From Ignorance To Righteousness

From Ignorance To Righteousness

There is a lie that satan continues to propagate today with signal success in the hearts of countless people. It is the notion that by giving themselves back to the God who made them, and by submitting themselves to His sovereignty, they will be robbed of that liberty which makes life really worth living. Such people are not necessarily insincere in this conviction, but are the victims of their own ignorance, which makes them dupes of the devil, whose greatest delight is exploiting that ignorance.

God's Word describes in detail the ignorance and the devil's part in it:

For the god of this world has blinded the unbeliever's minds [that they should not discern the truth], preventing them from seeing the illuminating light of the Gospel of the glory of Christ (the Messiah), Who is the Image and likeness of God.

Their moral understanding is darkened and their reasoning is beclouded. [They are] alienated (estranged, self-banished) from the life of God [with no share in it; this is] because of the ignorance (the want of knowledge and perception, the wilful blindness) that is deep-seated in them, due to their hardness of heart {to the insensitiveness of their moral nature]. (Ephesians 4:18).

This hardened heart is the essence of the "old man" within us (Ephesians 4:22), our flesh. The soul of the unregenerate is sold out to the flesh, and that persons behavior is subject to the demands of a rebel regime that denies to God His right to be God.

The human soul, dominated by the flesh, becomes party, however unwittingly, to every carnal ambition that would silence the voice of God and resist the claims of His Holy Spirit.

The Lord Jesus Christ wants so very much to replace by His presence within you, all your inherent potential for evil under the influence of the flesh. He offers you instead all His limitless potential for good through the energy and power of His indwelling Holy Spirit.

Spiritual new birth involves the principle of divine substitution, and though you are to be persuaded of your inherent wickedness, you are to be equally persuaded of Christ's inherent righteousness and all that it means for you.

If that which is both of the flesh is flesh, you can be equally certain that that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit - that God is God!

What is so completely amazing is that God is prepared to be God in you not figuratively but FACTUALLY. You can actually share His Life and be transformed into His likeness.

"For His divine power has bestowed upon us all things that [are requisite and suited] to life and godliness, through the [full, personal] knowledge of Him Who called us by and to His own glory and excellence (virtue). By means of these He has bestowed on us His precious and exceedingly great promises, so that through them you may escape [by flight] from the moral decay (rottenness and corruption) that is in the world because of covetousness (lust and greed), and become sharers (partakers) of the divine nature." (2 Peter 1:3-4).

1. In what ways have you been tempted to think that by giving yourself to God, you would be missing out on certain freedoms and pleasures?

2. What does it mean practically to you that by your spiritual new birth, Christ's inherent righteousness is now yours?

3. At this time, how do you recognize that you are sharing the life of Christ in actuality?

~W. Ian Thomas~