12 Minutes
Reason with these next few words to begin to understand on a panoramic
level. Again I say, God is love. And love is over faith and hope and reason.
Love never fails, but faith will one day be unnecessary, as it will be turned to
sight, and hope will be realized and be unneeded after that. Love, on the
other hand, will sustain throughout eternity. Yet as the seed of God, our faith
is vitally important, for through faith comes our being as the Word. And our
faith is as the object of that word...it is Jesus. We fix our eyes on Jesus, who
is the author and perfector of faith. The power of faith, then, is not on its own
merits, for faith is temporary. Rather, the power of faith is in the One who
began the faith and who will complete the faith. Because He is trustworthy,
the faith itself is an assurance, an argument for and the evidence of things
not seen. Love is greater than both faith and hope. We couldn't live our lives
without faith or hope: without faith, we cannot know the God of love; without
hope, we would not endure in our faith until we meet him face to face. But in
spite of the importance of faith and hope, love is even more crucial. Without
love, there can be no redemption. Love is what determined God the Father
to send His only Son to die for us. Thus, love is the virtue upon which all faith
and hope now stand in Christ – the supreme act of sacrificial love. And we,
as His seed, send our roots down into the depths of the love of Christ, the
love of God that we may comprehend it. Not by standing aside and merely
observing it, but by rooting our lives in it. Drinking it up. Savoring it.
Depending on it. Taking some risks on the basis of it. God is producing a
character in us that in every way all ways will please Him. We are becoming
like strong trees planted by streams of water that go on bearing fruit, even in
the time of drought. Are we ready to see??
What must we have, to come and reason with God? Faith! And we please
God when we come by faith to reason with Him and that faith is our earthly
pursuit. Once we are united with the One who has created us in His Image,
some needs will simply vanish once we leave this world. We come to reason
with God to gain understanding for a cause, an explanation, or justification
for an idea, a thought, an action, or event. We come to think, to understand,
and to form judgments by a process of sensibleness and soundness based
upon His truth as He gives us wisdom to know His purpose. Reasoning helps
us deliberate about the consequences of our doing life as we sift evidences
that our conclusions may be in the will of God. With that, let the Holy Spirit
construct higher truth for our learning. What does it mean to move beyond
reasoning? Realizing the eternal consequences of our faith. Faith and
reason are compatible, but some things are strictly a matter of faith. There is
something about our experience as the seed of God in our inner life that
gives us the deepest reason to believe in God, to have an eternal faith that
ends with the appearing of Jesus. How can something eternal end? Faith
comes by hearing and hearing by Jesus, the Word of God. He is our eternal
evidence and when we see him will we believe it is him? He is whom we
have heard in all our reasoning. Jesus is the beginning, the progress, and
the strength of faith that comes by hearing. The word of God is therefore the
word of faith.
God is love and must transcend faith and reason. And both faith and reason
are gifts of God. Or we can say are gifts of love. Neither to be slighted. But
nothing is to reduce what pleases God and that is faith. And faith will
conclude truth transcendently beyond reason. And it is in Christ that we find
this planted rationality as his seed. Jesus tells us things before they happen
so that when they happen we believe. Oh, we of no faith. If we believe that
Jesus is God then what he says already is!
Let me get to the point. Reason alone is untenable. It needs faith to declare
it as truth. And it is God’s love and our love for God that impels us to act in
the reasoning of the truth of His word by faith. Our Creator stepped out of
eternity and was incarnated into humanity, only to be crucified as a
propitiation for our sins and that He did it out of self-sacrificing, self-denying
love is to accept a concept existing in a realm where reason itself simply
cannot reach without faith. The sacrificial atonement of Christ, who suffered
the second death in our stead, is not the kind of truth that one can find from
reason alone. Reason in and of itself can take us far in the quest for truth but
it won’t take us to Golgotha. That event determined in counsel is beyond us.
It is based upon a kind of love that looks like God. Who has seen God? I tell
you God’s love looks like Jesus. It is His Word, and that Word is to be the
seed in us that makes us so like him that we be as he is. And here is where
we reason to evidence the faith of our love for God. We cannot anymore do
sin...if we are His seed.
This is our assertion to the life of Jesus. Brothers and sisters, friends and
strangers, the salvation event is radical! It was designed with deep-seated,
profound, uncompromising love. It ain’t a thing to play with. The other side to
reckon with is sin. If there was no sin, salvation would not have been
necessary. To manifest being a child of God, to remain being a child of God,
we, if God’s seed remain in us, cannot sin. And that does it. We move beyond
reason to evidence our faith because we not only love God, but we love one
another.
I John 3:1-11
Verse 5 is understandable because Jesus is the ‘only Son’ who came from
the Father who sent him. The remaining texts are ejaculatory articulations of
divine involvement and enablement of the seed, between being born again
and the day of judgment. These statements create the impression to
compare the status of the children of God with that of the Son of God. Is our
faith truthfully founded upon the evidence that when Jesus comes we will be
like him? It is through reason that we are to investigate these things that we
may resolve the truth of them that our faith is of Jesus and our obedience to
cease from sin changes the conditional “if you love me” to “because you love
me” keep my commandments. “If” is conditional. “Because” is the stating of
a truth.
How deep is the seed of God planted in our life? We must be a community
not torn apart by doctrinal differences. God’s principles, instructions, and
revelations are to resolve any matter of discord when faith is centered in His
every word. Not just the word you want to hear, but in the preceptualization
of every word that things to be understood may be truthfully regarded. Let no
one think they have illumination above ordinary morality except it be in the
light of the word of God. It is not God’s people who claim to be without sin. It
is faith in the word of God that says if His seed remains in us, we cannot sin.
And if we are born again, we have godly sorrow that brought repentance for
sin and if we are His seed we will not sin, and having faith in hearing the
word, says now we are the sons of God because of the love He bestows
upon us, and He has taken away our sins. In this the divinity of Christ
minimizes our humanity as we experience fellowship with God. We have
assurance of the indwelling of God through our abiding relationship with Him,
through His Son Jesus Christ. He has, therefore, given us His written word
to show us the pattern of His Son that we might build this temple according
to what He reveals to us...the perfect holiness of His Son.
The latter truth spoken by God in the Garden is now before us, “the seed” of
Christ. And the beast, that seed of the serpent dragon, knowing that he was
thwarted in his every attempt to destroy “the seed” turns his wrath against
those men and women all over the world, who keep the commandments of
God. The reason the dragon must make war with the remnant of her seed,
is to cause them to die. Especially those refusing to worship his image which
is being installed in the minds of the wicked. God’s seed will have to endure
the sorrowful twinge at the edge of a memory of what would have been had
sin never been. For believers, the combined taste of joy and sorrow is a
familiar one. It’s the taste we live with every day in this fallen world. Even on
days where we experience deep joy, there’s always the accompanying flavor
of sorrow. And then on those days where we experience profound sorrow,
there’s always joy right there in the midst of it. Our sorrow comes from an
awareness that things are not what they should be. There’s sorrow over the
fallenness of this world, it’s depth and breadth. There’s sorrow because we
know how things began and what happened to bring us to this place of
brokenness. There’s sorrow over how the curse of sin affects the world
around us and that of our own hearts. There’s sorrow over how the fall comes
to bear in our individual life through conflict, illness, heartache, and loss.
There’s sorrow over injustice, tragedy, abuse, and death. There is sadness
in the spiritual path. And yet there will be buoyant joy in the knowledge that
the last day trials are only for the moment. God’s willing sadness and joy
given us is mingled together. We acknowledge its presence as we move into
so great a cloud of witnesses claiming God’s promise. There is no one who
is a greater picture of this astounding effect of joy and pain than Jesus. He
is called the man of sorrows. He bore the weight of the pain of this world and
looked to the joy set before Him, the redemption of all things. We will
remember His intent and purposeful pleasure in structuring our lives in His
divine pattern. We will sin no more in perfect obedience to all of God’s
commands and we will bear the testimony of our faith in Jesus Christ. We
are the true spiritual seed of the woman, the remnant of her seed. We have
learned to accept Christ’s righteousness instead of trying to establish our
own. And we will overcome by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of our
testimony and some even by a victorious martyr’s death.
Revelation 12:11
The passage of time will be but a solo moment as faith sees across the portal
to the roundest, fullest happiness which will never fade, filling the everlasting
ages with His praise.
Jesus is God’s opposition to sin. His appearance was for the offering as us
in him and him in us. We have faith that we are children of God enlivened by
the activity of the Spirit. And that is the metaphor of ‘the seed of God’ being
analogous to ‘being born of God’. The content of our faith must be pregnant
in this, that Jesus is the Son of God, and as such we are paralleled with his
prayer in John 17. We have no excuse, no reason to sin. God the Father
sends His Son into the world to give to those who believe in the Son, eternal
life, enabling them to be sons and daughters. Jesus is the essential
forgiveness as the atoning sacrifice for our sin bringing us to be sons and
daughters of God. The Holy Spirit becomes the guiding influence in our life.
We become the seed principle of the Holy Spirit. And then it is only through
faith that we receive God’s light of salvation and be born into the family of
God giving us life ‘through’ him and continuously ‘in’ him. His seed is His
salvific event reasoned by faith in the beginning of His love.
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