Disciples know that they will continue sinning. This daily devotional looks at whether God looks at the distance we are from perfection, or what direction in which we are heading.
Nuggets
- We have to make sure we have a position on the Sanctification Road and determine where that position is.
- God wants us to continually choose Him, even when we are feeling guilty for sinning against Him.
- God wants us to have our noses pointed in His direction, not at someone else.
This is a devotion I threw into the drafts folder. When I was doing some other devotion, the sermon by Everard hit me. It was entitled The Right Platform.
The statement that got the gears spinning was when Everard wrote, “You must take your right position if you wish to journey in a right direction.”
Resource
Position. Journey. Direction.
So, the position is important. But is its proximity to the end of the journey more important, or is it the journey itself?
Programming notes: This was too long to do in one devotion. We will wait for the connections and application for the next devotion.
Everard said some more things that can help us through the journey of this devotion. What he said is in red.
Let's Put It into Context
“The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe, since there is no distinction” (Rom. 3: 22 CSB)
The verse that this originated from is Romans 3: 22. We were looking at it in our pursuit for a redo for godliness.
Godliness, equated with the Old Testament term fear of the Lord, is an attitude of reverence that is promoted by walking in His Spirit and obeying God’s laws and commandments and produces a moral likeness of God.
A Right Position Leads to a Right Direction
“You must take your right position if you wish to journey in a right direction. At a great railway junction the main thing is to get on to the right platform for the station you want to reach. So with all who wish to reach heaven. But what is that platform? That of self-condemnation. It is the laying aside of every self-righteous, self-excusing plea, and taking the place of a sinner in God’s sight” (Everard, The Right Platform).
We have to make sure we have a position on the Sanctification Road and determine where that position is.
We can look at position to mean a couple of different things. First, we can look at it as whether we are on the Sanctification Road or not. Are we following a worldview or a Godview?
McGillivray described a worldview position perfectly. He wrote,
“Ask that man of the world what is the foundation of his hope for eternity, and his answer is, that he has never yet been guilty of open, flagrant transgression. Ask that sensualist, and his answer is that he trusts his charitable deeds will atone for these infirmities. The professor of religion answers that he does his best, that he is sincere, and that he trusts God will take the will for the deed. But ye who would be justified by your obedience to the law, have ye really considered what the law requires? It demands perfect obedience, and condemns the least transgression.”
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The position that we must take is different from the worldview position. We have to take the position that the only way to salvation is believing in and living as did the Christ of the cross.
To read a related devotion, click the button below.
That is the first part of salvation.
- Salvation is the gift of life through the deliverance from condemnation and sin to acceptance and holiness and changes us from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive.
- Sins are actions by humans that disobey God and break one of His reasonable, holy, and righteous laws and commandments, goes against a purpose He has for us, or follows Satan’s promptings.
- Holiness is the transcendent excellence of His nature that includes elements of purity, dedication, and commitment that lead to being set apart. Purity means possessing God’s moral character, having eliminated the stain of sin.
- Spiritual death is the spiritual separation from God that occurred as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s original sin. The spiritually alive are those who have ABCDed, so they are no longer separated from God.
The ABCDs of Salvation
If you have not become a believer in Christ, please read through the
Plan of Salvation and prayerfully consider what God is asking you to do.
A – admit our sins
B – believe His Son Jesus is our Redeemer
C – confess God as Sovereign Lord
D – demonstrate that commitment by making any changes needed in our lives to
live the way in which God has called us
The Disciple’s Job Description
Glossary
Second, we can look at position as the spot that determines where we are at on the Sanctification Road.
- Sanctification is the transformation of mind, body, and soul, which begins with regeneration, gradually changes our nature through the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and ends with perfected state of spiritual wholeness or completeness.
- Regeneration is being changed from spiritually dead to spiritually alive and the internal requickening in us that God brings about through the work of the Holy Spirit to give us new character.
- The perfected state indicates the combination of the spiritual graces which, when all are present, form spiritual wholeness or completeness.
- Spiritual graces are worldly morals that have been submitted to God to further His kingdom instead of enhancing this world.
Glossary
Maclaren contended that the most important thing to God is not our exact location but in which way our nose is headed. He wrote, “Oh, dear friends! it is not a question of degree, but of direction; not how far the ship has gone on her voyage, but how she heads.”
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Isn’t that comforting? Disciples know that — even though we don’t want to — we are still going to sin.
We also know the Sanctification Road is going to be hard to navigate. What it is doing is changing us from our sinful nature to having God’s character. That is not easy!
Sometimes, what is being changed is deep-seated identities. If it was just surface differences, it might be less of a choice to consciously follow God.
God wants us to consciously choose to follow Him. He wants it to impact our very beings and our lives. He wants us to keep choosing Him when we fail at living for Him.
According to Haldane, one thing the worldview people may not understand is that they, too, are obligated to obey their Creator. God is Sovereign God to all — whether we acknowledge Him or not.
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We need to ABCD so that we can start our journey on the Sanctification Road. If we don’t, we will pay the consequences.
Responsibility and Guilt Impacts Direction and Distance
“There is a wide difference between one and another as to the measure of responsibility and the amount of guilt.” (Everard, The Right Platform)
God wants us to continually choose Him, even when we are feeling guilty for sinning against Him.
We tell ourselves that we fall short of God’s perfection so many times in this life. We tell ourselves that God couldn’t love us because we are not a mirror image of Him.
Maclaren addressed that. He wrote, “God does not love men because of what they are, therefore He does not cease to love them because of what they are. His love to the sons of men is not drawn out by their goodness, their morality, their obedience, but it wells up from the depths of His own heart, because ‘it is His nature and property,’ and if I may so say, He cannot help loving. You do not need to pump up that great affection by any machinery of obedience and of merits; it rises like the water in an Artesian well, of its own impulse, with ebullient power from the central heat, and spreads its great streams everywhere. And therefore, though our sin may awfully disturb our relations with God, and may hurt and harm us in a hundred ways, there is one thing it cannot do, it cannot stop Him from loving us.”
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We can’t earn God’s love through obedience. We can’t even earn His love by imitating Him. He is going to love us no matter what.
But we have to realize that our disobedience is going to effect our relationships with Him. We’ll have lost opportunities to spend time with our loving Father. We will earn the consequences of our actions.
The end of the Sanctification Road is righteousness and perfection. We’ve been saying that righteousness is the result of a solid relationship with God built by a sincere life of conscientious obedience to God’s laws and commandments.
Adeney took a different perspective. He wrote, “The righteousness of the gospel is indwelling goodness out of which all virtues flow.”
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The Sanctification Road is all about changing our character to be more like God’s. Sometimes, we will have success; sometimes, we won’t. Instead of feeling guilty, we need to keep our focus on God.
Following the Direction of Others
“Do not try to lull conscience to sleep by imagining yourself no worse than others. One sin is enough to prove you guilty, how much more thousands?” (Everard, The Right Platform).
God wants us to have our noses pointed in His direction, not at someone else.
Ooo, baby. We love to compare ourselves with others. That is a quick way for Satan to get us to sin.
Irwin gave a pretty good description of how we see others. He wrote, “You will meet some who will tell you that all men are equally bad, or that one man is as good as another. You will meet some who will sneer at the idea of virtue, or unselfishness, or honesty being found in any one. They will tell you that no such thing exists. They will tell you that selfishness is the ruling principle of human nature, and that, if men or women are honest, or virtuous, or charitable, it is because it is their interest to be so.”
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God doesn’t want us to be comparing ourselves to others. He wants us to compare ourselves to Him. It is His character that He wants us to imitate, not the character of someone of the world.
Father God. We don’t want to continue to sin. However, we are still in these human bodies, so we will. We want to be the mirror image of You. We know that will happen when we reach Heaven. Help us to always navigate the Sanctification Road so that our noses are headed in Your direction. Forgive us when we get turned around. Amen.
What do you think?
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