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Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. (John 15:2) |
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To be a Christian is not merely to take a mental attitude toward the facts of theology. If we can get someone to come around to our point of view concerning the Lord Jesus Christ we feel the individual has become a Christian; that he or she has been born again and therefore will go to Heaven when he or she dies. |
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We indeed have made a proselyte. Whether or not the individual ever becomes a true Christian has not been decided as yet. |
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The Christian salvation is not in theology. The Christian salvation is in abiding in Christ. |
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To abide in Christ is to meet Him every morning and to look to Him in every decision during the day. Christ must become all in all to us. He will if we cease not to cultivate His Presence, His will, His peace, His victory in every circumstance! |
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Going to church, reading the Bible, praying, giving, serving, are all necessary. But keep in mind they are scaffolding. They are means to an end. The end is Christ being formed in us. |
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When we keep abiding in Christ we begin to bear fruit. This means we have a change of character. The fruit of righteous behavior, of holiness of thought, speech, and word, of obedience to God, begins to be practiced throughout our personality. |
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The fruit is the image of the character of Christ. When we bear that fruit other people are affected. Christ is born in them. Their personality begins to be transformed. As we are willing to die in the Lord much fruit comes forth in us and in other people. Then we are bearing the fruit God is looking for. |
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As we bear fruit God, after deriving benefit for a while, prunes away much of it just as in any orchard. This is a perplexing experience for us but is necessary if we are to increase in the image of Christ. |
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This does not mean God prunes away the image of Christ in us but parts of our personality and actions that heretofore had been acceptable. An outstanding minister in Europe recently went through a devastating personal experience and has come back stronger and more insightful than ever. He wrote a book about his experience called "God Can Do It Without Me," or something to this effect. |
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The only limit to what we can become in Christ is how much pruning we will accept. If we don't get off the bus the result can be awesome! |
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If after having "accepted" Christ we do not begin to be transformed we are in clear, scriptural danger of being removed from the Vine. |
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Who is the Vine? Christ. What does it mean to be cut out of the Vine? It means we do not share in the Life of Christ. |
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Will I go to Heaven if I am cut out of the Vine? I don't know. Do you want to go to Heaven to be with the angels and have no part in Christ? |
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The point is, the issue is not Heaven it is sharing the Life of Christ. |
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If you accept Christ and then do not become a new righteous creature as measured by your personality and behavior you will be cut out of the Vine. |
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Are you saying we are saved by works? I am saying that good works are the only reliable evidence of salvation and the purpose of salvation and indeed are salvation. |
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We are saved from sin not from Hell. |
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Ask yourself: Do I want to be where there is no sin or where there is no fire? |
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Your answer will reveal the reality of your salvation. |
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I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. (John 15:1) |
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There are a lot of false vines but Jesus is the one true Vine. |
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Human beings are little more than dust when compared with the spiritual titans that live, move, and have their being in the spirit realm. Some of these majesties are righteous, serving God and Christ. Some of them are wicked and are governed by the fallen cherub, Satan. |
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We are in a religious revival in America. Past emphases on philosophy and psychology are drying up. People no longer are fired up about operant conditioning. The in thing is contact with the spirit realm. It isn't that people want to go back to the traditional churches, although some do. They are looking for excitement, for power, for relief from the boredom and oppression of life in the flesh. |
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The human race, particularly in the affluent nations where most people are not busily groping for survival on the land, crave the mystical, the supernatural, and they are using drugs as well as westernized versions of Hinduism to get it. |
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The "prosperity" and "faith" messages found in the evangelical churches are too close to Hinduism to be comfortable. |
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The spirit realm is real, make no mistake about this. If you are still blind to the fact that there are angels, spirits, demons, and God knows what else in a very real spirit realm you are behind the times. How will you ever understand your environment apart from a realization of the sources of power and wisdom? |
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The New Agers are ready to teach you about the spirit realm when the physical realm trashes your soul. |
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Now let me warn you of something. Because a personage exists in the spirit realm does not mean it is kind and good. Every destructive scourge that will eventually turn what was once paradise on earth into a darkening Hell's twilight of grotesque, cancer-disfigured monsters, torturing each other and shaking their fist at God and His Christ, being forced to drink blood in a superheated environment, came to earth because of the self-will of these lovely shafts of light in the spirit realm. |
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These goblin creatures disguise themselves as beautiful spirits who want to improve the quality of your life. They need you because life in the spirit realm apart from the Presence of God is dry indeed. |
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Once they get their talons into you they can torture you until you are more than ready to jump off the bridge. |
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If this has happened to you, or if you are being persuaded to adopt a spirit guide, a familiar spirit, run like Satan is after you He is! Never mind His blandishments or threats. Flee! Flee! Flee! Do you want to go insane! |
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Right now come to the One who has the power. His name is Jesus. He also is in the spirit realm, in the Paradise that spirit guides promise but can't deliver. |
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When He speaks the angels and demons shut up. "Shut up and come out of him," the Lord says, and you are free. |
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You are only dust. You are going to have to get hooked up to power if you are to stand during this year and the coming years. The greatest power by far is Jesus. Call on His name and your psychedelic visions and astral projections will wither. Maybe God will let you see the bottomless pit you are falling into. |
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I'm not kidding! It's this bad and worse! |
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In Jesus you will have righteousness, peace, and joy. Believe me this is better than excitement. The end of Jesus is endless love, endless peace, and endless joy in the garden of God. This is a much better plan than the instant gratification of your lusts, because all the mystical stuff going on is a thinly disguised justification for undisciplined moral behavior. The demons drink the passions of your flesh and you get AIDS and venereal disease. So much for the beautiful spirit guides! |
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If you want to escape from the delusions of our day tell God about it now. |
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Get hooked up to the righteous Power, the true Vine. If you don't you are going to default to the wrong vine and that fun isn't going to last! |
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But Christ as a son over his own house; whose house are we, if we hold fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end. (Hebrews 3:6) |
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In our day we are placing an unscriptural emphasis on the beginning aspect of salvation to the neglect of the process and the goal. The product of this overemphasis is people who "make a decision for Christ" and then fall away; make another decision for Christ and then fall away; make another decision for Christ and then fall away. There are many such individuals in jail at the present time who go to a Bible study and make another "decision for Christ." They make a decision for Christ because they want to please God, they want to be righteous. But what they are being taught is a philosophy, a system of belief, not the Divine salvation. |
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It absolutely is necessary that salvation begin in our life with a decisive, clear-cut action. We must turn away from our own attempts to save ourselves. We must put our faith in the blood atonement made by the Lord Jesus. We must repent of our sinful behavior and renounce the things we are doing we know to be sinful. |
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We must be baptized in water, declaring we have died to the world and now are raised with Christ that we might enter the Kingdom of God. These actions must be performed clearly and decisively. |
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But this is just the beginning. After this there is a life to be lived in which we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling—not as today with gleeful overconfidence but with fear and trembling that we might be faithful in pleasing God. |
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We have been given the piano, now we need to learn how to play it. Otherwise the Christian Gospel is to us a religious philosophy, not the power of God to salvation. |
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Then there is the Day of Salvation that is coming in which Christ will remove the presence of sin from us and clothe us with a robe of righteousness. The robe of righteousness is fashioned as we keep putting to death, through the Spirit of God, the sinful deeds of our body. In the Day of the Lord we shall be clothed with a body from Heaven that has been formed as we have put to death the deeds of our body on the earth. We are going to reap exactly what we have sown. |
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Salvation has a specific beginning, a specific program, a specific conclusion. Remember, salvation is defined as complete deliverance from the guilt, power, and presence of sin. Each of us has been given a mark toward which to press. There is a conclusion of the work of salvation, not a conclusion of growing in the Lord but a conclusion of the work of delivering us from the guilt, power, and presence of sin, of redemption. Such deliverance is not completed at the beginning of our salvation but at the end. |
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It is not the beginning that saves us but the end. He who endures to the end is the person who is saved. We can go through the program successfully as long as we keep our eyes on the Lord. But if we grow cold and neglectful we are heading back toward the fire that will consume the adversaries of God. This is what the Book of Hebrews teaches us. |
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God is granting revivals of repentance in the United States in the present hour. This may prove to be our last opportunity to seek the Lord. Let us make sure we do not, after repenting, grow cold again. (There may not be another opportunity to repent!) Let us rather press forward to the finish line so we may be saved (delivered from the presence of sin) in the Day of the Lord. We will be made a partaker of Christ if we hold fast our confidence steadfastly to the end. (from Eternal Judgment) |
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Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place of my rest? (Acts 7:49) |
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The Bible is so large and complicated it is hard to tell the forest from the trees. But there are a few themes that are central to the Divine purpose. One of the most important of these is the construction of the living temple of God. |
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God has a temple in Heaven, we know from the sixth chapter of the Book of Isaiah. But the temple in Heaven is not to be the future home of God or the place of His throne. God is in the process of constructing a house for Himself, a house built of living stones. The Lord Jesus Christ is the chief Cornerstone of the eternal tabernacle of God. The believers are the remainder of the building. |
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When God created the heavens and the earth, the world of molecules, He made an environment superior to the spirit realm (as the fallen angels and demons understand very well—that's why they spend their time here and are all the time messing with people). |
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God was on earth in the beginning but He had to withdraw into the spirit realm because we chose to obey the fallen cherub. |
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But there's this about God. He doesn't change His mind. What He starts He finishes—big time! |
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God has allowed six thousand years for all of us, angels included, to get it through our head that Satan is going nowhere. God is permitting Satan (like He does us sometimes) to express himself. God is giving him lots of rope. You know what Satan is going to do with the rope? You've got it. He is going to hang himself. He always does! |
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When God is satisfied the lesson is over He is going to return to the earth in Jesus Christ and the saints. All sin and unrighteousness will be driven from the material creation. |
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After a thousand-year orientation program God in Christ in His Church will descend graciously through the new sky to the new earth (the old went into the hamper). God loves dramatic entrances. Ta-dah! |
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Here comes God in His new house to dwell among His children, the saved nations of the earth. Now they will pray sideways. Instead of looking up to Heaven for God they will go to the new Jerusalem. There the saints will bless, teach, and heal them. |
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All these people are the inheritance of Christ and His saints. But our best inheritance is the Father. We shall be able to see His face! There's no church in the new Jerusalem because God is here with us forever in unconcealed splendor—just like in Eden. |
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The name of that city shall be, "The Lord is there." |
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"O come, O come, Emmanuel." |
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Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name. (Revelation 3:12) |
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The name of the Father is written on the conqueror. The name of the holy city, Jerusalem, is written on the conqueror. Also, the new name of Christ is written on him. |
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What is the new name of Christ Jesus? We do not know. We do know, however, that as we grow in the Lord He becomes to us all we need and desire. |
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When we begin as a Christian our understanding of Christ is that He is the Son of God and also the unblemished Lamb who was offered for our sin and who rose again from the dead by the power of the Spirit of God. |
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As we move ahead on our journey we discover that Christ is our peace, our healing, our wisdom, our strength, our joy, our sanctification, and everything else of lasting value. Gradually He grows in our vision until He becomes larger than the galaxies of the universe. We see that the creation is upheld by the Word of His power. |
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Still Christ grows in our consciousness. |
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We are beginning to understand that the Church, the Body of Christ, is the universal expression of Christ Jesus; that the two thousand years of the Christian Era, during which Christ is being formed in the believers, have been for the purpose of magnifying the death and resurrection of Christ in the members of His Body. |
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Finally we realize that Christ "filleth all in all." He has grown in us and our vision has been enlarged until He who at one time was seen by us as the gentle Teacher of Nazareth has become all that is worthwhile in the universe. |
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We know now that God intends for the whole creation to become a reflection of the image and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ and that we all shall live and move and have our being in His will and Life. |
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In Christ Jesus dwells all the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form. He is the visible Revelation of the invisible God and—wonder of wonders—we are being created in Him as part of that revelation! |
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We are being created a part of His appearing, His forthshining. Christ will return not only with us but also in us. In that Day we shall resemble Christ Jesus, and yet be ourselves. Our personality will be in union with His in such a manner that we will appear as Him and as ourselves—neither personality being confused as to identity. |
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To be married to the Lamb requires that we lose the right to be ourselves. Our uniqueness is enhanced, but we always and forever will be an integral part of Christ. |
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He is willing to give up His right to be an individual so you may become part of Him. Are you willing to give up your right to be an individual so He may become part of you? |
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You are getting the better part of the deal! (from The Conqueror) |
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Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. (Revelation 3:10) |
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I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil. (John 17:15) |
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What Jesus means in Revelation 3:10 He explains in John 17:15. In both instances the Apostle John recorded the message. |
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It is not the will of Christ that we be lifted out of the world but rather that we be kept, or guarded, from the evil (one). In Revelation 3:10, we are kept from the evil of the "hour of temptation." The word for "temptation" is used in the Lord's prayer, "Lead us not into temptation." |
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The problem of Antichrist's reign, as far as the saints are concerned, is not as much in the realm of suffering as it is in the area of temptation to sin. In many instances Satan can overcome a believer more easily through sin than through suffering. |
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The trap and delusion of the last days is lawlessness and materialism. Already numerous Christians have had their spiritual vitality destroyed because of their participation in the lawless, wealthy cultures of our day. The believers are being overcome by sin, by physical luxuries, by fornication, by covetousness, by neglect of their salvation because of eating, drinking, buying, selling, marrying, giving in marriage—by the normal business of civilization. |
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The world of Noah and the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were caught off guard by the Divine judgment because of lawlessness and materialism. |
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In the majority of instances God does not deliver us from temptation by taking us to Heaven, although sometimes we could wish He would do so. Rather, God makes a way of escape for us so we may be able to triumph throughout the particular trial. God keeps us in the midst of temptation. |
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When we think of Israel in Goshen, Jeremiah in the dungeon, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace, Daniel in the lions' den, we realize that God can and shall deliver us out of every trial if we stand fast in trust and hope in Jesus. God provides a way of escape. |
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Some of the older saints will testify that God's way is to enable us to overcome every difficulty through Him. Sometimes the Lord allows us to remain in trying circumstances until we achieve victory through His faithfulness and glory. When we have achieved victory He removes us from the conflict or the conflict from us, as His plan indicates. Have you found this to be the way of the Lord? |
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It is the promise and the Glory of God to bring a saint through deep waters and fiery trials and to keep him or her free from every spiritual harm (and sometimes from every physical harm as well). This is God's way. We achieve victory in the place where we are. |
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It is our belief that the hour of temptation, of lawlessness, already is upon us in its early stages. Every saint who follows Christ with an undivided heart will be kept in spiritual safety, and often in physical safety as were Elijah and Elisha, no matter what comes to pass on the earth. |
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We must guard the Word of Christ's patience. It is in the realm of patience that some of our greatest trials take place, some of the fiercest battles rage, and some of the most glorious victories are won. |
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If we continue to watch soberly and vigilantly in prayer, standing steadfast in Christ throughout every temptation and peril that approaches us, the Lord Jesus will provide a means of deliverance for us and we shall escape all these things that will come to pass on the earth. We shall survive and finally stand in absolute triumph in the Presence of the Son of Man (Luke 21:36). (from The Conqueror) |
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But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. (Romans 6:17) |
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Should we obey the Word or not? To a Christian this may sound like a stupid question. But we are being taught today we do not have to obey the commandments because we are "saved by grace." Is it possible we are confused? |
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How are we to regard the writings of the Apostles? |
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Throughout the Epistles there are numerous commandments and exhortations: |
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"Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame." |
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"Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God." |
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"This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind." |
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"Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves." |
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"Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do you." |
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"For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that you should abstain from fornication." |
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And so on and on and on—hundreds of such direct commandments! |
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Also, Christ and His Apostles issued severe warnings concerning those who do not bring forth the fruit of righteousness, who return to the ways of the world. |
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"Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit." |
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"But that which beareth thorns and briers is rejected, and is near to cursing; whose end is to be burned." |
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"I will therefore put you in remembrance, though you once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not." |
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How are we to treat the warnings and admonitions of Christ and His Apostles? How important are they? Does the fact we are "under grace" mean that while it would be nice if we would obey the New Testament commandments, not doing so does not mean we will lose our salvation? |
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Christ commanded us to turn away from the world, take up our cross, and follow Him. Paul urged us to present our body as a whole burnt offering, a living sacrifice to the Lord. Most believers do not obey Christ or Paul in these matters. Does this mean they will not go to Heaven when they die? |
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A related question is, what is the new covenant? How does it work? |
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It seems today there is almost total ignorance of the new covenant. What is being preached in most evangelical churches is not scriptural, not the new covenant. There is widespread blindness but God is ready to remove the veil. |
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We are crying grace and love to the world. The Spirit is crying repent to the churches! |
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We do not demonstrate our love for Christ by a big show at the altar but by obeying His commandments. According to the Great Commission we are supposed to teach people to keep Christ's commandments. |
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We're not doing it and we're not teaching it. In fact we're messed up big time. |
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Is there a Phinehas among us? (from A Contemporary Error) |
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