Jesus Is

By Mark VanOuse

“That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; Holding forth the word of life; that I may rejoice in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in vain. ” Philippians 2:15-16 KJV

The picture here is light in the midst of deepest moral darkness, in the midst of a “crooked and perverse nation” (or “generation”). Such was the environment of the Roman empire at the time of the early church. This was a time when the masses were not entertained by the pretend gore of today’s cinema, but by butchery of real humans murdered for fun in the Colosseum. This was a society so thoroughly given over to decadence and violence that their insatiable want for entertainment demanded the blood and gore of the gladiator and Christians thrown to the lions. Read the rest of this entry �

The puritan Walter Marshal writes:

“The end of Christ’s incarnation, death and resurrection was to prepare and form a holy nature and frame for us in Himself, to be communicated to us by union and fellowship with Him; and not to enable us to produce in ourselves the first original of such a holy nature by our own endeavours.” [”Gospel Mystery of Sanctification”, first published in 1692]

I find it quite striking here how Marshall says that the “holy nature and frame” is communicated to us, rather than imitated by us, which would thus enable us to be the “first original of such a holy nature by our own endeavors.”

Wow, that really nails it, doesn’t it? God alone deserves glory, because God alone is God! It only follows that anything genuinely good and holy comes from God alone. It is not something that we manufacture, rather it is something God gives.

Otherwise, the righteousness would be our own and not God’s. Then we would have to get the glory, or “credit”. That glory is reserved for God alone. None other except God could fill His infinitely sized shoes!

© 2006, Mark VanOuse

By Andrew Murray

I have received much spiritual blessing through Andrew Murray’s classic devotional “Abide In Christ“. I highly commend it to you!

Let it be your first care to abide in Him in undivided fervent devotion of heart; when the heart and the life are right, rooted in Christ, knowledge will come in such measure as Christ’s own wisdom sees meet. And without such abiding in Christ the knowledge does not really profit, but is often most hurtful. The soul satisfies itself with thoughts which are but the forms and images of truth, without receiving the truth itself in its power. God’s way is ever first to give us, even though it be but as a seed, the thing itself, the life and the power, and then the knowledge. Man seeks the knowledge first, and often, alas! never gets beyond it. God gives us Christ, and in Him hid the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. O let us be content to possess Christ, to dwell in Him, to make Him our life, and only in a deeper searching into Him, to search and find the knowledge we desire. Such knowledge is life indeed.