Are You Perfect?

Is it possible that you have completely misunderstood what it means to be Christian?  God has not "raised you from the dead" so that you will be the same person you were before.  He died for you so that you might be completely new and the newness is not in your better attitude, your more motivated outlook or your developed skill set.  Nothing could be done with you if all that was before you were improved Bible studies and higher insights into Christian living.  The Lord died for you that He might live in you and be joined to you.  He blew the top off the lid when He was crucified and made you the Holy of Holies; not a sanctimonious museum filled with God "stuff" but the actual place where the Lord dwells.  We have spent so much wasted time worrying about whether as the temple of the Holy Spirit we should be smoking or looking at pornography.  It is all a wash but this one matter.  By dying on the Cross, Jesus Christ joins into your personality, your will and your discernment and that completely alters the playing field.  Paul said that He had been crucified with Christ and He meant it.  This was not religious noise.  He said that it was no longer him that lived but Christ lived in him and he meant it.  He was not spouting  philosophical gibberish.  Why do we so quickly blow past the most important part of being born again?  We are joined with Christ.  Are we afraid of what has happened?  Are we incredulous?  You, when you believed in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, attained His life living through you and it is time you gave Him breathing room, made a way for Him to work in and with you.  Every point in the Sermon on the Mount is a place where God can live through you and make you fully functional.  You could not love your enemies before but Christ can through you.  You could not swell with joy at one sinner coming to Christ as the Father does but Christ can through you.  You could not hate the world and bless the very ones who make your life so distressing but Christ can through you.  The biggest error we make as a Christian people is thinking we cannot do the perfect thing the Lord lays out for us because we  completely disregard Christ living through us.

...and I no longer live but Christ lives in me…  Galatians 2: 20

The Egyptian Temptation

When Abraham brought his little family down to Egypt along with all his slaves and employees, he did far more than put them all at risk, he cut at the tight cord of faith each of them had.  The last word the Lord gave Abraham before the famine was that the land where he was living was his land and the land of his progeny.  Nothing in the promise included a disclaimer about moving away if things got rough.  The test of faith is aimed at our spot of confidence, not our weak point.  The clear word of God became murky for Abraham when the shortage of food struck him personally.  And yet courage and trust were the defining character traits of Abraham up to this moment.  The confidence Abraham had in his strategic response to the famine made him a prime target for Satan and as soon as he crossed the line between faith in God and self-assurance, he found out just how wickedly cunning Satan can be.  The son Isaac was to be Abraham's, not Pharaoh's and if it weren't for the rough intervention of God, Abraham might have lost his wife to the King of Egypt along with the lineage leading to Christ.  Doubt is contagious and Isaac later made the same terrible error a hundred years later.   Beware of your own insight into the problem you face.  It could shatter many years of faith not just for you but also those who look to you for direction.  Go to the Holy Spirit in every instance and you will find yourself secure within the hand of God.     Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. Genesis 12:10-11 NIV