oh happiness!

there's grace, enough for us, &the whole human race!

(oh happiness, david crowder)

i really like this song :) it is so happy sounding & it is so true! that His grace extends to all of us, oh happiness!!

lately (more like the last month), i've been realizing that obedience to Christ, like humility, prayer, etc., is indeed a discipline and a process to be brought to perfection and completion only by God's work within our lives. on wednesday, during sg, we studied half of chapter 1 of 1 peter. vs. 2 particulary caught my eye:

who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ...

obedience to Christ is a process, a discipline that we must adhere to, but that we cannot fully do on our own. as i read the Bible &reflect on it more&more, i realize how very counter-cultural and counter-logical (unless we have renewed our minds) the commandments in the Bible are, how very difficult it is for our sinful self to obey and adhere to, and how obedience to Jesus Christ without the continuing work of the Spirit in us is going to always be at an elementary level: obeying the letter of the law, but not necessarily the spirit.

as the Spirit sanctifies us, as we grow in our new life, as we fall deeper in love with our Savior, it is impossible to not realize that unless we make it a goal to live by a higher standard, we cannot be emptied of all the junk in us enough to have Him fill us more, to have more of His image, love, characteristics, etc in our lives. to me, living by a higher standard doesn't automatically come when we become Christian and adhere to "Christian" rules. i love the way Tozer put it, his "new cross" is the current modern religious trend, his "old cross" is the Biblical one:

The new cross does not slay the sinner, it redirects him. It gears him into a cleaner and jollier way of living and saves his self-respect. To the self-assertive it says, "Come and assert yourself for Christ." To the egotist it says, "Come and do your boasting in the Lord." To the thrill seeker it says, "Come and enjoy the thrill of Christian fellowship." The Christian message is slanted in the direction of the current vogue in order to make it acceptable to the public.

...The old cross is a symbol of death. It stands for the abrupt, violent end of a human being. The man in Roman times who took up his cross and started down the road had already said goodbye to his friends. He was not coming back. He was going out to have it ended. The cross made no compromise, modified nothing, spared nothing; it slew all of the man, completely and for good. It did not try to keep on good terms with its victim. It struck cruel and hard, and when it had finished its work, the man was no more.

to live by a higher standard, is to completely die to our old self, to this world's values, to deliberately NOT conform to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (romans 12:2).

i really liked this one pastor's insight on Mark 10:21.

Jesus looked at him and loved him. "One thing you lack," he said. "Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."

the pastor pointed out the part that said Jesus loved him. When Jesus loves us &when we are at a point where we want nothing but Him, He will require of us above and beyond the norm. Selling everything one had was not part of the ten commandments, it's not something you have to do, so why did Jesus ask the man to do so? because Jesus loved him; because Jesus wanted to be his all, because Jesus wanted a deeper relationship with him than just one based on following laws. if we want to serve God wholeheartedly, if we want to be overflowing with God's power, we must not be surprised when He begins to ask us to obey a higher standard than the one we are already following; instead, we should rejoice, because God has seen our desire and has counted us worthy to live according to a higher standard.

In a large house there are not only utensils made of gold and silver, but also those made of wood and clay. Some are for special use, while others are for ordinary use. (2 timothy 2:20, ISV)

in God's house, there are vessels not only of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay; some are for noble and special purposes and some for ordinary. do you want to be the article of gold? or of clay? the article used for noble purposes? or for ignoble? special? or ordinary? if we want to be used by God for special and noble purposes, we're going to have to be a vessel of gold and silver, a vessel that obeys and adheres to a higher standard. we cannot expect to be christians totally immersed in the practices and doings of this world, and expect God to use us as a vessel for special purposes.

one example of living by a higher standard is shown by the verse 1 thessalonians 5:22. in the NASB, it states: "abstain from every form of evil" but in the KJV, it states: "abstain from all appearance of evil." by the NASB version of this verse, we are obeying it if we generally do not do anything actually sinful. but by the KJV version, to obey it, would be to adhere to a higher standard, because to abstain from doing anything that could even give the appearance of evil requires much more of a person than just not doing the evil itself. for example, in referrance to couples who "just" sleep together at night, i've often heard others justify it saying "but it's not like they had sex," but if we are to hold ourselves up to the standard of the KJV version, why must we give even the appearance of sex? there are different standards of purity &holiness, &depending on what type of vessel we hope God will use/view us as, we will aim to adhere to different standards of purity & holiness.

i myself am learning to obey God more and more as He reveals to me how very rigidly i would view His laws and commands. i'm gradually beginning to see that His commandments for us aren't just a bunch of "rules taught by men" (matthew 15:9), they aren't just lines that we cannot cross, &no matter how close we get to them, as long as we don't cross them, we are fine. but that His commandments are a lifestyle, areas of our lives that we hand over to Him for complete control.

i use to view the command to "honor God with [my] body" (1 corinthians 6:20) as just in reference to sexual immorality (after all, it's under a section subtitled "sexual immorality"). but if God cares about our sexual selves, does He not care about our health? does He not care about what we put in our bodies? our minds? hence, with this realization, i've been learning to honor God with my whole body, with my sleep schedule, my eating habits, my exercise schedule, the things i read, the things i watch, the things i listen to. it's not easy, that's for sure. just the other day, i was eating a cup of instant noodles for lunch while listening to pastor chuck smith's sermon on leviticus &how God cares about what we eat. i thought it so ironic and in the end i threw away half of the instant noodles. i'm definitely still learning to honor God with my whole body, but thank goodness for grace when i fail and for the fact that it is through the sanctifying work of His Spirit that will bring my obedience to Jesus Christ the obedience that God requires of me. :)

there, but for the grace of God, i go