Resurrection: Jesus is Risen and So Are You!

This week, Christians all over the world will celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, Savior and Life, Jesus Christ.  This is something worth celebrating for sure.  But what about Monday, the day after?  Will we celebrate then too?

Yes, we will when we are confident that we, too, have been resurrected!  Our resurrection is not a physical one, yet.  It is a spiritual one, which is just as real.  Read and embrace this with joy!

"But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ-by grace you have been saved-and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus."  Ephesians 2:4-6

Please notice, the phrase "raised us up" is past tense.  God has already raised you with Christ. Remember, the old nature, your identity which defined you as a sinner in Adam, no longer exists.  Your flesh does, but not the old nature. It was put to death.  Just read Romans 6-8 and it is right there, plain as day.

Because of your resurrection, you are a new creation.  You are a child of God.  You are a saint.  You are complete.  You are righteous.  You are holy.  You are beloved.

On Easter, celebrate Jesus' resurrection and yours.  Then celebrate it again on Monday and every day after by remembering who you are in Christ.  What a glorious identity we have in Him!

  

Believe it!  This is the Gospel! 

Live Free In Christ, Mark Maulding

President and Founder 

www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding but feel free to share it!

Buried: The Old Man No Longer Exists!

In one of my favorite movies, The Princess Bride, the hero is Westley.  In his exploit to rescue his true love, Buttercup, he is captured and tortured by the infamous, Prince Humperdink.  Then he dies...or so it seems.  But when he is taken to Miracle Max, he says an amazing thing.  "He is mostly dead." 

It is a humorous scene which illustrates the way many Christians think about their old nature, that is, their identity in Adam.  They believe that it is not really dead but mostly dead.  Yet, the complete Gospel tells us the real story.

Romans 6:4 says, "Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life."

We were spiritually immersed into Christ the moment we believed in Him.  At that very moment, God put the old nature to death and put him in the tomb with Jesus and LEFT HIM THERE.  He is not "mostly dead".  He is "dead, dead."  He will not be resurrected from the grave to bother us again.   He, no longer exists.   Just make sure you don't confuse the old nature with the flesh.  They are not the same.  We still have the flesh.

We have one nature, our new creation identity in Christ.  1 Corinthians 5:17 says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; old things have passed away, and look, new things have come." (HCSB)  We don't have an internal civil war between two natures.  We only have the new nature.  This is who you really are, no matter what the flesh does or whether you feel like it or behave like it. 

Believe it!  This is the Gospel!

If you want to learn more, come to one of our Grace Life Conferences or order the cd and syllabus by calling us at 704-522-9026.  Or, to really go in depth, come to our verse by verse study of Romans 5-8.

Live Free In Christ, 

Mark Maulding, President and Founder www.GraceLifeInternational.com
All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding but sharing is encouraged!

Crucified - Dead to Mr. Law

Which of these two different types of marriage would you like to be in?  (Men – imagine you are the bride here.)

Marriage to Mr. Law – Every morning you wake up he says to you, “There are some things you have to do today.  I will follow you around all day to remind you of what you must do.  If you make a mistake, I will point it out to you in detail.  Oh, and by the way, I will not help you in any way.  You are on your own.  And don’t forget, my only reason for being in this marriage is to tell you what to do and to point out when you blow it!”

Marriage to Mr. Grace - Every morning you wake up he says to you, “I love you!  I can’t wait to spend the day together.  Let’s go get some coffee and spend some time talking.”  You share your hearts with each other and you tell him how wonderful he is and he tells you how wonderful you are.  He also says, “There are some things I want you to do today but I don’t want you to feel stressed by them, because I am going to go with you to help you.  Remember, you and I are “one”, so I will do all of these things through you, if you will depend on me.  When you make a mistake, please don’t run and hide from me.  Instead, run to me and tell me what you did. I so want you to share with me!   Be mindful that I completely accept you, even with your mistakes and struggles.  And no matter what, don’t forget I love you!”

For all Christ-followers, aren’t you glad we are in the marriage to Mr. Grace, meaning Jesus!  We died to our marriage to Mr. Law and are now married (united) to Jesus.  Romans 7:4, “So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.”

Yet many of us live as though we are under the law, i.e. are married to Mr. Law.  Let’s all stop committing spiritual adultery and listen only to Jesus, the lover of our souls!  Marriage to Jesus is so much more enjoyable! 

Live Free In Christ, Mark Maulding, President and Founder www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding  (But please share it with others!)

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!

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

Grace for Rock Concerts

One of the things I did with my three sons was to get away with each of them at key times in their lives. I wanted us to have fun, eat a great meal, talk about sex and discuss where they were in their spiritual lives.

Just before their senior year in high school, I gave each one the opportunity to go away for a weekend to a place of their choice within driving distance. The two oldest each went with me to Universal Studios theme park. But, the third had quite a different request.

He asked me if we could go see Def Leppard in concert. If you don't know who that is, they were a hugely popular rock band in the early 80's and 90's. I jokingly said to him, "I wanted to take you away for the weekend to talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll and you want me to take you to a rock concert?"

We went to the concert that summer and had a blast, tailgating beforehand while talking about sex and other spiritual matters. I wasn't concerned about him being negatively influenced by the concert. Why? He loves Jesus and I knew we could discuss the music on the way home. I also believed that Jesus in me had more influence than the rock band and it turned out to be true.

God's grace can give us the freedom to enjoy even a rock concert with a child!

Live Free In Christ,

Mark Maulding, President and Founder

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