“The Son of man came……..to give His soul a ransom in place of many” (Matthew 20:28).
He gave up His soul in place of many, instead of many; or a ransom instead of many. So if He gave up His soul for us, we are to give up our soul for Him. Giving up His soul doesn’t mean dying on the Cross, it means giving up the pleasures of this life and, instead, living His life in faithful obedience to the Father, as an example to us; it meant that He didn’t do what pleased Himself, He didn’t follow His natural inclinations but His soul was dedicated to following the Father; He didn’t follow His affections.
We are meant to do the same; we are to give up our souls to follow Him; to surrender all the natural inclinations and affections to His sovereignty; our affections and desires, our thinking, have to be offered up as a sacrifice to Him, as He offered up His soul as a sacrifice to the Father; this is the “acceptable sacrifice” to which Peter refers (1 Peter 2:5). This means giving our mind, our heart and our affections to Him and cutting them off from all other sources, having only a desire to serve him.
We are to bring into His presence our mortal physical bodies as a living and holy sacrifice well pleasing to God, which is our logical or rational service of worship (Romans 12:1).
The soul is the engine room of our humanity; it drives us; when we are born, our soul is disposed towards the lusts of the eyes, the lusts of the flesh and the pride of life; these are the things that motivated our first parents in the Garden and this is what has been left to us as our fleshly inheritance from our father Adam.
When men presume to speak to others on behalf of God, they place themselves in a fateful position and put themselves at great risk.
There is the body of truth and there is the Spirit of truth; the body of truth is the logos, the whole word of God as revealed to man; the spirit of truth is the rhema, the word proceeding from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4) into the ears of man by the power of the Holy Spirit, whose task it is to guide us into all truth, teach us all things, reveal to us what is to come and speaking whatever He hears from Christ Jesus (John 14, 15 and 16).
Eternal life is to hear the voice of the One speaking to us from heaven; that is the eternal life that we may have in this world. Christianity needs to be delivered from the religious doctrines of men and to hear the words of eternal life (John 6:68) from the only One who has authority to say; “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
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