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Monday, March 24, 2014

Crucified: Sin is Not Your Master

Several years ago, I was praying for our Father to provide another car.  My transmission was going out and I needed another car for all of my ministry travels.  After speaking to a Sunday School class, someone called me who had been there and said, “I think God wants me to give you my car.”  I replied, “I think He does too!”

When I picked up the car and was driving home, I noticed an envelope in the arm rest.  When I opened it, to my surprise there was $500 to pay for my tag and taxes!  I had been given so much more than I realized when this man gave me his car.

The Gospel is that way, too.  When we received Christ, we got so much more than we may realize even now.  One of those blessings is that we died with Christ so dramatically that sin is no longer our master.  Romans 6:7 says, “For when we died with Christ we were set free from the power of sin.” NLT Sin here does not refer to “sinning” but to a power that once ruled over us before our death with Christ.

Why does this matter?  First, the tempting thoughts you have cannot originate with you.  They will sound like you with personal pronouns such as I, me, my, mine but they aren’t from you.

Second, you now have a choice.  You can either obey the thoughts Sin inserts in your mind, or you can obey your new Master, Jesus Christ in you.


The next time you are tempted, remind yourself that Sin is not your boss! Jesus in you is!  Listen to Him!

Live Free In Christ, 
Mark Maulding, President and Founder 
www.GraceLifeInternational.com 
All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding but may be shared with others!

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Crucified - The Old Nature is Dead

   Have you ever tasted a cake that had some of the ingredients left out?  It is so awful; you will not eat another bite because it may gag you and make you throw up!  In the same way, if you leave some of the ingredients out of the Gospel, it can have devastating effects in your life.
   For example, most Christians understand that they have received forgiveness and are going to heaven but don't know that they have also been crucified with Christ or what this means.
   Romans 6:6 says, "Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin."  Old self is a reference to the old nature, that is, our identity in Adam before we were in Christ.
   The Apostle Paul is saying, "Don't you know this, Christian?  If not, you should."  What are we to know?  We are to know that our old identity of being born a sinner was crucified with Christ on the cross.  The Greek language here is very specific.  It means that this sinner identity died with Christ a final death that is complete.  (Col. 2:10-11)
   You do not have a civil war in you between the old nature and the new nature.  The old nature is dead and gone.  We now deal with the flesh which is different than the old nature.  Our new identity is saint, not sinner!
Live Free In Christ, 
Mark Maulding, President and Founder 
www.GraceLifeInternational.com 
All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding but may be shared with others!

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Grace to Receive Love

    I have a beautiful cat with thick gray hair which reminds me of a lot of people I meet.  It has a difficult time receiving love.  Often when I reach down to scratch its head, it runs away.  Occasionally, it will approach me, meowing to let me know it wants love.  But it can only receive my love for about one minute. 
   God made us to be loved.  It is a basic need of the human heart.  How do we know this?  Because God created us to need Him and God is love according to 1 John 4:8.  Yet, many Christ followers struggle to receive His love as well as people's love.
   I was one of them.  While I believed and preached that God loves us, I had minimal experience of it.  The problem was not on God's side. It was on my side.  This spilled over into my relationship with my wife and others, in that I had difficulty receiving their love.
   Our Father's love is like a water faucet.  The moment we become one of His children through faith in Christ, that faucet turns on cascading on us forever.  We are like a cup under it.  If we are turned right side up, we are filled with His love for us.  If we are turned upside down, we cannot be filled with His love for us.
   What causes us to be turned upside down has to do with our stinking thinking.  We are all programmed by the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we are born which we inherited from Adam.  Though unaware of this, it causes us to believe that we have to make ourselves loveable.  We gauge whether we are loveable by how well we perform, what other's think of us, how we look and what we have.
   Parents pay a critical role in this as well.  If we grow up in a family where grace is in place, we will experience a lot of unconditional love.  If we don't, we will experience a lot of rejection.  Either way, unless we understand the Gospel of grace, we will be hindered from receiving love.
   To be able to receive love, we need a revelation of Christ in us.  There is a great prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19 that I encourage you to pray often for yourself and those you care about, even as I do.  The prayer is basically asking our Father to deepen the revelation of Christ in us to us. 
   "When I think of the wisdom and scope of his plan, I fall down on my knees and pray to the Father of all the great family of God-some of them already in heaven and some down here on earth- 16 that out of his glorious, unlimited resources he will give you the mighty inner strengthening of his Holy Spirit. 17 And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love; 18-19 and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God's children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God himself."  Living Bible
   For me and many others I have taught and counseled through the years, receiving the revelation of Christ in us as our Life, we experienced His love for us which opened us up to be able to receive the love of others.   I encourage you to make a copy of this prayer and pray it often.
                       
Live free in Christ,
  
Mark Maulding, Founder & President


www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding