Continuing works by J.J.

Entry #5


Before I get going on this new entry to my continuing blog, I would like to extend an open invitation to anyone out there reading my blog a chance to have your pressing questions answered on matters of the Christian faith. So feel free to ask me that question that you have bugging you to no end and the churches can’t seem to answer to your satisfaction, and I will give it my best shot

In entry number 4 you were given the practical exercise of asking yourself what the reasons were for doing what you no longer wish to do. The bible says that if we do what we don’t want to do, that it is no longer us doing it but sin that does it which liveth in me. Here’s what that means:
The word sin has two meanings: 1.) Missing the mark. 2.) Falling short of the mark.
When we are sinners not yet saved by the new birth of God’s Holy Spirit, we are considered “missing the mark.” The mark of spiritual perfection. Yet when we are born-again and our natural spirit is transformed by God’s Holy Spirit we are now perfect in spirit because it is now God’s spirit that lives in us urging us to do what is good and pleasing in God’s sight. This urging comes in the form of experiencing pleasure and joy in that which is good. (Of God.) “Only God is good.”

Thus God is in all things good and pleasing to our soul, which is now the unity of God’s spirit and our body. Only the problem is we still have the yearnings of a sinful body, supported by the mind conditioned to living in sinful practices. Hence, though we now want to live at the urging of God’s spirit we still want to enjoy the pleasures, riches and/ or worries of sin; wherein the bible tells us that our flesh is at war with the spirit.

Now understand this…when we try to resist sin by stopping it, we will soon fall back into it because we haven’t learned to see and submit to God’s loving and truthful alternatives to the reasons we have for why we choose to sin. To resist sin, to try and do the good that any book says we need to do, and that includes the Bible, is all the sin that falls short of the mark. Since most misunderstand the bible anyway.

The reason is, because we haven’t searched our own minds excuses for doing sin and thus haven’t found God’s loving and truthful alternatives to those reasons so that we can choose to submit to God’s way instead of our own way of resisting from sheer willpower.
We have not yet been, “transformed by the renewing of our mind.”

Now understand this: Most Important!!! Would you rather “submit” to the way of love and truth found as the alternative choices available for your reason for committing sins? Or “submit” to doing what any book tells you to do; even if the book is the Bible?

Do you see the difference? To do what the bible says to do is an impersonal submission that has no understanding of the reasons why you sin, other than they are carnal in nature. God is still: Out there watching over you.

On the other hand to “submit” to the revealed loving and truthful alternatives that you found in your questioning of repentance to your reasons for sin makes it personal. God is found within you in “increasing measure” as you do the loving and truthful ways that have always been there, for you to find and rejoice in submitting to. Now you are being transformed! Where in submission through resistance you are just learning to be stubbornly blind and ignorant. And doomed to failure because when you are weakest, the sin will re-surface. All you did was bury it under the strength of your will power.

If you can see this MAJOR difference then you can also see that the best teaching is that which teaches us how to overcome sin by transformation rather than by blind faith.

Blind faith is what you learn in church, not what you learn in the bible. Yet if you do not establish your walk in “The Way” of repentance and transformation you will not know how to see the lie of the church’s teachings. Nor will you be able to help your brother “cast the speck out of his eye.”

The churches preach from the bible but they misinterpret it. Some twist it so bad that it is easy to see their cults doctrine. Others are more subtle and use a lot of stories and a lot of oratory to arouse your emotion and blind you to accepting their doctrine which supports blind faith, blind obedience, love from human effort, an empty hope based on an empty grave, and a false repentance that is more of a confession than true repentance. The six key concepts that the churches of the world are mis-teaching you today!

Don’t worry about that, believe it or not all of their false teachings will serve to prove to you the one truth that they don’t teach. Just remember the joy of understanding you felt when you first saw the way of transformation. Remember that and move to continue in your own personal transformation. Write it down! “Why do I do the wrong I don’t want to do?” Find your answers, then make those answers into questions too and answer them…on paper! Example: “Why do I drink so much?” (Possible answer: “I drink to be bold.”) “Why do I need to be bold?” “Because I’m lonely.” “Why am I lonely?” “I have no lover.” “What’s stopping me from having one?”
Do you see how transformation happens? The answers reveal where you can choose to change, whether it be by changing a personal characteristic developed through misunderstanding…Are you really so unlovable? Or are you believing a lie that someone gave to you? Do you need a better paying job or need to lose weight or change something about yourself?

Through all of the growing in self awareness is the growing of loving responses that we choose to do when we can, until they are a part of us and we learn to love even when we think we have no one to love. We soon see how it is that we come to know God’s love and become able to believe in Jesus who made it possible for us to know Gods love. (Luke 10:22, John 17:25-26).

Read these verses and SEE its God’s love that Jesus reveals to us. SEE that we don’t see Jesus but we see God (by His Love) through Jesus. OUR FAITH TO BELIEVE IS ESTABLISHED!!!

This is scriptural…James 4:1-8 begins… “What causes fights and quarrels amongst you? Do they not come from the desires that rage within? You want something but don’t get it, you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God, and when you do ask, you ask amiss so that you may spend what you get on your PLEASURES…”

And in Luke chapter 8 Jesus tells us that it is the lust for the WORRIES, RICHES, AND/OR PLEASURES that keep us from becoming mature.

That’s what I just taught you about in the bible: How to overcome the worries, riches and/or pleasures of our sinful desires.

When you see why you do your sin, know the reasons/motives for why you do them, then God can give you the gift of the Holy Spirit so you can choose to acknowledge the Truth in your desire to accept the responsibility for living in Love and Truth as your chosen way of wanting to live like and in! You will then easily be able to accept the scriptural truth taught by Jesus and his apostles: “First, cast the plank out of your own eye, and then, you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

You will be speaking from experience, from a possibly born-again viewpoint of understanding of the same way you learned to question the motive of your sin that you don’t like to do… “The good I want to do, I do not do, but the bad I don’t want to do I do! What a wretched man I am; who will rescue me from this body of death…”

Who? Jesus will rescue us. How? By revealing the increase of God’s love as we look for the reasons and look intently for the perfect low of love in the alternatives! See them? Choose to do them until they become a part of you. Transformed by the renewing of your mind! Renewed in spirit, renewed in understanding, knowing beyond any doubt that it is a universal truth that we can all “REPENT” and choose to find the love of God that has always been there just beneath the vain, boastful, envious, rude, self-seeking self! Renewed in confidence, renewed in attitude and assurance, renewed in ever increasing love! You have become one of God’s chosen yet that’s just the icing on the cake. The part I like is that you get to walk with God in the present in increasing measure till the full part measure of our faith is matched; until we know it in the fullness of Christ Jesus.

Is that all there is? No! Not by a long shot. There’s more to come. Till next time…

In Him,
J.J.