed hopeless cases of humanity. There is no good in us and the good that we want to do, we do not. Rather it is the evil that we do. But the day we realise our hopelessnes is the day we can receive our hope in Christ. It is the day we realise our inability and our sinfulness that is when we can receive the righteousness of Christ. That is what surrender is – when you realise you are not able and only Christ is able and so you give Him total control over your life. Your will is no longer yours. It belongs to Another. Your goals, ambitions and desires take on new meaning as you see them in the light of God’s word. Your life is now totally in the hands of God. You are willing to obey Him no matter what the cost. You surrender to His every command and you give up all human efforts to do the will of God. You will be happy wherever you are whether as a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord or as a mighty warrior in the kingdom of Christ. You die to yourself in order to live for Christ. Without such a death and resurrection we are indeed miserable sinners.

If we want to move from faith to faith and from perfection to perfection, we have to open up ourselves to the surgery of God on our lives. The imperfections that we have have to be carefully cut by the divine knife of God. So we need to have an attitude where God is free to work in us. We have to open up ourselves and surrender ourselves to the hands of God to do whatever He sees fit. When we do this God arranges situations in our lives to perfect us and bring us to maturity. We have to see the hand of God in every situation whether good or bad. Nothing comes to us unless it is allowed by God Himself. And all things are for our good and for His glory. During times of trial we need to search the word of God and respond accordingly. We need to seek godly counsel and we need to accept whatever God is trying to teach us even though it may be painful. As you surrender and become quite, God Himself will speak to you through His Holy Spirit and will guide you.