“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.” (Romans 10:4)
I saw an article just after the New Year about some of the new laws going in to effect on January 1st of this year. It is common practice to set a “start date” for new laws, and picking the first day of the year is as good as any. I always sort of wondered about that. I mean, if you are going to pass a law, why should we all have a set period of time to violate it before it can be enforced? So, for instance, current “drinking age” is 21, but say we make a law that pushes it to 25, but the law does not go into effect until January 1, 2013. Doesn’t that give the 21-25 crowd even more incentive to go out and tie one on? You are just asking for a problem with a drunken bash of epic proportions on December 31, and there isn’t anything you can really do about it. But I guess a lot of our laws have to have some sort of time-line on them for some reason.
But the thing that really caught my eye in this article was the number of new laws that took effect at the beginning of this year. Over 40,000 new laws are waiting to be broken. Is there anyone on earth that can keep up with even a small percentage of that number? That does not include all the hundreds of thousands – dare I say millions – of laws already on the books. I am absolutely certain that simply sitting here typing these words, I am doing something that could be construed to be against the law. I would bet that it would not be very difficult to find some reason to arrest every single one of the 300 million citizens of the country right now. Yet the Federal, State and local law makers find another 40,000 ways every year to add to the list. Will it ever stop?
I thank God every day for the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary for my sins. Those who “believe in God” but have never trusted Jesus as their Saviour are on a non-stop relentless pursuit to try to please God by their own efforts. They are “God-fearin’ people” who keep trying to obey every law they can think of to please God. But it never ends. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) There never comes a time when a person can do enough good to overcome one sin. One drop of arsenic in a full gallon of water poisons the whole thing. One sin makes you short of God’s glory, and denies your access to his presence. Heaven is a perfect place reigned by a perfect God. If he let you in with just one little sin, it would no longer be perfect. The person who tries to please God by keeping the myriad of never ending rules and regulations can never know when he has satisfied the demands of a holy and righteous judge. Just like none of us even know all the laws of the land and cannot possibly keep all of them, the sinner cannot buy his way to heaven through the law.
Then there is the Christian who has trusted Christ to save him, but then he thinks that the only way to please God after his salvation is by keeping the myriad of rules and regulations of his particular “religion”. At least he is going to heaven because of his trust in the sacrifice of Christ, but he has the same problem. There is no end to his list. He can never know when he has really achieved righteousness, because he has his sin nature to deal with that cannot be tamed. Every time he turns around, there is another “twist” of the law that he has violated. He spends his entire Christian life in utter frustration trying to “appease” God rather than just letting God be pleased simply because he is his child destined for an eternity in heaven.
The verse above tells us that Jesus is the “end of the law” for a believer. That is because he already fulfilled it for us. There is a simple statement in Romans 8:4: “That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us…” The simple words of the Bible are important. The law is not fulfilled by us, it is fulfilled in us. Jesus already did it for us, so all we have to do is let him live through us. We still mess up because we are human. But God has given us everything we need to be fulfilled in him. Just let the light of Jesus shine.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Doing the Wrong Thing
“As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” (Romans 3:10-12)
Why is it that no matter what happens, it always seems to be the wrong thing. Mankind just cannot get things right no matter how hard he tries. For example, hand a pair of shoes to any 3 year old on planet earth and tell him to put them on his feet. He will put them on the wrong feet 98% of the time. Statistics would tell you that it would be 50-50, but anyone who has ever had children will tell you otherwise. Here’s another one. Pick up any two-prong plug (without the ground) and without looking, try to plug it in. They make them now with one prong larger than the other so that the polarization is consistent. I don’t care how many times you try, you will have to turn to plug around virtually every single time because you will plug it in wrong. Then there is the one that frustrates the devil out of me. Go to the store, and when it is time to check out, pick a lane. No matter which one I pick, it will come to a screeching halt because I always pick the wrong one. It gets so bad sometimes that I will jump out of that line and get into the next one – and of course, that line will then shut down. Can I get a witness?
No matter what it is, man seems to be able to make a mess out of it. Have you ever noticed that you don’t need classes on doing the wrong things? No one ever sits down with their children and says, “OK, Johnny and Susie, daddy is going to teach you how to lie today…” They pick it up naturally because sin is ingrained in our DNA. Psalm 39:5 says, “Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Vanity in the Bible means “nothing”. The best we can produce is a big fat zero. I remember as a freshman in college taking an exam where the professor gave us a trick question. He had a whole series of one digit numbers that we were supposed to multiply to find the final answer. The string of numbers was huge. It was like 5x3x6x4x2x7x2… and the series spanned about 4 or 5 lines of text on the page. Right in the middle of it was a zero. The students were feverishly multiplying numbers and keeping track of the total until they hit the zero, and you could hear the audible groans when they realized that the zero wiped out every other number. It was cruel, but it taught us to look at the entire problem first before we plunged into trying to solve the details. That is a great illustration of the issue that mankind has in facing his Creator and trying to justify himself before a holy and righteous God.
No matter how hard we try, there is a big fat zero in the very heart of our existence called sin. It negates anything else we try to do to satisfy the claims of God upon our lives. You can try to multiply all the other “good works” of your life that you want, but you always hit the zero. You will always do the wrong thing. You might hit it right at times, because even the blind squirrel finds an acorn, but every day, you will run into the buzz saw of sin eventually, and usually sooner than later. Man wants so desperately to save himself by his own righteousness, but it will never work. Instead of looking at the individual details of your life, look at the whole thing first. The zero of our sin nature wipes out any effort we make to “add up” for God. Something needs to be done about that. Jesus died on the cross to pay your sin debt, and when you place your trust in him as Saviour, he removes your sin. The Bible says he places our sins in the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19), casts our sins behind his back (Isaiah 38:17), and separates us from them as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). Now we can do something. Only after we apply the sacrifice of Christ can our individual numbers be multiplied to produce a “bottom line” that God can count and reward us for at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
If you have not come to Christ to deal with your sins, don’t put it off another minute. If you know him, spread the word to a bunch of zeros who need him. The time is short.
Why is it that no matter what happens, it always seems to be the wrong thing. Mankind just cannot get things right no matter how hard he tries. For example, hand a pair of shoes to any 3 year old on planet earth and tell him to put them on his feet. He will put them on the wrong feet 98% of the time. Statistics would tell you that it would be 50-50, but anyone who has ever had children will tell you otherwise. Here’s another one. Pick up any two-prong plug (without the ground) and without looking, try to plug it in. They make them now with one prong larger than the other so that the polarization is consistent. I don’t care how many times you try, you will have to turn to plug around virtually every single time because you will plug it in wrong. Then there is the one that frustrates the devil out of me. Go to the store, and when it is time to check out, pick a lane. No matter which one I pick, it will come to a screeching halt because I always pick the wrong one. It gets so bad sometimes that I will jump out of that line and get into the next one – and of course, that line will then shut down. Can I get a witness?
No matter what it is, man seems to be able to make a mess out of it. Have you ever noticed that you don’t need classes on doing the wrong things? No one ever sits down with their children and says, “OK, Johnny and Susie, daddy is going to teach you how to lie today…” They pick it up naturally because sin is ingrained in our DNA. Psalm 39:5 says, “Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” Vanity in the Bible means “nothing”. The best we can produce is a big fat zero. I remember as a freshman in college taking an exam where the professor gave us a trick question. He had a whole series of one digit numbers that we were supposed to multiply to find the final answer. The string of numbers was huge. It was like 5x3x6x4x2x7x2… and the series spanned about 4 or 5 lines of text on the page. Right in the middle of it was a zero. The students were feverishly multiplying numbers and keeping track of the total until they hit the zero, and you could hear the audible groans when they realized that the zero wiped out every other number. It was cruel, but it taught us to look at the entire problem first before we plunged into trying to solve the details. That is a great illustration of the issue that mankind has in facing his Creator and trying to justify himself before a holy and righteous God.
No matter how hard we try, there is a big fat zero in the very heart of our existence called sin. It negates anything else we try to do to satisfy the claims of God upon our lives. You can try to multiply all the other “good works” of your life that you want, but you always hit the zero. You will always do the wrong thing. You might hit it right at times, because even the blind squirrel finds an acorn, but every day, you will run into the buzz saw of sin eventually, and usually sooner than later. Man wants so desperately to save himself by his own righteousness, but it will never work. Instead of looking at the individual details of your life, look at the whole thing first. The zero of our sin nature wipes out any effort we make to “add up” for God. Something needs to be done about that. Jesus died on the cross to pay your sin debt, and when you place your trust in him as Saviour, he removes your sin. The Bible says he places our sins in the depths of the sea (Micah 7:19), casts our sins behind his back (Isaiah 38:17), and separates us from them as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). Now we can do something. Only after we apply the sacrifice of Christ can our individual numbers be multiplied to produce a “bottom line” that God can count and reward us for at the Judgment Seat of Christ.
If you have not come to Christ to deal with your sins, don’t put it off another minute. If you know him, spread the word to a bunch of zeros who need him. The time is short.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Traditions
“Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” (II Thessalonians 2:15)
Christmas is the time of year when family and religious traditions are in full bloom. Everyone has them. Growing up in our family, our tradition was to always get our presents on Christmas Eve. My dad had a lot of reasons for that. There were seven children in the family, which meant a lot of gifts to open and toys to be played with. Mom would always feed us dinner about 5pm, then dress us in our jammies and let the party begin. That way we could play with the toys until we crashed on the living room floor. Imagine the hassle of trying to give toys to seven excited young children early Christmas morning and then telling us to stop to get ready to go to church. Sometimes we would do the Santa thing, but it didn’t take long for us to figure it out. One year, dad got the next door neighbor kid to dress up like Santa. He was about 6 years older than my oldest brother, so he was big enough to play the part. But we recognized him, and it blew the whole thing for us. My dad told us the reason we got our presents on Christmas Eve was because Santa was really busy, so he had to get a head start. Since our last name begins with “A”, we were at the top of the list. It never dawned on us how inefficient this system was for poor old Santa. Alphabetically, the next family could have been in Uzbekistan for all we knew. But we bought it. No one really ever complained because it just meant we got our stuff a day early.
Years ago, I had a call in talk radio program on one of the local secular stations. They gave us the evening slot on Saturdays because no one listens then anyway. One year at Christmas I did a program on all the exotic traditions from around the world. It was many years ago, and I have lost the notes, but one of the strange ones I remember was from France, where people celebrated the holiday with beer and cookies. Good grief. My gag reflex is kicking in just thinking about that. No wonder they can’t defend their country.
In the Bible, there are three types of traditions: good, bad, and neutral. The vast majority of them are neutral. Every church and family has certain things they do that are unique to them, and for the most part, they are harmless. Most family traditions have no real spiritual impact one way or another in your life. Our church has an annual tradition of a Labor Day picnic. We fire up the grills and BBQ about 150 pounds of pork ribs and 100 pounds of chicken, with all the trimmings. We have done this now for 18 years straight. It is one of our best times, and so ingrained in our lives that we wonder why every church doesn’t do one. But spiritually, it matters not one iota.
Jesus railed on the scribes and Pharisees regularly for their traditions. These would be the bad ones. He said in Mark 7:9, “Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.” These are the traditions of religious men that plainly contradict the word of God and draw us away from a true relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why whenever I hear a religious leader talk about his “faith tradition”, it makes me cringe. It is like fingernails on a chalkboard to my ears. These are the traditions we need to get rid of in our own lives, and fear not to speak about in the lives of others.
Then there are the traditions Paul referred to in the verse above. These are the good ones – the type of traditions that anchor our lives to the truths of the word of God. Notice he said they are the ones taught by “word (OT) or our epistle (NT)”. Our rock and anchor of truth is God’s book. When it tells us to hang on to something, hang on to it for dear life. I Thessalonians 5:21 says, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Once you have proven something to be true in the book, live it, love it, learn it, and pass it on to others. God’s anchors will keep you afloat in this crazy sea of life in this insane world.
Christmas is the time of year when family and religious traditions are in full bloom. Everyone has them. Growing up in our family, our tradition was to always get our presents on Christmas Eve. My dad had a lot of reasons for that. There were seven children in the family, which meant a lot of gifts to open and toys to be played with. Mom would always feed us dinner about 5pm, then dress us in our jammies and let the party begin. That way we could play with the toys until we crashed on the living room floor. Imagine the hassle of trying to give toys to seven excited young children early Christmas morning and then telling us to stop to get ready to go to church. Sometimes we would do the Santa thing, but it didn’t take long for us to figure it out. One year, dad got the next door neighbor kid to dress up like Santa. He was about 6 years older than my oldest brother, so he was big enough to play the part. But we recognized him, and it blew the whole thing for us. My dad told us the reason we got our presents on Christmas Eve was because Santa was really busy, so he had to get a head start. Since our last name begins with “A”, we were at the top of the list. It never dawned on us how inefficient this system was for poor old Santa. Alphabetically, the next family could have been in Uzbekistan for all we knew. But we bought it. No one really ever complained because it just meant we got our stuff a day early.
Years ago, I had a call in talk radio program on one of the local secular stations. They gave us the evening slot on Saturdays because no one listens then anyway. One year at Christmas I did a program on all the exotic traditions from around the world. It was many years ago, and I have lost the notes, but one of the strange ones I remember was from France, where people celebrated the holiday with beer and cookies. Good grief. My gag reflex is kicking in just thinking about that. No wonder they can’t defend their country.
In the Bible, there are three types of traditions: good, bad, and neutral. The vast majority of them are neutral. Every church and family has certain things they do that are unique to them, and for the most part, they are harmless. Most family traditions have no real spiritual impact one way or another in your life. Our church has an annual tradition of a Labor Day picnic. We fire up the grills and BBQ about 150 pounds of pork ribs and 100 pounds of chicken, with all the trimmings. We have done this now for 18 years straight. It is one of our best times, and so ingrained in our lives that we wonder why every church doesn’t do one. But spiritually, it matters not one iota.
Jesus railed on the scribes and Pharisees regularly for their traditions. These would be the bad ones. He said in Mark 7:9, “Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.” These are the traditions of religious men that plainly contradict the word of God and draw us away from a true relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. That is why whenever I hear a religious leader talk about his “faith tradition”, it makes me cringe. It is like fingernails on a chalkboard to my ears. These are the traditions we need to get rid of in our own lives, and fear not to speak about in the lives of others.
Then there are the traditions Paul referred to in the verse above. These are the good ones – the type of traditions that anchor our lives to the truths of the word of God. Notice he said they are the ones taught by “word (OT) or our epistle (NT)”. Our rock and anchor of truth is God’s book. When it tells us to hang on to something, hang on to it for dear life. I Thessalonians 5:21 says, “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” Once you have proven something to be true in the book, live it, love it, learn it, and pass it on to others. God’s anchors will keep you afloat in this crazy sea of life in this insane world.
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