The deadly cocktail of mixing Law and Grace for the believer

It is becoming a better known fact to many Christians that they are not to serve and live for Christ through the Mosaic Law (Ten commandments and Old Testament commands) but rather to properly understand by revelation and subsequent life transformation the New Covenant, purchased by Jesus Christ our great High Priest!
Should this be news to you then you really really do need to look into this and study the fact that as a believer in Christ you are ‘no longer under law but under Grace’ and to fully begin to live in this reality.
For the purpose of this blog I want to assume that you know this. However I also want to assume that like me you may be finding the subtleties of living in the fullness of life that Christ has purchased for us sometimes elusive. Let me give you an example from my own life...
By and large I understand and can preach New Covenant realities for the child of God, our freedom in Christ, our great privileges, the fact that we are no longer under the curse of the Law, that Christ was the END of the Law and so forth. That means that God accepts and receives me as His son on the basis of the blood of Christ – His atoning sacrifice and not on my own merits. I understand that as I have started (under Grace – unmerited favour by the mercy of God) then so am I to continue ie. That Grace is not just the means of my Justification but is also the means of my Sanctification and to fulfil my destiny!

Along the way though I have discovered though that I can still end up living in a subtle fusion of Law and Grace

when revelation begins to wane or fleshly living starts to creep up and bite me from behind! Paul told the believer that there ‘is now NO CONDEMNATION’ for those in Christ Jesus....

how often have I told myself that I am living and believing correctly under Grace by the Spirit of God only to have to re-evaluate when the crippling power of condemnation or a sense of failure starts overtaking me. Its only when the effects of living under this for a while accumulate and overwhelm us that we realise that the cumulative effect of even a small amount of ‘Law based living’ will eventually cripple us like a pebble in the shoe of a weary traveller

. Perhaps you feel a sense of unworthiness and an inability to move into the calling and prophecies that you have received?

Maybe like me you have discovered that 'starting' is the easy part and you have lapsed back for seasons, even unconsciously, into adopting the Old Covenant approach of 'do and live' again rather than the life-giving 'live and do' of Grace?

By Grace we understand that we entered the Kingdom by faith (through Grace) apart from works and as such must continue in this manner, not abandoning Grace in favour of once more earning God’s favour and acceptance through our own efforts – surely the great default of many of us.

A revelation of Grace through a renewed mind appreciates that even a little bit of Law based thinking for the believer will bring condemnation and guilt and fail to lead us into the Spirit led and filled life we desire.

It takes one rotten apple to spoil the barrel. What I have discovered is that much of this Law based thinking comes through 'old defaults' from our past. We lurch back toward ‘human performancisms’ rather than allowing ourselves the right to receive by faith what we don’t deserve and enjoy the full rights as sons – unmerited favour and position by virtue of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection – apart from works.

Its the subtle mix of Law and Grace based living that is the most difficult animal to catch and the most dangerous

It takes time to realise that as a believer there is no such thing as a balance between Law and Grace! We must go the whole way and cast out the slave woman Hagar (a ‘type’ of the Law) and embrace fully living as a child of Promise after Isaac (a ‘type’ of Grace) Cast out the Slave woman Paul told the Galatians! It sounds so harsh but this is what we must do to any ‘law based’ thinking. So if you catch yourself trying to earn God’s favour, or battling with a Spirit of condemnation due to feelings of unworthiness or other PERFORMANCE related means of living for God and possessing your inheritance then STOP and reconsider.

You start by Grace and you must continue by Grace. Your faith is the key.

Will you believe the scandalous freedom you have in Christ or not? Will you accept him and the New Covenant in all its fullness or not? Don’t think that by mixing Law based and Grace based living you can hedge your bets. No, it will ruin you.
Learn to identify what is going on in your mind by the fruit of your life. Condemnation, feeling a failure, fed up, drivenness...all BAD! Hope, courage, assurance, buoyancy and joy ...all GOOD!
Watch your life transform in Christ by living in and through the Gospel of Grace today in all its fullness, leave no stone unturned and identify those places where you have tolerated that deadly mixed cocktail of L & G for too long. Discover the difference!
JS.

Willow Creek website blog entry by J Shiels

A 'Guest Blog' response on a Willow Creek website in response to request for giving advise to young leaders (by Jason Shiels)

FIND LINK BELOW,

http://www.willowcreekevents.org.uk/leadership/lessons-for-young-leaders-you-are-never-too-young-to-start-jason-shiels/

My Quietness

A poem by Amy Carmichael


O Thou who art my quietness, my deep repose,
My rest from strife of tongues, my holy hill,
Fair is Thy pavilion, where I hold me still.
Back let them fall from me, my clamarous foes,
Confusions multiplied;
From crowding things of sense I flee, and in Thee hide.
Until this tyranny be overpast,
Thy hand will hold me fast;
What though the tumult of the storm increase,
Grant to Thy servant strength, O Lord, and bless with peace.

Beyond the motive of Jesus for an easier life

Revelation and beholding Jesus the radiant majestic Son of the living God takes us beyond just living for the sole motive of having an 'easier life' The latter is bound up in self-absorption or perhaps fear. Living for the will of God may sound nauseatingly virtuous to a secular person or a fleshly engrossed Christian but it is actually the natural consequence of true affection for Christ. Love and obedience cannot be separated. Increasing love of God leads to increasing obedience and so on. The Judaistic believers in Hebrews were being tempted to see Jesus as an angel or equal to an angel. It would have made life easier to have believed these rumours and to remain within the framework of Judaism - repectability assured. However life in Christ will not necesarily be easy. A wrong assumption at Gospel uptake can lead to a life where this is the governing expectation and raison d'etre. Jesus my problem solver and bringer of comfort and security? Living out of revelation of Jesus as the Son of the living God will ruin us for this basis for living. The whole of Hebrews chapter 1 is a commentary on the fact that Jesus IS the Son of God and in His radiance and divinity is superior to all the angelic and created realm. Accordingly dangerous living becomes way more attractive, indeed a reflex, in light of such a great salvation and God than 'easy street' Do you have a majestic and glorious King in view, a Gospel that continues to make you want to 'reckon yourself dead to sin' (Romans) and to live a dangerous life of adventure for God that will echo in eternity?!
Any comments...?

Deeper Discipleship the Jesus way

http://sc.fhview.com/sc_customplayer/seriesitems/1/118278

Who do we say that Jesus is?
What is our actual revelation not our projected one?

3 legs of discipleship:
* truth that sets free
* love experienced from the Father that compels
* fruitfulness and favour from abideing in Christ

Do we have ears to hear what God is wanting to speak into our heart? Are we open and receptive?

Words of Grace (Acts 20) build us up and project us into our inheritance. Do we have the good soil of the Parable of the Sower or is the seed stolen?

We can be a child of God but not a disciple....may it not be so for you or I in the future...

Spiritual warfare in Ireland is different from Africa or India...listen and come out from under the spell of satan's 'slow death' approach...

Just a few points from the above sermon.

JS

Amazing Grace

Towering introspection is often the product of failing to reach certain invisible but tangible expectations we have of ourselves, others and life in general. For Christians, many still live with 'Law Consciousness' as the means of measuring their worthiness without truly understanding that 'Christ was the end of the Law' and has opened up a 'new and living way' through the finished work of the cross!
Unhealthy degrees of introspection based on 'point scoring' (or 'own goals'!) against some performance code we imagine God to have, leads to a privatised outlook on life that is bereft of sowing ourselves into the 'field of the world' as the 'good seed' that Jesus the 'sower' has declared us to be! Dizzying degrees of self-analysis, God questioning and the vacuumous effect of introspection are right where satan 'the enemy of our souls' wants us to be! They produce man-consciousness rather than God-consciousness and narrow vistas of small thinking that renders faith like a box of wet matches.
The drive for 'success' has been instilled in us from infancy. Society is built upon it. From prize-givings to beauty pageants to the selection of teams in PE class, all of us have at times felt the need for affirmation and 'success' crushed, leaving us feeling like 'also-rans'
Until the last number of years, much of Christian ministry was also founded for me on the faulty foundation of worldly success psychologies, that is until God allowed me to experience a sense of 'failure' often enough and 'delay' long enough to know that something was not right here in my 'cause and effect' lens for the Kingdom of God. Surely if the inputs were high enough into the systemic nature of ministry that sub-consciously we had understood then the outputs would role down the production line. Not so.
It has only been experiencing the sheer power of God's Grace and love inspite of my weaknesses and sins that has taught me that its less about us than I had at first understood.
The connection between our achievements and perception of success can be a self-limiting factor that sets the barometer for our inner world. If we are accomplishing and doing great then we feel all the more loved, but when we aren't we can feel alone and unloved. Experiencing failure may seem like a horror show when it happens but on reflection I am learning to see that there is something much more precious at stake than the performance based litmus test. Failures in and through our lives can be the door to experiencing and dispensing new levels of God's mercy and Father's heart - and all that inspite of us!
When you experience a sense of failure, as I have often done, please understand that God does not reject you. Thats what puts the 'amazing' into Amazing Grace (how sweet the sound that saves a WRETCH like me!) So often we have thought if only I could be better, do more, have more to show for my effort THEN I would be valuable and significant. Dear friend, that is not so. The cracks in our squeeky clean and 'together' lives are testament to the fact that we are not the finished article nor should be spend our lives expecting to be either. That is too exhausting. Grace will lift you. Our need of God is based on humility. Humility deveops through failures and delays along the rough-road of life. As His light shines through those cracks in the armour of our not-so-perfect lives then let Him love you anyway, because that love was never based on your virtue in the first place. Its Amazing Grace.
JS

God's remedy for the worry and anxiety prone

Ireland in 2011 faces a huge uphill struggle on a few fronts. Unemployment, rising levels of debt, negative equity, marital disharmony and breakdown, depression, Governmental failures, to name but a few. However, even in good times it seems like circumstances are not the only factor that affects one's outlook on life.
Sniffing out as yet non-existant potential pitfalls or negative outcomes on the horizon is a common characteristic of perceived wisdom amongst some of types of people. Some make a career out of squashing almost any shred of hope or glimmer of possibilitarianism out of life. Even when things look bright and rosy its almost as if this mind-set refuses to enjoy the moment, seeing it as weakness given the looming dark shadows of expectation that always seem to overshadow the present. With this mind-set a constant restlessness exists from the uncanny knack of turning positive situations into a bitter struggle for survival, a 'battening down of hatches' approach in case we 'get ahead of ourselves' and end up more disappointed in the end. A sorry way to live life.
Not all the worry prone are so dramatically negative though! Others just live with a low grade and ongoing gnaw of stress and anxiety. In this type of mentality there is no deep-seated negativity just a deficit emotionally that comes from feeling overwhelmed by the barrage of plates that need spinning, bills that need paying and expectations we place upon ourselves (or live under) of how life is supposed to be, and the sinking sense that we are not quite 'making it' or must always be 'doing more' to succeed - a vacuumous demand upon the human soul.
The portion of Scripture below was spoken by Jesus to teach us that there is a Father in Heaven who is NOT detached and discompassionately removed from His children here on earth. God sees and knows whats going on in our hearts and the practicalities of our lives. Not only that but He wants to Father us through this situation as a God of immense love. He sees the pain of the mother with an autistic child, He is touched by the pain of a bereavement, the loneliness of a divorcee, the helplessness of the indebted and poverty stricken and the agony of the sick and infirm. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ, having lived amongst us but now ascended to the Right Hand of the Father (a position of honour and authority) is also 'touched with the feelings of our infirmities'. He is touched by your pain, confusion, worry and whatever else that describes the turmoil of the human heart and mind at any given moment. Touched!
Jesus provides a simple but radical cure to the disease of worry, stress and anxiety. It involves getting to know God as your Father, not only as some 'Higher Power' amongst the clouds! Jesus was speaking to His disciples and interested parties about the key of logical thinking. He describes how His Father looks after the sparrow and clothes the lily of the field and rebukes them for their lack of understanding and TRUST for imagining that He would treat them, His children, any less than one of these. This was a common ploy of Jesus. He uses here an argument from the lesser (sparrow) to the greater (us) to show the folly of imagining that He as our Father would desert us or withhold the provision of a loving Father!
Worry and stress by and large comes from a lack of trust in God. It means we have not yet learnt about His faithfulness, or have perhaps forgotten it. In many of us there is a default setting that tends us toward worry and anxiety as part of a 'coping mechanism' Unfortunately this is a reversal of how God intended for us to cope, by relying upon him and letting Him achieve in us and through us what we could never do in our own strength. This is NOT a vote for laziness or carelessness, that is not what is intended here by me, or by Jesus. This is about really believing in and relying upon our Father in Heaven for our lives here on earth.
Why not test this out? Allow God to reset your worry default (if you have one) and learn to live by faith and not by mere natural instincts. That is the way of PEACE and the fruit of handing over the ultimate control and provision for our lives and hopes to the Father!
Any comments?

25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life[e]?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Mathhew 6 (Jesus Christ)

Personal insights on 'Handling the emotional component of being involved in ministry'

* Its a Theological issue - What goes on in my head and heart is largely the key to walking in emotional freedom or stress. I have found that there is a large difference between truth we have heard and truth that resides in the inner sanctum of our lives. As a deeper Theology of Assurance and Inheritance has grounded me in a more profound trust there has been MUCH less room for worry and anxiety, the ugly sisters of leaking emotional tanks.

* Its a success issue - our whole view of 'success' has needed to change. Deep in the heart we need to make the transition from 'God writing our story' to 'us writing His story' and the journey into this is inevitably through trials and delay. Its the best thing that could ever happen to us. When we find our 'success' in God Himself and trust at a deeper level, joy and peace replace Arminian drivenness - a relentless inner unrest that is an emotional slave driver.

* Its a people issue - ministry is about people and building lives, team, reaching the lost and so on. For me knowing how to 'switch off' and relax, and rest in the perpetual 'unfinished business' of lives and church 'in process' has taken time and is again related to a deeper trust. Handling criticism is another big one and living free of people's moods and 'issues' with us at times has meant that we sleep well, fret less and laugh more. Relational disharmony is highly draining and learning greater honesty, confrontation and listening skills has helped to reduce 'passive aggressive' and unsettling escalation of disharmony. We must learn aswell to live well in our own 'shoes' and not live under our own or other people's comparisons of ourselves.

* Its a lifestyle issue - I have found the following important: rest, protecting a day off, having good holidays, having a date night with Ali and building our marriage is VITAL to emotional well-being, good sex life in marriage is most helpful to our emotional state, taking exercise and keeping in shape helps how we feel about ourselves, getting enough sleep, eating well and general health well-being, Having a hobby and enjoying a glass of wine and fun with friends is necessary to avoid constant intensity and being drained. Laughter breaks fear.

* Its a Spirit issue - quite simply the anointing of the Holy Spirit breaks 'yokes of bondage' of our lives. Emotions get damaged in this trench warfare. I have had to work hard (and still do) to maintain a decent prayer life and enter the 'rest' of God. Entering the 'santuary' of God (Psalms 73) also brings proper perspective to us amidst unsettling emotions and helps ground us in the Sovereignty of God that brings peace even amidst temporary 'defeats' and choppy waters.

* Its a friendship issue - I have found this vital. Having friends that we can be real with and who don't judge us for opening our 'under-bellies' has been a key to remaining emotionally stable. Ladies in particular need this but so do men! Laughter and the joy of friendship is deeply therapeutic to one's emotional state, I believe.The opposite of this is just bottling things up inside and leads to harmful repression of emotions that will one day mount up to the point of breakdown unless dealt with.

The tussle for transparency

"Peace, peace, when there is no peace" — Jeremiah 6:14

"MINISTERS ARE FEARFULLY GUILTY if they intentionally build up men in a false peace" Charles Spurgeon.

Read more in his 'Blast of the Trumpet against False Peace'

www.spurgeon.org/sermons/0301.htm

Cards on the table, none of us wants to be labelled as the insensitive fundamentalist screaming down a loudspeaker to some poor defenseless bystander!

When I first arrived in Dublin to establish a Gospel frontier post(and in the process a church) I made the point of telling everyone I was from Co.Derry (we never called it Londonderry!) and that I was not a 'Paisley type' bigot or narrow minded sort! All true, but the point was that we live in a country blighted by religious stereotypes the perceptions of which had left me back-footed trying to explain what I 'was not' rather than what I am and believe. It takes time to establish trust and I hope that has happened...and that I too have grown up to be less 'perceptions' conscious and more God conscious, less of a man pleaser and more of a God pleaser!

Spurgeon's trumpet blast here is an outcry against Christian people, especially leaders, who have believed the Gospel and received Christ as their Saviour but do nothing to challenge the religious stereotypes of people around them....and in doing so leave people with 'false peace'

Religious stereotypes are nothing new. Jesus had to face them from Jewish leaders who refused to listen to his truth claims and rejected Him for who He truly was ('the Saviour' sent by God to reconcile men to God) This is a great tragedy that continues to happen in our day. Rejecting Jesus' truth claims, hiding behind stereotypes and a 'form of godliness' but denying the need for a truly God saved and tranformed life leads to current and eternal separation from God (in a place that Jesus called Hell) - and dare I say it, a wasted life.

I'd say thats a tragedy worth getting brave for, persevering with stereotypes for, and laying our lives down for.

WWW.SOUTHCITYCHURCH.ORG