The Life of Freedom

Christ has set us free to live a free life.  So take your stand!  Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.  The moment anyone submits to any rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ's hard won gift of freedom is squandered.  I repeat the warning: the person who accepts the ways of absolute church control trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.

I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens.  When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, and fall out of grace.

What is being preached and taught today is making it very complicated and almost impossible to make the spread of the Gospel have any power universally.

Meanwhile, we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit of God to come out of this preaching and teaching.

For in Christ, neither our most conscientious belief nor disregard of belief amounts to anything.  What matters is something far more interior: Faith expressed in love.

As you may state now you are running superbly!  Who cut in on you, deflecting you from the true course of obedience to Christ and His Word?  This detour doesn't come from the One who called you into the race in the first place.  Please don't toss this off as insignificant.  It only takes a minute amount of yeast, you know to permeate an entire loaf of bread.  Deep down, Jesus has given me confidence that you will not defect, but the one who is upsetting you, whoever he is, will bear the divine judgment. 

It is absolutely clear that God has called us to a happy life.

Just make sure that you don't use that freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom.  Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that's how freedom grows.  For everything we know about God's word is summed up in a single sentence.  Love others as you love yourself.  This is an act of true freedom.  If you bite and ravage each other, watch out -- in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?  In Mark 13:7-8, Is no justification for changing our stand on how we use Jeremiah 29:10-11.

God has a plan for each and every one of us, if we would only look to Him and not psychological or social means.  The Word of God is a vast source of cures for all of man's problems. 

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit, then you won't feed the compulsion of selfishness.  For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness.  These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at another time ways according to how you feel on any given day.  Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law dominated existence?

So many of us try keeping rules and working our heads off to please God, and it doesn't work.  So we must being "law men" so that we could be "God's Men."  Christ's life shows us how and enabled us to do it.  I identified myself completely with Him.  Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ.  My ego is no longer central.  It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have people's good opinions about me, or what I believe God is doing with me.  The life you see me living is not "mine", but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.  I am not going to go back on that for anyone or anything.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old-rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God?  I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace.  If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.

Talk to you soon,

Pastor Norman 

Artesian Well Church

6031 Linden Avenue

Long Beach, CA