“In Christ I have been crucified and I am living no longer but Christ is living in me; and that which I now live in the flesh I live in the faith of the Son of God, the One loving me and giving Himself up instead of me” (Galatians 2:20).
The Father and the Son looked down upon the world and saw what had become of those whom God had called to be His. In response to the lost condition of His people, which had been foreseen, the Son agreed to come down in the flesh and suffer human death with two objects; firstly, judicially, that the penalty that God designated for sin, the blood of the pure Lamb of God, might be paid, and secondly, fraternally, that God might yet have for Himself a family and brethren for His only begotten Son.
Too often in our spiritual life, the old covetous nature comes into play and we try and amass, as personal possessions, the virtues that we believe make up the fair dinkum Christian life; this is akin to the same spirit that, in the natural man, seeks to accumulate worldly things.
But we generally fail, and for good reason; the Spirit of the Lord will only work in the way of the Lord and God doesn’t want us to be cluttered up with “things” of any sort; He seeks to strip us of all “things”, spiritual and material, in order to make way for the life of His Son Christ Jesus. “Things” are bereft of life; held out of relation to Him, they are dead; God does not seek a display of our spiritual things or our Christlikeness, but a manifestation of His Son in our lives.
Many believers seek their life in a church, because they think that there they will find like-minded people; while that may be the case, this is not what we are called to; the fundamental nature of the call of Christ is that we are to find our life in Him, and in Him alone; surrender to Christ, not usefulness to men, is the basic necessity for salvation. If Christ is truly the Lord of our life, then we should truly live the life of our Lord!
Dante, on his imaginary journey through hell, came upon a group of lost souls who sighed and moaned continually as they whirled aimlessly in the dusky air. Virgil, his guide, explained that these were the “wretched people”, the “nearly soulless” who while they lived on earth had not moral energy enough to be either good or evil. They had earned neither praise nor blame, and with them, sharing their punishment, were those angels who would take sides neither with God nor Satan.
The writer depicts the doom of all the weak and irresolute, destined to be suspended forever between a hell that despised them and a heaven that would not receive their defiled presence. Not even their names were to be mentioned again in heaven or hell.
Although a fictional fantasy. this is Dante’s illustration of what the Lord was saying to His people in Laodicea, who were neither hot nor cold, and He spewed them out of His mouth.
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