Feeding the Sheep - Living the New Life 6
-Apostle Paul, 1st century
Colossians 3:12
[This is the 21st message of this series]
This lesson is intended for mature believers (or adulting believers). For a more orderly study, please go through all the previous messages first, if you haven't yet.
New Nature
This is the 6th part of this series, within a series.
To continue, we were talking about how the Apostle Paul is telling the first church in Colassae what "to do", now that they are living their new life.
Replacement
Whenever we quit doing certain things, we now have this free time. The first five lessons of this mini series told us what we ought not to do.
And so when we take those out of our day, what do we do in its place? Yes it's physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Out with the old and in with the new. The five earthly things we ought to quit on doing is replaced by five heavenly things we ought to be doing instead.
Mercy
God gave us a heavenly gift --mercy. Christ took upon Himself what we deserve to have. We deserve death. We deserve punishment. We deserve to pay for our sins. The world calls this karma.
Instead God had mercy on us; giving us something we did not deserve -- grace. He gave us forgiveness and eternal life.
To be like Christ starts and ends with mercy and grace. The same way God have shown us, the same way He modeled for us, is the same things we ought to extend to others.
We Weren't Nice
Admit it or not, we were worse off than most people and yet God extended His mercy upon us. How can we not extend the same amount of mercy over others who most probably than not, are not even close to being as bad as we were, before Christ redeemed us?
In our new life in Christ we ought to have kindhearted mercy, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience towards one another. And it is not going to be hard as we already received all these from Him who redeemed us.
Admit it or not, we were worse off than most people and yet God extended His mercy upon us. How can we not extend the same amount of mercy over others who most probably than not, are not even close to being as bad as we were, before Christ redeemed us?
In our new life in Christ we ought to have kindhearted mercy, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience towards one another. And it is not going to be hard as we already received all these from Him who redeemed us.
Gift
God extended all these to us and we received it all as part of the new life package. These are all included. God does not expect us to use our own strength in anything, if we do, we will fail.
We can be religious hypocrites or holier than thou Pharisees, Saducees and religious teachers of the law. But we can only do so much until we become like Apostle Paul -- blinded by his self righteousness, his piousness and his years of learning and self discipline. They were all using their own strength to reach God and took a lot of pride in how they were better than everyone else.
God extended all these to us and we received it all as part of the new life package. These are all included. God does not expect us to use our own strength in anything, if we do, we will fail.
We can be religious hypocrites or holier than thou Pharisees, Saducees and religious teachers of the law. But we can only do so much until we become like Apostle Paul -- blinded by his self righteousness, his piousness and his years of learning and self discipline. They were all using their own strength to reach God and took a lot of pride in how they were better than everyone else.
No, we cannot do it our own way. We cannot Mother Theresa our way into holiness. Even she cannot do it and we are not even close to being like her.
We all will fall short and needed God to reach down to us, not the other way around.
New Creation
Our new nature is born out of these:
mercy, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.
A new creation in Christ grows up to be a merciful, compassionate, kind, humble, gentle and patient person.
Acting as such will take up most of the time we have freed by staying away from the things we used to do in our old nature:
impurity, evil desires, greed, anger, rage, wrath, slander, dirty language and lying.
mercy, compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.
A new creation in Christ grows up to be a merciful, compassionate, kind, humble, gentle and patient person.
Acting as such will take up most of the time we have freed by staying away from the things we used to do in our old nature:
impurity, evil desires, greed, anger, rage, wrath, slander, dirty language and lying.
That person is not us anymore. Let us not be like among the Walking Dead, the same way we used to live our old life.
Comments
Post a Comment