Much Better! The New Covenant

Recently, I had the great joy of marrying a special young couple for whom I had provided pre-marital counseling.  It was cool to observe them stare into each other's eyes with that "I love you but I hope I don't pass out" look as they repeated their vows.  As they did, it reminded me that wedding vows are the closet thing we have to a covenant in our culture today.  Christ followers have entered into what Jesus called the New Covenant by very few know what this means.  This void has made us vulnerable to being ambushed by religion and the pain of the flesh.  We see them every week at Grace Life International. A covenant is an agreement between two parties pledging their commitment and responsibilities to each other.  It is binding until one of them dies.   In ancient times, it might be between a king who set up a covenant with the people he had conquered.  The people may not have been given the choice of agreeing.  This was a very authoritative, legal covenant. Another version was much more relational.  In the Old Covenant, God gave Himself to Israel as their authoritative King and their loving Husband.  Key Elements of A Covenant 1. Binding vows.  2. Responsibilities and blessings.   Each had responsibilities for the other which would result in blessings for both.  For example, you and I might commit to be responsible for helping each other if one was attacked.  The blessing would be that we would both have twice the defense for defeating an enemy.   3. The Cutting of the Covenant.   The two parties would walk in a figure eight around animals sacrificed and cut in half in two piles. Now the covenant was sealed in blood until someone died.  The sacrificed animals were also a warning of what would befall someone who broke the covenant!
4. The Covenant Meal.  Both the enjoyed a meal together, eating the cooked animals showing they had internalized the covenant in the very fabric of their being.  5. A sign of the covenant.  There was always a sign covenant as a constant reminder of the relationship.  For example, my wedding ring constantly reminds me of my marriage covenant with my wife.
 Did you know that the Old and New Covenants have all five elements (which I will share next week)?  Did you also know that when Jesus died as one of the parties of the Old Covenant, it ended and the New Covenant was inaugurated?  Read Hebrews 9:16-17.
 "Like a will that takes effect when someone dies, the new covenant was put into action at Jesus’ death. His death marked the transition from the old plan to the new one, canceling the old obligations and accompanying sins, and summoning the heirs to receive the eternal inheritance that was promised them. He brought together God and his people in this new way." I am excited for the deeper intimacy, freedom, and fruitfulness in Christ that await you as God unfolds the New Covenant for you during the next few weeks.
 Believe it!  It's the Gospel!
Live Free In Christ,

Mark Maulding, President and Founder
www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding

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!

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