Focus

Romans 3 shows a contrast between a focus on sin, or keeping the law, resulting in a knowledge of sin vs. a focus on God's revealed righteousness through Jesus resulting in knowing God and the truth about Him. What we focus on will result in intimacy with either sin or with God. This chapter is in the context of God on trial and His need to be justified. Repeatedly it is mentioned that evidence is being put forward of the truth about His character.

If we focus on keeping the law as righteousness we become intimate with sin and witness against God in His trial, bearing witness that He is a liar. In so doing however, it is exposed that I am the liar and God is not, ultimately exposing the truth about Him.

Verse 26 is the verdict of the trial – God is just and He justifies all those who choose to witness truthfully about both Him and themselves in His trial.

Faith is both produced and put to use by focusing on Jesus and the truth about God. By doing so we end up verifying the truth of the law (v. 31). But it is not by focusing on the law that we establish it. We have to focus on the truth about God's character as revealed in Jesus to establish the law.

Romans 7 and James 1. If I believe the lie that I can keep the law, then I am ripe for sin to use the law, the condemnation of my failure or the pride of my supposed success, to produce sin in me. James is more detailed. I am enticed, lured by the beauty of righteousness through perfectionism and the craving to have it now (lust) and have people think highly of me. If the lie in me responds to sin hiding in the clothing of LAW righteousness, sexual intercourse/intimacy/adultery will take place and sin will be conceived in me (produced in me). When sin matures – grows up – it bears the fruit of death/separation from life and the source of life.

Rom. 7:8 Apart from the law sin is dead. If I am disabused of the lie that I can be perfect by keeping the law, if I let Jesus take my focus off the law, then sin can't hide under those deceptive clothes and becomes powerless/dead in my life.

Does the Sun Still Shine When it's Cloudy?

Thankful for blessing or thankful for the Blesser?

Does the sun quit shining when a cloud covers its view?

Does the sun not produce warmth when all I feel is cold?

Does the sun extinguish at night?

The sun is constant, unchanging, always producing and dispensing light and heat. The difference in affect on my life is the atmosphere that comes between me and the sun. To a large extent I choose the mental atmosphere that surrounds me.

If I can't feel God's warmth, joy, assurance, peace and light it is not because He changed.

Am I only grateful for the sun on a clear, warm day?

If so, I am only grateful at all when life feels good and I feel blessed.

Gratitude and praise become as fickle as the weather and the atmosphere over me.

When I am ungrateful and can't praise God I profess that the sun has gone out.

I am bearing false witness against the goodness of God.

Blessing flows from God undiminished and more constant than light and heat flow from the sun.

Proselytize or Evangelize

Proselytism –

1. Unworthy motives – concern for our own glory rather than God's

2. Unworthy methods – resorting to physical coercion, moral constraint, or psychological pressure.

3. Unworthy message – deliberately misrepresent other people's beliefs.

Evangelize – to make an open and hones statement of the gospel, which leaves the hearers entirely free to make up their own minds about it.

Legalism and Sanctification

Saul was one of the most ambitious legalists in history who had a commanding knowledge of Scripture and an unsurpassed zeal for righteousness. But it was not until he scales fell from his eyes that he began to understand the truth about God in all those Scriptures. And it was when a man who could see and who was open to and easily moved by the Spirit, a heretic, came and prayed for hem and laid hands on Saul that the scales came off not only his eyes but his heart.

Will it be that Adventists with all the true doctrines and false prejudice against other born-again children of God, will have to be prayed over and receive laying on of hands from non-Adventists or maybe newly enlightened “converts” who are far more open and advanced in things of the Spirit, before the scales of legalism can be dropped from our eyes? It is easier for truly Spirit-filled people to accept the true Sabbath and other doctrines of truth than for rigid law-keepers and EGW abusers to accept the humility and joy of the Holy Spirit. True doctrines only enhance the experience of those who are already on the track of being led by the Spirit and craving more of God's presence and knowledge of Him. But legalism blinds its adherents with pride in supposedly having all the truth, believing that having the right facts, formulas and arguments constitutes the sume of the law. Everything in the Bible is forced through this filter and squeezed/contorted into this mold.

Legalism is the counterfeit of true sanctification. The one is motivated by pride of truth and selfish ambition to escape this earth and settle in the comforts of heaven. The second is driven by a deepening disgust with one's self from a growing knowledge of our own desperate sinfulness in the light of God's overwhelming beauty and a growing, passionate craving for deeper intimacy with the God of mercy and compassion who has been lied about, maligned, and falsely represented. Heaven is only a place where intimacy with the ultimate lover can be more fully realized, not a fire escape.

Harvest Contents

2 Cor. 9 - A description of the harvest and its contents. Generosity unaffected by covetousness, without grudging or compulsion, in cheerfulness. Impossible for me to produce. This is the seed that God provides and multiplies. If I sow it, it multiplies my (unmerited) righteousness. The fruit is thanksgiving by me, then by many, and glory given to God by many because of my consistency between my actions and my confession of words. This causes the “many” to pray for me and yearn for me because of the surpassing (selfishness? no) grace of God they see in me.