To truly live the abundant life in Christ, we must die to our fallen, carnal nature. For us to be successful at this, we will need intimacy with the Father and constant intake and exposure to His written word.
Our intimacy with God is the key to dying to sin and self.
When we give ourselves to intimacy with God and reading and studying His Word, we lay on the great potter’s wheel, allowing Him to shape us into everything we were created to be.
If we don’t embrace the finished work of Christ and believe that sin has been dealt with, we give the enemy opportunity to deceive us. He primarily does this through the lies of guilt, condemnation, and shame.
Guilt = A subconscious belief that “I am not forgiven.”
Condemnation = A subconscious belief that “I am worthy of judgment.”
Shame = A subconscious belief that “I am still the old person I used to be before Christ.”
These lies are Satan’s counterfeit to the Holy Spirit’s conviction, godly sorrow, and a heavenly perspective on our identity in Christ.
Romans 14:22 (NKJV) Do you have faith? Have it to yourself before God. Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves.
For those that struggle with sin, it is a dead giveaway that they have yet to understand the gospel message and the completed work of Jesus Christ.
I struggled with it for decades until I began to see my deception. Even then, overcoming the strongholds of wrong believing took some time. The two things that helped me most were intimacy with the Father and the book of Romans.
Reading Romans repeatedly helped me gain the proper perspective on my redemption. It helped me move from trying so hard to be “sold out to God” to understanding that I have been bought out completely. Christ purchased me with His blood, knowing that I was a sinner, that I had a fallen nature, that I would make mistakes, and that I could not fix myself. Still, he bought me! Praise the Lord!
Once I realized I could do nothing about fixing my sin and understood that only He could, I just quit thinking about it. Now I wake up every day to pursue Him and trust that He is perfecting the work that He started. I believe God knows what He is doing, and I am convinced I do not.
As we seek God’s face, our old carnal man dies because no man can look into the face of God and live.
Exodus 33:20 (NKJV) But He said, “You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.”
We can behold the Father’s face through the written word. It is our carnal man’s face-to-face encounter with God. As we behold Him and His holiness, those unholy and unworthy things die.
We must believe that we are dead to sin, not giving sin another thought, not giving it the time of day. If we keep it out of our thoughts and speech, all the time and energy we previously wasted trying to “do better” or “clean ourselves up” can be spent with Him.
The most important thing to remember about “reckoning ourselves dead to sin” is believing that we are alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Romans 6:11 (NKJV) Likewise, you also, reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Quoted from the book, The Spiritual Warfare Manifesto
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