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Monday, January 13, 2014

From Here To Maturity

When you think of maturity, you think of being complete.  Our goal and God's goal for us is Christ-like maturity.  It helps if we understand that we can't pull this off on our own.  We are not and never can be Christ.  But we can(and believers do) contain Him.  He lives in us.  "We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power might be from God and from ourselves."

One of Satan's lies in the garden was that we could be like God.  He tempted Eve and Adam to live out of their own strength and thus be their own gods.  Up until that point they weren't even human.  To be human they had to make a choice.  God allowed Satan to tempt them in order to help them become human.  By  offering them the opposite of God, he was making them aware of the possibilities and they had to make a choice.  Unfortunately they chose the non-God way.  but there is a sense which making the wrong choice make them even more human.  Now they discovered first-hand the consequences of going against God.  They experienced God's wrath which included pain, guilt, and separation.  And Satan got a curse.

"Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all because all sinned."  Rom. 5:12   So now all of humanity has made the fateful choice and is living with pain, guilt, and separation from God.  Even for those of us who have been redeemed by accepting what Christ has done for us on the cross and receiving the risen Lord Jesus as our savior often make the mistake of being our own god by living by our own self-effort. 

God's desire for Adam and for us is that we allow Christ is live His life in and through us.  We are containers of Him.  A container gets none of the glory, does none of the work, and has only one function--to contain the treasure.  We now, as humans who have make many wrong choices now have the chance to choose life by choosing His life.  And the amazing thing is that, when we do so, we actually become what we are meant to be--like God.  Except that this time it is through union with Christ(the Tree of Life)as we allow Him to express His divinity through us.

The more we let Him be Himself in and through us the more fruit we bear and the more others see Him in us.  And we become spiritual parents.  We head toward maturity.

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