Redemption

Nurtured by the Right Question

Wrong questions are the breeding ground of doubt, despair and unbelief. I know; I’ve asked the wrong questions for almost sixty years. But, in the midst of those questions mercy, grace, atonement and the answer burst its way into my darkened questions. Tell Me Why is the most foreboding of all wrong questions.

Don’t miss-hear me; questions are natural and a part of our God given DNA. But: to end up at Why? That wrong question is not a part of the likeness and image of God that we are all endowed with. It is the epitome of our fallen, darkened condition! So, how do we approach these unanswerable questions?

Before there are answers, there is a relationship you must have your heart opened to. There is a knowing that paves the way for sufficient answers. Here it comes! You must know that God’s plan is God; revealed in a “baby wrapped in old dirty clothes”, a Son of Man, a life lived exemplary for all generations, on a Cross-disfigured and murdered by His own and in an empty tomb. He is not a program, or an impersonal idea.

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As We Understood Him – Taking Step 3

In our 3rd step “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

One very interesting fact of this step is that the amount or degree of our lives and will, we are able to turn over to God, will be determined by the amount or degree of our understanding of Him.

Many of our brothers and sisters came into the program as Atheists or Agnostics. In the 4th chapter of the Big Book of A.A, titled “We Agnostics” we read the following “Instead of regarding ourselves as intelligent agents, spearheads of God’s ever advancing Creation, we agnostics and atheists chose to believe that our human intelligence was the last word, the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end of all. Rather vain of us, wasn’t it? We, who have traveled this dubious path, beg you to lay aside prejudice, even against organized religion.”

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Uncondemned

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1


My immediate reaction when I read this verse is, Hallelujah!!! If there’s any reason for the children of God to praise the Lord – and there are many reasons piled on top of each other – this must be it. If we were to list our blessings, as the old hymn exhorts us to do, surely the first in line would be the fact that if we’re in Christ Jesus, we are uncondemned.

Only those who understand our state outside of Christ can truly grasp what that simple phrase – no condemnation – means. Anyone who lacks a clear vision of human depravity simply doesn’t have the background to understand the fundamental importance of this verse. We must first understand, in the words of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, that:

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Are You a Ragamuffin in Need of Grace?

Brennan Manning loved to refer to the Gospel as the Ragamuffin Gospel. I always liked that! Why? I didn’t come to Jesus with any piety or with the veil of religious performance. I was completely surprised when I encountered Jesus. He was totally other than my immature image of Him! And I had hit “my” bottom as a drug addicted Hippie. My home was the streets.

Jesus took me in through the love and hospitality of two of His Ragamuffin Saints. And He immediately sensitized me to the realities of being drawn into Him. He threw out the welcome mat to my heart to be at home in Him. I had no theology. Not even the slightest pretense of having a clue about my life “purpose” or “worth.” I was entirely “clueless!”

Brennan Manning eloquently communicated the Gospel of Grace without even a hit hint of religious pride. And he never wavered or compromised it. Instead; he was faithful to the message of grace through his own personal struggles, failures and shortcomings. The following quote succinctly captures the essence of Brennan’s life message!

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Breaking Free from Slavery

Slavery: according to www.dictionary.com slavery is described as:

1.The state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slaveholder or household.
2. a.The practice of owning slaves.
b.A mode of production in which slaves constitute the principal work force.
3.The condition of being subject or addicted to a specified influence.
4.A condition of hard work and subjection: wage slavery.


And according to the thesaurus on the same site, these are some of the words that go along with slavery:

bullwork, captivity, chains, constraint, drudge, drudgery, enslavement, enthrallment, feudalism, grind, helotry, indenture, labor, menial labor, moil, peonage, restraint, serfdom, serfhood, servitude, subjection, subjugation, thrall, thralldom, toil, vassalage, work, bondage, committal, confinement, constraint, custody, durance, duress, enslavement, enthrallment, entombment, impoundment, imprisonment, incarceration, internment, jail, limbo, restraint, serfdom, servitude, subjection, thralldom, vassalage.

As you can see, slavery is not a very nice thing. The people of Israel knew all too well what slavery was when they were slaves in Egypt for 400 years. What started out as good, with Joseph being the 2nd in charge in Egypt, soon turned into something terrible and forceful when a bad pharaoh took over.

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How is it working for you? Is Jesus not enough?

How is it working for you?

Is Jesus not enough? Does what He accomplished on Calvary fall short? Can we add anything to our salvation? Can we study enough to figure a strategic path to wholeness? Does doctrinal purity overcome sin and fleshly appetites? Does the Magnificent Love of God fall short in wooing us into pure inner motives? Is the Great Grace of Jesus a ‘nice’ and ‘sweet’ ideology? God forbid!

“Because helping people control their flesh through human effort and adherence to rules is not only a thankless but never ending task, most leaders employ any strategy that promises even a measure of success. Guilt, shame, condemnation, and threats in God’s name are presented by the enemy as viable options. The church has swallowed this lie hook, line and sinker!” (Pg. 106 Pure Grace: The Life Changing Power of Uncontaminated Grace)

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The Gospel According to Jesus

The Message of Jesus’ Love
The Message of the Kingdom of God
The Message of the Church and Body of Jesus Christ
The Message of the Ages and the Revelation of Father
The Message of Holy Spirit through the Word and the Believer!

The supreme wonder of the gospel is its present realization of life – life of such unfathomable and enduring quality that it cannot fade for all eternity. World religions may claim to have the answers to the present misery of the individual, but what does it profit a man to achieve harmony with nature yet lose his soul? Jesus offers eternal life now. He said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.” John 11:25, 26 God bless you. ~Reinhard Bonnke.

The Gospel imparts a hope that is beyond sin, judgment and fear of exposure or death! You will never exhaust the vast ocean of God’s love. You will be forever discovering greater lengths, widths, depths, and heights of His love.

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The 3 Dimensional Word! Feasting on the Scriptures

There is no more delightful fellowship than among empty, hungry, willing believers who seek one another out for no other purpose than to eat Jesus together. This Divine privilege belongs only to the Corporate Body of Christ!

They do not talk about themselves or commiserate in self-help programs or discuss what they want to do or build in corporate self-actualization, but they simply come to give themselves together to Him and to “seek first” His corporate expression!

Their passion is to exegete Jesus (to make the Son of God known), as “Word” made flesh, and the “Word-Son” lifted from the very pages of Scripture and applied by Holy Spirit to the believer’s heart! And then to take Him to the world!

Jesus is Father’s living, ingestible Word – your nutritious Life. The Spirit will feed you the Word-Son by revealing Him to you primarily through the Scriptures but also by many other creative means, which enable you to recognize and eat Jesus in your study of the Scriptures. Come with me as we are invited by Jesus himself to the ‘mysterious’ table of God; both, individually and corporately!

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Never Give Up! (Part 2)

(see: Part 1)

15 The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it. 16But the LORD God gave him this warning: “You may freely eat any fruit in the garden 17 except fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat of its fruit, you will surely “die” (forfeit a living/intimate relationship with God). Genesis 2:15-17, NLT

Now, although Adam and his wife were both naked, neither of them felt any shame. Genesis 2:25, NLT

Shame was born in dis-obedience. And so was mankind’s propensity to lean upon flawed understanding and call it “wisdom or knowledge”. These are the result of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! Their/our eyes were opened to what they weren’t equipped to understand or process.

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Never Give Up! (Part 1)

15The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden to tend and care for it. 16 But the LORD God gave him this warning: “You may freely eat any fruit in the garden 17 except fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat of its fruit, you will surely “die” (forfeit a living/intimate relationship with God).” (Genesis 2:15-17, NLT)

Now, although Adam and his wife were both naked, neither of them felt any shame.(Genesis 2:25, NLT)

Shame was born in dis-obedience. And so was mankind’s propensity to lean upon flawed understanding and call it “wisdom or knowledge”. This was the result of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! Their/our eyes were opened to what they weren’t equipped to understand or process.

Mankind was awakened to deception and blinded to the trickery of illusion!

Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. 6 Seek his will in all you do, and he will direct your paths. 7 Don’t be impressed with your own wisdom. (Proverbs 3:5-7, NLT)

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