06/20/2023
When the Lord visited me in 1985, to abolish my man-made holiness program, He went straight to the point asking me to reckon myself dead to sin. When I struggled to confess it, He explained that what I could not accomplish, for I could not keep the Law perfectly, weak as I was through my own efforts, He accomplished by sending His Son in order to fulfill His requirements in me.
"God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant.
In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us." - Romans 8:3–4 MSG
Today, many Christian and even some secular sources proclaim that the number one enemy of humanity is the ego or the self—if you fail to control it properly, it will act up against your relationships, your family, your boss, your company, your position—and ultimately it will betray you.
The Gospel, however, is not about improving the I, the self, the ego. It is about this: “Not I, but Christ.”
"For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave
himself for me." - Galatians 2:19–20 AKJV
Not a single one of us can free ourselves from that old identity; only Jesus can. He came to crucify the “I” on the cross, and to destroy the lie of the independent self-existence (ego) that the devil and world system uses to enslave us.
That is why it is essential that we never reduce or lose sight of the magnitude of what Christ our Redeemer accomplished on the cross. His sacrifice was not solely to forgive our sins and secure our access into heaven: He makes us brand new. If we were to believe that Jesus covers over our rottenness and allows the poison of the serpent to remain inside of us until we finally make it to heaven, we would be denying the fullness and grandeur of His death and resurrection.
Adam Clarke, a brilliant eighteenth-century Wesleyan theologian, put it this way: “If we are waiting for our physical death to free us once and for all from the power of sin, then we have just crowned death as our savior and not the Lord Jesus Christ.”
-- excerpt from JOY, God's Secret Weapon for Every Believer by Georgian Banov
