Category: Romans

Reflections on Romans 4:3

“What does Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’” (Romans 4:3, NIV)

One modern paraphrase renders this verse to say that because Abraham believed, God “canceled his sins and declared him ‘not guilty.’” When I read that, my heart cried out. I want my sin condition healed! I want God to create in me a new, clean heart that no longer wants to be sinful and selfish. I do not want to be a pardoned sinner!

The Remedy captures what I long for: Abraham trusted God, “and his trust was recognized as righteousness because the distrust caused through Satan’s lies had been removed, and through trust he was endowed with a new heart, right motives and Christlike principles.”

How sad that anyone could believe God would do only a halfway job of healing His creation, that all through eternity we would have to keep arguing with our fallen natures.

A Clean Heart

The Lord will create a clean heart in us (Psalm 51:10). This means we will be free from the inclination to want to sin. The inner man of sin will be removed. In our walk with the Father, we will have crucified these sinful attributes of our characters. This is done by refusing to agree with, accept, or think on selfish, evil things. We starve the man of sin in us to death by refusing to feed him.

Every time we shut down the inclinations, thoughts, or actions to be selfish or sinful, we weaken this part of our nature. We don’t have the emotional or spiritual strength to wage this war alone. This is where the Father promises all the power of His throne to aid even the weakest member of His family who is choosing to wage this war. Any movement or choice in this direction floods our life with power from heaven.

When we begin this war, our ability to recognize and take in this heaven-sent Grace and power will be small. Each day, as we make our will subject to our wishes, along with the growing connection with the Father that comes from spending time with Him, our ability to take in more of His saving, healing power grows, as it does its work of healing and restoring us to the mind of Christ.

Our wishes are His wishes when we have His heart and mind in us. We truly want to do well; we are just running our new life on the old sinful platform in our brains. As we do the good, we change our inclinations, until our knee-jerk reaction is the mind of Christ acting first, not something we have to catch and redo.

Learning to Absorb

When our physical bodies are sick, it is all but impossible to absorb the nutrition from the good, healthy food we eat. One of the most energy-consuming things our bodies do is produce the hydrochloric acid bath the stomach uses to break down our food and release its nutrition. When the body is sick, this creates a downward spiral. We flood our body with good, nutritious food, but most of it passes through unabsorbed, because the body is too weak to make the strong bath needed to break it down.

So it goes in the spiritual life. The Father floods our hearts and minds with His healing Love and Grace, but we do not have the spiritual strength to absorb all He sends. In the beginning, only a little is taken in. Each day that we take time to commune with the Father, spend time in the Word, and meditate on His Love, our ability to absorb grows, and our connection to heaven grows with it. We are able to feast on and absorb greater and greater amounts of the healing nutrients sent straight from the throne of God. This is our spiritual healing journey.

Junk Food for the Mind

You must control your mind; there is so much power for good or evil in our thoughts. Keep your mind away from sinful, evil, selfish subject matter. Learn to feed on the beautiful, healthy, and uplifting. Close your mind to negative subject matter. Turn off the news and the TV. All the material pouring into you from every direction is destroying your connection with the Father and dwarfing your mind.

You would never knowingly let junk food cross your lips if you understood what it does to your body. Even one candy bar’s worth of sugar can weaken your immune response for hours afterward, leaving you open to whatever virus is floating by. Junk food throws open the doors of your body to invaders.

Junk food for the mind does the same. It breaks your connection with the Father and dwarfs your mind, making it harder for the healing power to enter and heal. And feeding your mind and heart on junk is addictive, just as junk food is. Choose to disconnect from the garbage media.

The more time you spend with the Father, the more you will want to be with Him. Your heart and mind will expand. This is your choice.

Reflections on Romans 4:2

The Remedy puts Romans 4:2 this way: “If Abraham was somehow healed by his own efforts at keeping a set of rules or performing certain rituals, then he would have his own healing formula to promote and would not need trust in God.”

If our strength of will to do good things could heal the sin-sick condition in us, why did Christ have to come and live the perfect life, so He could provide the healing antidote for a sick race? If anything we could do would heal our bent toward selfishness, we would save ourselves and would not need a Redeemer. The truth is, we have no power to create the changes in our DNA, to heal the sin condition Adam passed on to his children.

Children in Grown Bodies

Adam and Eve were emotionally very small children. They had fully developed bodies, but they were not given the time to grow up emotionally. They sinned, and fell from Grace, as small children, knowing nothing of life, completely immature. That was all they had to pass on to their children: a lot of blank, unlearned DNA, nothing good to hand down, only the blotch of sin. How sad for humanity.

We pass on to our children what we have developed in ourselves. Parents who have grown in character, skill, and self-control give their children a richer start than parents who have children before they themselves have grown up. Adam and Eve had strong, perfect bodies, but they had not had time to develop the inner life, and sin damaged what little was there. The DNA they passed on to humanity was damaged and nearly empty. They had nothing in themselves to bless their offspring with.

Why Healing Has Taken So Long

How long it has taken for a people to develop to the place where God will be allowed to heal the living. God, with all His wisdom, power, and Love, has been unable to effect a healing in humanity, because no one understood enough to allow it, or even to understand what that healing was. Until we are able to accept it with our minds, and agree to take part in the process by an understanding, conscious decision to be healed, God is unable to heal us, because we would no longer be us if He did.

We all need to understand this point. If God were to heal us completely from all sin and selfishness, from our desire to sin, our inclination to selfishness, all the traces of evil lurking in our minds and hearts, without our agreement, we would cease to exist. We would no longer be who we are. There would be someone else, with a pure heart and mind, full of joy and all the great stuff, but without the person known as me. I would be gone, replaced by a perfect clone of myself.

Unless I agree to and want the healing changes God is able to make in my heart and mind, He cannot make them without wiping me out and making a new me that is not me. This is why He has taken so long to heal this sin infection. We must understand and trust Him enough to agree intelligently to the process. For God to heal our sinful self while we continue to be us, we must agree, understand, and cooperate, allowing His strength and Love to fortify us in our choice to do well.

My Choice, His Power

I can choose to do well. I can choose to stop a bad habit. I can choose to be kind and loving when I feel ratty and prickly. But my will and emotional strength to do what I choose is not enough. In my own strength I fail every time. It is when the healing Love and Grace of God flows into me that my will becomes stronger.

I choose it. Then, in the power of God’s Grace, I truly want it. Then, as I move forward in the direction I have freely chosen, I find I have the strength to persevere and become the person who honestly is this new way. The choice has become me. I am no longer drawn to the old way; the new way is who I truly am. It has been made a part of me, and now I am free to move on to my next better choice, onward and upward.

The power comes when we apply our will, as weak as it may be, to our choice. We choose, we apply our will, we move one little inch in that direction, and He fills us with all the power we can hold to get up and march forward.

It is all us, and it is all His healing Grace. We could not do it alone, and God cannot do it without us.

The Toe Slid Forward

This is how we are re-created in His image while we live, so that we will be ready to meet Him when He returns. “We shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). This is a true miracle of Grace and Love.

All heaven, all the power in heaven, is just waiting for the weakest soul to make a choice and slide that toe forward just a bit. Then they will find they have the strength of Samson. That one choice, along with the action of the will, is all the permission God needs to fill us with power straight from His throne.

This is Love: His eyes constantly roaming through the earth, looking for the very beginning of a choice, so He can fill the human heart with strength to stand and be strong (2 Chronicles 16:9).

I have seen this miracle in my own life so many times through the years. Looking back, I see His healing flowing into me as soon as it was my choice to change. Just as soon as it was me who truly wanted healing, He was right there with the strength to move forward. It is all in the mind; we must control our minds.