Tag: condemnation

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Will you go?

                                

Jonah 1-4    Jonah is not only a Hebrew but also a Hebrew who worships the Lord, the God of heaven. Yet, Jonah is a picture of the selfish racial condemnation of others. God said in Isaiah, who will go for us and Isaiah said, “send me.” Yet, Jonah hearing that same call turns a blind eye and says, “send another, not me.” Does this sound familiar? Do we have excuses why we do not say “send me?” Look within and see why we take a ship to Tarshish and sleep away the opportunities God has placed before us. We are the Jonahs of today with our plethora of excuses.

Yet as the Psalmist said, “The Lord is merciful and fair; our God is compassionate.” [Ps 116:5] He will not relent when He has a plan to send men/women to the lost fields of Nineveh to bring them hope and the message of salvation. He may send a fish or a neighbor, or another believer to accost us in our tracks and redirect us to the lost. God is the antithesis of Jonah, and we are to be His messengers of hope as He is the God of hope.

Where is God directing you this day? To whom will you bring the message of God’s love and hope?

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Therefore…..Not Condemned….Romans 7

rom 8 nothing separate2A TV series was aptly titled “As the World Turns” and so it is with those whose lives are bound up by the adversary the Devil. They live in hostility against a holy God whose “wrath…is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unrighteousness,” [Rom 1]. But we who are in Christ Jesus are no longer under God’s condemnation! “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him” [Jn 3]

Beloved, we have received this sacrificial gift of redemption! Even when our adversary comes bringing a Scarlet Letter to hang about our neck to condemn us we have this truth: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  We no longer need to be “afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” [Mt 10] Instead we can recite the words of Micah “I will wait for the God who delivers me..” And this why we can echo “If God is for us, who can be against us?….[we are] “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor heavenly rulers, nor things that are present, nor things to come, nor powers,  nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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