What is the true nature of a man who has been reconciled with God through Jesus Christ? Or to put it another way; Christian, do you know who you are?
Is salvation merely a ticket to get on the bandwagon of human effort to rid ourselves of our sins?
Legalism, by any name is a misrepresentation of the profound, life generating gospel of Jesus Christ. Legalism, simply put, is adding (human requirements) to the finished work of Jesus Christ.
Today’s Judaized, Law-keeping religious Christianity, in it’s myriad of forms, is obscuring, adding to the radical salvation that was bought and paid for by the son of God; Man looking inward – trying to attain spiritual life by his own effort… This is the teaching of all false religion and it is why many see Christianity as just another religion. Paul addressed it in his letter to the Galatians.
“I only want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by hearing with faith?
Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now going to be made complete by the flesh?” Gal 3:2-3
Dear brothers and sisters, let’s quit trying to sound super-knowledgeable with a repertoire of Kabbalist “sacred names,” or thinking we’re a prophet every time the Holy Spirit gives us eyes to see or a heart to discern, shall we? Let’s drop the pride and get back to the cross, where we find true life and the peace that passes understanding.
“For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” 1 Cor 2:2
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. – (2 Corinthians 5:21)
Oswald Chambers – My Utmost for His Highest
Sin is a fundamental relationship— it is not wrong doing, but wrong being— it is deliberate and determined independence from God. The Christian faith bases everything on the extreme, self-confident nature of sin. Other faiths deal with sins— the Bible alone deals with sin. The first thing Jesus Christ confronted in people was the heredity of sin, and it is because we have ignored this in our presentation of the gospel that the message of the gospel has lost its sting and its explosive power.
The revealed truth of the Bible is not that Jesus Christ took on Himself our fleshly sins, but that He took on Himself the heredity of sin that no man can even touch. God made His own Son “to be sin” that He might make the sinner into a saint. It is revealed throughout the Bible that our Lord took on Himself the sin of the world through identification with us, not through sympathy for us. He deliberately took on His own shoulders, and endured in His own body, the complete, cumulative sin of the human race. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us…” and by so doing He placed salvation for the entire human race solely on the basis of redemption. Jesus Christ reconciled the human race, putting it back to where God designed it to be. And now anyone can experience that reconciliation, being brought into oneness with God, on the basis of what our Lord has done on the cross.
A man cannot redeem himself— redemption is the work of God, and is absolutely finished and complete. And its application to individual people is a matter of their own individual action or response to it. A distinction must always be made between the revealed truth of redemption and the actual conscious experience of salvation in a person’s life.
Recommended reading: Birthright: Christian Do You Know Who You Are? – David Needham
