the great I AM

It is amazing what a poor view of God we can have even after we have been saved and delivered. The reason behind this is that we understand God only based on our experience with Him. We understand Him based on what others teach us about Him and we do not see how important the Scriptures is to reveal to us the nature of God. Starting from the Old Testament, we have to see how God progressively reveals Himself as God Almighty, God Jehovah, the Holy One of Israel and so on. We usually comprehend Him only as our Helper or the One who forgives and forgets. We see Him as long suffering because we quickly find out that we can sin and get away with it. We do not realize that instead of punishing, there is a more of a withdrawal of His Spirit from among us because God is dealing with us in a different way than He dealt with Israel. It is only through closely looking at the Scriptures can we fully comprehend the wholesomeness of our great God.

Faith is the evidence of grace

We have to bring all our responses to God under the umbrella of grace. We cannot respond to God rightly without grace working in our lives.  We have to magnify grace by declaring that grace is the atmosphere in which we can be pleasing to God. How does faith fit in? Well, faith is the evidence of grace working in our lives. If grace is not producing faith, then it is not grace. In the same manner, if we cannot believe, we should see that we are out of grace. Since grace brings faith, we are bound to believe. We cannot excuse our unbelief. Since we have already received grace, we already have faith to put our trust in God. We need not cry out for more faith. We just need to believe.

Beware of passivity!

We are living in an age where passivity in the things of God reign supreme. We do not pay attention to the Scripture even when we try to do our own Bible study. We do not reason with God and wrestle with Him in prayer. But somehow we expect that things need to work out for us because we are His children. Even in the area of song we face difficult times. We are supposed to use song and praise as a testimony and as a weapon. However far too many of us see praise and worship songs as an entertainment. We listen to praise and worship songs and we just enjoy the song. We do not try to enter into the spirit of the song and try to edify ourselves with it. We want to just enjoy listening. And if possible even sleep off at night with song plugged into our ears as a soothing lullaby.We have to learn to use the song. Or produce a song ourselves. It is not as difficult as we think.

Walking in the flesh

In my Wednesday Bible class, I was inquiring for a good word in malayalam for 'legalism' and couldn't find any. I had to use quite a lot of words to explain it and finally had to come to define it myself - 'Any act or activity not explicitly commanded by God, done with the purpose of obtaining God's favor but without the activity of grace or of Christ either in the decision or in the act itself'. I find it so important to admit more and more that without Jesus we can nothing. At least nothing that pleases God. Isn't that what God wants us to see when He gave us Jesus? Isn't He the author and finisher of our faith? A single boast can easily lead to many. So it is important to remain zero boast. Does that mean we become passive Christians? No! it means that we can do all things through Christ who strengthens us.

Spiritual warfare

When we do spiritual warfare, most of the time we only focus on how to achieve the victory and so our thoughts are centered around how God can take us through. We are trusting God for the victory and not realizing that the way to victory is to work alongside God and not God alone doing it for us. What we fail to do is to work with our thoughts while we are in the battle. We should prevent certain thoughts from gaining the upper hand because they are crucial to our victory. We cannot afford to complain while in the battle. We cannot afford to be thankless while in the battle. We cannot afford to question the delay in receiving an answer. The battle is as important as the victory and winning the war inside is as important as gaining the ultimate victory.

Our life of faith

God is leading us into a life that is impossible and different in every way from the way the world lives. For example, when we fall sick and pray for healing, our next step should be to rise up in faith (or at least do something that shows that we prayed in faith) instead of waiting passively and hoping that something would happen. When we pray for the unsaved sick, they have every right to see the evidence before they believe they are well. We too expect the same and fail to realize that our faith receives before it sees. The evidence may come before or after. We are called to live in a different realm altogether.
Let me also note here that unless we train ourselves in this faith walk, we would never see consistent success. If we do not begin well, we can never progress into higher levels of victory.

The Law of God

The Law was given to Israel and the call of God was to be holy as I am Holy. This call to be holy meant that they had to live a life that was separated unto God and was well within their ability to keep. The requirements for that holiness was made very clear to them Their refusal to obey the Ten Commandments was unacceptable to God even though we later understand that the Law was like a mirror to reveal the sinful nature in man. However the Law was a very legitimate demand from God and He worked in every way so that they would begin to obey. Their disobedience revealed their wickedness and not their helplessness. They were not trying desperately hard and still not succeeding. They were just not willing to obey.
Jesus in the New Testament brought the Law to an impossible level of obedience but it was never so with the Law of Moses. We have to distinguish between the legitimate demand of God in the Old Testament and the impossible demand of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. The age of the Law showed man's failure to obey God. Jesus came to reveal to man that he needed God to obey God.