“And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV).
Exchanging the Old for the New by Sharon Jaynes
The following are excerpts from Today’s Truth
“When God warned Adam and Eve not to eat of fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, He told them that their punishment for disobedience would be death. They did eat - and immediately their spirits died- their zoe life was taken away and they were cut off from God. As a result, every person after that time has been born with a dead spirit, including you and me.
But God didn’t leave us that way. God demonstrated His love toward us, that while we were still a sinner (cut off, dead, rotten to the core), Christ died for us and made it possible for us to be grafted onto the living root – Himself (Romans 5:8, Romans 11:17). At the very moment we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior, we receive a new living spirit (zoe life) to replace our old dead spirit. In the twinkling of an eye - in the time it takes for us to say, “I believe,” we become a spiritually new creation. However, God’s process of shaping and molding us into the image of Christ, takes a lifetime. That process is how to become spiritually beautiful.
Let’s Pray
Dear Heavenly Father, I know I became a new creation in Christ when I became a Christian. But sometimes, I just feel like the same old me. Please help me to become more conformed to the image of Christ today. Take away whatever needs to be taken away to reveal the beauty of You that is in my heart. Help me to be spiritually beautiful today and always.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
Some words from Devotions for MORNING and EVENING with Oswald Chambers”:
For Sept 27 “The words of the Lord hurt and offend until there is nothing left to hurt or offend. Jesus Christ has not tenderness whatever toward anything that is ultimately going to ruin a man in the service of God. Our Lord’s answers are based not on caprice, but on knowledge of what is in man. If the Spirit of God brings to your mind a word of the Lord that hurts you, you may be sure that there is something He wants to hurt to death.(pg.558)
“The Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the heart of the natural man, and that is the very thing Jesus means it to do, because immediately we reach the point of despair we are willing to come to Jesus Christ as paupers and receive from Him. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’—that is the first principle of the Kingdom. As long as we have a conceited, self-righteous idea that we can do the thing if God will help us. God has to allow us to go on until we break the neck of our ignorance over some obstacle, then we will be willing to come and receive from Him. the bed-rock of Jesus Christ’s Kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of futility. ‘I cannot begin to do it.’ then, says Jesus, ‘Blessed are you.’ That is the entrance, and it takes us a long while to believe we are poor. The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Christ works.” (pg. 559)
“Every element pf self-reliance must be slain by the power of God. Complete weakness and dependence will always be the occasion for the Spirit of God to manifest His power.” (pg.260)
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