Unleash Your Inner Warrior
My dear warrior, Over the last year, my understanding about grace and the law have been intensely challenged. As the questions came flying, I found myself unable to answer and I realized that though I knew God’s heart for me, I did not understand His grace as fully or deeply as I ought. The challenge caused me to become hungry for answers, and I became all the more ravenous after God’s heart and mind. I wanted more than just to know His heart for me; I wanted to know His thoughts! Being challenged this way caused me to delve constantly deeper into His Word, and constantly ask for wisdom and spiritual understanding and seek to understand the reality of His Kingdom. Those questions lit a fire in my heart that launched me onto the greatest adventure of my life—and also inspired me to start this blog, because I cannot stand to keep what I have been learning to myself. The question asked me was this: if I believe I am saved by grace through faith, then what about the moral law? Am I no longer subject to the moral law? (The moral law I'm referring to is the Ten Commandments, as God gave to Moses). It was not something I had ever thought about before. I had read Romans countless times, and confusing as it is, I loved Romans 6. All that time, I understood that we are under grace, and that when we are saved, God changes our hearts so that we no longer desire to sin. That was it, and it had been good enough for me. While this is true, it wasn’t enough—and it certainly wasn’t all of it. I had dismissed anything called “the law” entirely, and nearly missed His absolute majesty by having such a simplified understanding of grace.
There are so many false grace messages out there that teach distorted version of the gospel; these contain flagrant lies about the grace of God. Unfortunately, there are so many people out there who have no idea they’re being deceived about the grace message. In short: any grace that enables you to carry on in your sin and lets you simply excuse it because 'grace covers you' without you ever having to confess sin as sin and repent of it is a lie. “Salvation is not getting our passport stamped so we have the assurance of forgiveness so we can cast Jesus off for the next 20 years and have the assurance we’re in heaven. Liberty isn’t liberty from Jesus’ leadership. Liberty is liberty from defilement, darkness, and the things of darkness that defile our hearts –that’s the ‘liberty’ we want to get free from. There are a lot of people that want liberty from Jesus’ restraints. They want liberty from Jesus but they want His forgiveness. That is not biblical Christianity!” –Mike Bickle A grace message that is devoid of the biblical truth that we must deny the lusts of the flesh is a false grace message. To teach grace only in part and leave out that truth is a distortion of what Jesus taught. Grace is the presence of God that takes up residence within us and empowers us to live above (sinful) human standards. Grace is the strength to walk in freedom from the power of sin and darkness. Grace enables us to deny the lusts of the flesh; it helps us to move in liberty in every aspect of our lives; to have the mind of Christ and live free from negative thoughts, cynicism, sarcasm and the demonic influences that try to cloud our hearts and minds. Grace is freedom, not to live in sin, but to live free from sin. “Freedom does not have sin mixed in with it! It is not freedom to do whatever you want, it’s the ability to do what is right.” —Bill Johnson Grace sets a higher standard than the law. But it is through Christ alone, through the Holy Spirit in us that we are given the ability to live up to this new, higher standard. This is how we are meant to live! Warriors set themselves to a higher standard—not one that is shared by the world. That is the life we have been called to live. Warriors, we are meant to live and operate in grace, to live above the standard of sinfulness the world has set. We ought not submit ourselves to the sinful desires of the flesh, or think we are free indulge them because Christ has died for our sins. No, it is because He died for us that we no longer live in sin. It is because of His sacrifice on the cross that we are no longer are slaves to sin! And so we return to the question of the moral law. If you recall, a few blog posts back I talked about Love being the first and great command. When you fulfill the first and great command, you automatically fulfill the moral law. You see, we still abide by the moral law because the moral law is built into grace. By living under the law of grace, we automatically submit to the moral law, because the moral law is fulfilled by love. If we do not have love, we cannot fulfill the moral law. If we have love, and we live and operate as such, then we automatically fulfill the moral law. If we disregard the moral law (the Ten Commandments), then we also break the first and great commandment: to love. You cannot do one without the other. They are inseparable. The moral law is built into grace. God wrote the moral law into our DNA. You will not find a single culture in the history of the human race that did not have the moral law; every culture had laws against murder, adultery, stealing, etc. We intrinsically understand that these things are wrong. God Himself said that He has written the law on our hearts. While you were living in sin, your sinful nature tried to down out the sound of your conscience so that you could continue on in sin ‘undisturbed’ by the sound of godliness objecting to your unlawful behavior. When you were saved, God re-inscribed the moral law on your heart. “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; not the ceremonial law, which was abolished when this covenant was made; but rather the moral law still in force, which is a transcript of the nature and will of God; was inscribed on Adam's heart in innocence; is greatly obliterated by sin; a contrary disposition to it is in man; this is reinscribed in regeneration; and hence a regard is had to it by regenerate persons, in which lies part of their conformity to Christ: or else, since the word here used signifies doctrine or instruction, the Gospel and the truths of it may be meant; see Isaiah 2:2,Romans 3:27; which have a place and dwell in the hearts of renewed ones.” – Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible, Jeremiah 31:33 This is merely the tip of the iceberg in discussing grace, but I wanted to introduce the topic this week. So this all begs the questions: Are you living in God’s enabling grace that draws you to Him? Or are you living in so-called ‘freedom’ to sin? My dear warrior, wage war on that which would keep you from living in the fullness of God’s grace; fight to stay in the grace that enables you to live by God’s standards and enjoy the freedom of walking free from the slavery of sin. Pursue God in wholehearted love and ask for a holy hatred for the things that would destroy you or keep you from intimate relationship with God. Ask, seek and knock until you have the breakthrough, until you have a vibrant heart set alight for God—until you have a glorious relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Ask God to give you a revelation of His Love for you, and of His grace. Once you have the revelation of that, it will set your heart on fire for him to live in wholehearted love for him, putting effort into a relationship with Him. Live in freedom my dear warriors, Yours, Warrior Beloved ©Michèle Aimée, 2015
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