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Just let me begin by explaining, for those that have not been able to be present at the earlier lectures, that on our last occasion we began to explore the provision God has made to make those who believe in Christ holy. It is the glorious fact that God is not only interested to forgive our sin, so that we may escape the penalty of God's wrath against our sin, though thank God he has made the magnificent provision for us in the death of his dear son.
He loved us while we were yet sinners. While we were yet enemies, God says we're reconciled to God by the death of his son. And those who put their trust in Christ, says Holy Scripture, can be absolutely sure that they shall be saved from the coming wrath of God through him. That is, of course, the place where we all have to start. There is no possibility of becoming holy until we have become right with God. So that if this morning we have not trusted the Savior and have no peace with God in our heart, that is the first question that we ought to address.
How can I be reconciled to God? How can I be sure my sin has been forgiven? How can I be sure that I shall never come into the coming wrath? But for those that have trusted Christ, then God has made provision to make them holy. You see, forgiveness of sins that we get from Christ is not a ticket that says we can now go on sinning and do as we please, and it doesn't matter because Christ has died for us. God has a magnificent salvation.
God's longing is that he shall not only forgive our sins, but make us holy. And we shall not finish our study this morning before we are reminded that God's goal for those he redeems is nothing short of this. He is going to conform us to the image of his dear son, and one day to take us that we might be glorified with Christ and that we may reign with Christ over a creation that God will eventually s- restore to its redeemed glory.
God is ambitious. We may think of ourselves as worms in the dust, and so in some sense we are, but God's ambition for us is not only to forgive us, but to glorify us and make us conformed to the image of his dear son. So we began to explore on our last occasion the provision that God has made for making believers in Christ holy. And what we noticed to start with, and at once, is this: the realism of God's provision.
He doesn't forget we're sinners. He doesn't overlook the fact that we who trust, have trusted Christ are not practically perfect overnight. In the age we shall not be perfect completely, should we live to a hundred and five. God is aware of our weakness and failing. Nonetheless, sets about making us holy. And our passage will tell us that by God's provision, he can be freed from three tyrannical despotisms. They are the dominion of sin.
That would otherwise keep people enslaved in its grasp and in despair that they would never overcome it. And secondly, the dominion of the law. Some people, when they wake up to the fact that they're sinners and they have some undesirable habits in themselves and are not what they should be, think the answer to that is to try and keep God's law. A very noble motive, of course, but they find by experience that the law, instead of making things better, makes them worse. Because the law being holy and its standards being perfection, when we try to keep it, even as believers in Christ, when we try to keep it as by our own strength, we find it always criticizes us.
The law is exceedingly critical, you know. If you don't keep it a hundred percent, curses you. And it's frustrating, isn't it, when you've tried to keep it the best you know how, to find you keep coming short of it. And that's why God doesn't simply come along with cheap exhortations, try and be good. God's program for making us holy realizes the trouble. And so not only is there provision to release us from the dominion and domination of sin, but somewhat startlingly, you may think, we find in the Holy Scripture God's provision for releasing us from the dominion of the law.
And then finally we shall read how God's provision for making us holy will release us from the dominion of death itself. What a marvelous God he is, and how exciting his program is. Oh, my friend, are you sitting next to a Christian? I wonder? Hm. You may not believe me now, what I'm going to say. But if you could see that Christian lady that's sitting beside you, not as she is now, good enough by ordinary standards, of course, but if you could see her as she shall be when God is finished with her and conformed her to the image of his son, if you could see her like that, that as she will be, you'd be tempted to fall at her feet and worship her.
We're told in the Bible that when John the Apostle in his vision was given to see an angel, well, John was so overwhelmed with the glory of this exalted being that he fell at the angel's feet, you'll see, and started to worship the angel. And the angel had to pull him up by his hair and say, no, no, no, John, you don't do that kind of thing. I'm only an angel, a fellow servant of yours. The Lord Jesus, of course, is above angels. One day, all the exciting news of this. God is going to bring believers not only home to the Father's house, he'll have them conformed to the image of his son.
And I repeat, this is not empty promise, this is realism. That he delivers us from the, uh, domination of sin, we found in our last occasion explicitly stated, and it's in Romans chapter six. And should you have a Bible with you this morning, or if there's one in the pew in front of you, you might care to turn to this. It's page in my Bible one hundred and seventy three in the New Testament, but then, um, it'll be a different page number in yours. If you start with Matthew and then proceed to Mark and then to Luke and then to John, you'll see in Acts of the Apostles, you will eventually come to Romans.
And this is chapter six and the verse fourteen, where God says, for sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace. And we thought last time about that, about that sentence. What is the connection in the thought? How is it that sin shall not have keep, have dominion over us because we're not under law? What, what quite is the connection? And the answer is this, that if as believers, trying now to please the Lord and being educated to hi- uh, by him, that we might, might partake of his holiness.
God is realist enough to know that we shall not be perfect overnight. In many things we shall come short. And if we were still under the law and the threat of its penalty, when we offended, the law would say finish. You say, no, I'm going to improve. Well, says the Lord, do it if you can, but you've already done enough to deserve the penalty of the law. No good, ladies and gentlemen, saying, well, I did make a mess of it in the past, but now I promise I'm going to, to, uh, be all right in the future. If I get in debt to the bank for a million dollars, and I say, well, I have been a bit stupid, but I promise after this to pay you on the dot, every cent and every dollar.
The bank manager will look at me in the face and said, that's a very good resolution of yours, but what about the million you already owe? And that's how it is with sin. And if as believers, when we fell and fall short, the law, if we were still under it, would condemn us to eternal perdition. Useless or promising to be better in the future. And you see, if we live till we're ninety nine and a half, then it will still be true of us. All have sinned in the past and still do come short of the glory of God.
If we are still under law, then our struggle to be holy would be frustrated at every turn, and sin would keep us down. For we've deserved the penalty of sin, which is exclusion from God forever. Oh, thank God for deliverance from the power of sin to keep us down. The believer, when he or she makes a mistake and falls and does something unworthy. Yes, believers confess their sins. No good denying we have sinned.
But if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us for all unrighteousness, and he can do it justly because he's already paid the penalty of our sins, and that sin in particular. Incidentally, that doesn't mean that when believers sin, it doesn't matter, or it makes no difference. For in chapter six of Romans, verses fifteen to twenty three, Paul reminds us believers of a very important principle. There is no condemnation to those that are in Christ.
You can be eternally sure of your salvation. You will never come into condemnation. That the Lord Jesus said. Believers, therefore, will not, uh, suffer the penalty of God's law, but they can suffer its consequences, can't they? There's a difference between the penalty of sin and the consequences of sin. When, as believers, we sin, there can be consequences. If of a believer, I don't listen to the word of God, and I let myself become drunk and get involved in a s- in a brawl and fall out of the window of the first floor of wherever I am in the hotel, and smash my leg up so it has to be amputated, then of course I can ask for God's forgiveness, and he'll give it.
Will he put my leg back the next day? Now that's a consequence, isn't it? Here's a farmer, and uh, the Lord has told him, I can't think how, but let's suppose the Lord has told this farmer, Farmer Giles, I want you to grow wheat in your field this year. And Farmer Giles is a believer, so he says, yes, Lord. But then he discovers that the price of barley is better than the price of wheat. So he sows barley.
And presently the barley comes up, and he looks at it and says, beautiful barley. And then he remembers that the Lord told him to sow wheat. Ah. So now he gets a very bad conscience, and he goes to the Lord and and confesses his rebellion and his sin and his disobedience. He's grown barley instead of wheat, you see. And the Lord replies, if we confess our sin, he's faithful and just to give us our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So the dear farmer, as he kneels on the ground there, thanks the Lord for forgiveness. But what about the old barley?
Do you think it would good if the man said, now, Lord, please, please do a miracle and change this barley into wheat? Would he? Think not. There are consequences of disobedience, as distinct from the penalty. And Paul uses it as a humble illustration. He says, I speak after the manner of men. But before you were believers, you yielded your members as instruments of sin, going your own way and doing your own desires. Now, as believers, yield your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
And bear this in mind, if you constantly yield your members to someone or something, you constantly do it, it will form a habit, and you will become the slave of that habit. There are consequences. If as believers, we disobey the Lord and keep on doing it. No penalty, consequences. What therefore are we to do? We are to present our bodies, our ins- our ha- our hands, feet, and all about us, and our brains as servants to God.
If we use our brains independently of the Lord as believers, we shall come to grief. We shall make all kinds of intellectual mistakes and dishonor the Savior. We are to present our members, all of them, to God and make the habit of doing it. And there is a great virtue in godly habit. To keep the Lord's s- uh, uh, ordinances, to make a habit of reading his word, of making a habit, a disciplined habit of prayer.
Thus is character built up by habit. But that aside now, we come to consider the breaking of the dominion of the law, and we read from chapter seven, verse one now. Or are you ignorant, brethren, for I speak to men that know the law, how that the law hath dominion over a man for so long time as he liveth? Now, an example of that principle, the law of marriage. For the woman that hath a husband is bound by law to the husband while he lives. But if the husband die, she is discharged from the law of the husband. That's just an illustration, one incident of the binding power of the law.
Now then, verse four says, wherefore, my brethren, you also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you should be joined to another, even to him who was raised from the dead, that we might bring forth fruit unto God. Deliverance for the dominion of the law, not now to do as we like, but to adopt a completely different principle, positive principle for making us holy. Not now our own resources trying to keep the law, in which we failed.
The death of Christ has paid the penalty of that failure. Sets us free from the law then. What for? Oh, not to go our own way. That we should, to carry on the analogy, the metaphor, be joined to another, even to Jesus Christ, risen from the dead. Oh, what a lovely concept that is, and a reality. Holiness, my good friends, for a believer, is based on a love affair with Christ. Instead of the law saying, thou shalt do this, and we try to and fail, and it criticizes and condemns.
The basic principle of a believer's developing holiness is joined to Christ. As husband is to wife, that Christ through us might bring forth fruit to God. And marvelous, isn't it? Sometimes I'm a, I'm, I'm a backyard astronomer, and sometimes when I consider the heavens and the galaxies and their tremendous distances and their vast uncalcula- calculable numbers. Then I think must God must be so big. How could he take notice of me?
And then I discover something about the bigness of God. Do you know he's so big that he even take notice of me. If he weren't so big, he might forget me amongst the ants and the worms. But being so big, is able to take notice of me. And the marvelous thing is that God's own son loves us individually and wants, if you can have it that way, to embrace us. Christ taking us in charge, loving us, and making something of us. That's a positive way to holiness.
And when it happens, this is what Paul says. Just listen. This is Romans seven again, verses five and six. When we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were through the law wrought in our members to bring forth fruit unto death. But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were holden, so that we serve in newness of the s- of the spirit and not in oldness of the letter. You see, when now we are joined to Christ, and he's setting about making something of us for God. It's not arbitrary rule that sometimes we resent.
It's the love of a veritable bridegroom, and we sense he not only loved us and died for us, but he loves us now and is keen on perfecting us. It means now we serve God as Christians on a different principle. What is here called, we serve in newness of the spirit and not in oldness of the letter. We, we shall have to pause over that, lest we misunderstand it. You'll see words have a funny way with them, don't they? And expressions have a funny way, and sometimes they can mean, uh, something that, um, people didn't think they meant.
Hm. We have the phrase in our country, at any rate, I suspect you do in yours, of keeping the spirit of the law and not just its letter. Well, that's a very good principle. I want to tell you now, it's not what this verse is saying. Nothing to do with that whatsoever. And some people think it is. They say, oh, you know, all those commands of Christ. Well, I don't carry them out myself, not literally. I just think of what the spirit of them is, and so sometimes I don't carry them out at all. I think, you know, the spirit of Christ and keeping the general spirit and being good, I don't have to attend to the commandments of the Lord.
God, that's desperately wrong, you know. Yes, when the Lord commands, we as Christians are expected to do his commandments. If you love me, he says, you will keep my commandments. What does it mean then? Well, let's take an example of this first, what I say is the wrong meaning. I noticed you have speed limits on your road, though I'm not sure that every car I observed in this week has been keeping them, but that's by the way. You have speed limits, and the spirit, the reason behind the speed limit is to save lives, of course.
Folks will disobey the speed limit and speed along the road, at danger of, uh, killing people. So the speed limit is there to preserve lives. But here is, uh, an ambulance or a private car, maybe, and somebody's had a heart attack and is in danger of dying, and you've got to get them to the hospital as soon as you can possibly get them there. And the road is clear. Shall you obey the speed limit and arrive at the hospital when the man's already dead? Or should you break the speed limit and get the man to hospital so he can be saved?
You break the speed limit, I suspect, and get into the hospital. And if you were criticized for breaking the law of the speed limit, you would say, but come, come, come, come, come. I've kept the spirit of it, if not the letter. The spirit of the law said you were to save lives. This time, to save a life, I had disre- to disregard the actual letters on the post, seventy kilometers an hour or something. But I performed its spirit to save a life. You see the word? Well, it's a good argument. It's not what this verse means. Sorry to have spent so much time telling you what it doesn't mean. But you see, unless you tell people what things don't mean, they carry on believing what they don't mean, instead of coming around to see what they do mean.
Well, what does it mean then? When we're joined to Christ, we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in the, uh, uh, oldness of the letter. This is a reference to one of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. It is the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant was the covenant that God made with the nation of Israel when they stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, do see. And God gave them the law, and the people promised all that the Lord ha- uh, hath commanded we will do.
That was the old covenant. The prophet Jeremiah, in his prophecy eventually, some centuries after Mount Sinai, in the name of God, announced that one day God was going to make a new covenant, not according to that old covenant. And why not? That old covenant proved unsatisfactory. Oh, really? Why? Because Israel couldn't keep it, that's why. So Jeremiah promised that God was going to make a new covenant. It was going to be on different terms. Now, when our Lord calls his disciples to the upper room on the night in which he was betrayed, he took bread, we remember, gave it to the apostles and said, this is my body which is given for you.
All of you are to eat of this in remembrance of me. Then he took a cup, a cup of wine, and as he handed that cup to the apostles, he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you. Christians this morning here in this very place have done what the Lord Jesus asked them to do.
They have met together. Central has been a plate with bread on it and a cup with wine in it. And they have remembered the Lord as he told them to. And as they have taken the cup, they have surely, I suppose they have, remembered what he said about that cup. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Someone says, but what is the difference between the new covenant then and the old covenant? Well, when you get time, if you're interested in that, you should read another letter that Paul the Apostle wrote.
It's called the second letter to the Corinthians, and you should read chapter three. I have only time to, to, uh, uh, point out some of its major, uh, remarks. You see, the old covenant was given by God, written by the finger of God. It was written on tables of stone. There it was, everybody could see, written clearly, written on tables of stone. There were the rules, so to speak. The people were supposed to keep them. The trouble with that was just this, that though the rules were clear and commanded you to do certain things, those rules on that bit of stone couldn't give you any power to do the things it commanded.
That was the trouble. And likewise, uh, the things that it prohibited were very clear, chiseled onto the stone, you know, by the finger of God. But those prohibitions told you not what, told you what not to do, couldn't give you any power to refrain from doing it. If God is going to be realist and we are going to become holy and keep his commandments, then God will have to have some other system. Not only informing us by rules chiseled in stone what to do and not to do, but supply a new power.
And that power is, uh, described in the New Covenant. Let me rehearse some of its terms. I will, says God, according to this New Covenant, I will write my laws on their hearts, and in their minds will I inscribe them. That's the difference. And Paul, in that lovely chapter that I've referred to, two Corinthians three, do read it if you haven't read it recently, uses these terms to describe what happened when he came to Corinth. Corinth was a, a wealthy city and far gone in sin and prof- profligacy.
And the people there who later became Christians, many of them had been involved in all kinds of perversions. But they had repented and trust the Savior. They had been cleansed. They had been washed, they had been justified. And now Paul is telling them what happened when he came to Corinth. He says, you know, my ministry is different from that of, uh, Moses. Moses, directed by God, wrote the laws on the tables of stone. That's pretty easy if you've got a sharp enough chisel. What I did, says Paul, I wrote God's laws on your heart.
That's another th- story altogether, isn't it? Writing laws on people's hearts is a rather different operation from chiseling them on a bit of stone. Your heart, well, I don't know about your heart, but my heart is so changeable and ups and downs and in and out. Getting God's laws written on my heart. But it takes nothing less than the power of the Holy Spirit. And Paul, in describing what happened when he came and preached the gospel there at Corinth, uses this lovely meta- metaphor. He says, you know, the living Lord Jesus, he took me as a pen.
And the equivalent to the ink was the power of God's Holy Spirit. And as I preached to you and you listened to God's word, and it convicted you of sin, and you sought the Savior and repented and believed, though you may not have known what was happening at the time, the risen Christ was writing the laws of God on your very heart by his Holy Spirit. That's another way of describing what the Bible calls being born of the Spirit. A new life put there. A new life with its different principles and its new potentials.
The very life of the Spirit of God. That is a magnificent gospel, that is, you know. It doesn't any longer say do your best, though we ought to do our best. It's realist. For the believer, born of God's Spirit, with a new life and new potentials for holiness. It doesn't mean that God thereby, uh, turns us into automatic computers and presses the right buttons, and we do what we've been told. We still have a free will. What a believer finds, if he's walking with the Lord, that he has now within him the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit desires against the wrong attitudes, what the Bible calls the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit, so that we not may not do the the works of the flesh.
Excuse a crude analogy illustration. I once had a shower in my bathroom. Well, it meant well, but it was one of those you had to twist various knobs. You twisted one knob and you got the cold water, and you twisted another ba- knob and out came the hot water, and you tried to get them balanced. And then all of a sudden, as you stood there enjoying the warmth, the thing went freezing cold, oof. And then, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, you tried to turn the knob, ooh, it nearly scalded the flesh off your bones, you see. It was the old hot striving against the cold, and the cold got a- against the hot, you know. I scrapped that, but that's another story.
You'll see. And to come back to serious things, God is a realist. Believers still have their infirmities and difficulties, and they do have God's Holy Spirit. And he strives against the flesh. And we have to be trained, don't we? To yield with, to side with, is the phrase actually Paul uses in the next chapter. To side with the Holy Spirit and think the thoughts of the Holy Spirit and seek his gracious power to carry out the laws of God.
Don't say, my brother, my sister, it is impossible or impractical. When God made this universe, we read the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God gives to every believer the Holy Spirit of God. God grants us to be ever more aware of his presence. I say it doesn't turn us into robots, does it? For believers come, or should come, to the Lord's Supper. Why do they come?
You say to worship the Lord, of course. How marvelous. To remember him. Who died for us. He commands it anyway. But as he hands us the cup, he still says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, promising to write his laws ever more deeply on our hearts. So we come to do business with the Lord, don't we?
That's why we're told that when we come to the Lord's Supper, we must prepare ourselves. And say, Lord, if there is any wicked way in me, show it me. And confess our sin. To come lightly to the Lord's Supper and take the bread and the cup that remind us he died for us. He bore our sins in his body, and all the while carrying on sinning without repenting, and doing the things that murdered Christ. Now, if you do that, says the apostle, then God himself, in his faithfulness to you, will discipline you, as a father disciplines a wayward child, in order to bring you to repentance and agree with God that sin is sin.
But if coming with chastened hearts and repentance and knowing the Lord's forgiveness, we take the cup of that new covenant. Oh, listen to its final terms, and their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. Oh, hallelujah, and thank God for the regular meeting with the risen Lord, to receive from him the cup, the new covenant in his blood, and to know he persists in his writing his laws on our hearts, and that as we confess our sins, he reminds us that, legally speaking, our sins and iniquities he will remember no more.
And if you can't help shouting hallelujah in your hearts at the moment, so as not to disturb anybody, carry on, Josie, and tell the Lord how marvelous he is, and how wonderful his salvation is, and how wonderful his provision of the Lord's Supper, that we might come regularly and in business-like fashion, come to have dealings with him as we take and eat the bread and take and drink from the cup. The breaking of the dominion of the law, then, by a different spirit, a different principle of leading a ho- holy life.
The goal of holiness. Well, in chapter eight, I pick out a verse like this. Verse fifteen it is, ver- verse fourteen it is. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you receive not the spirit of bondage again unto fear, but you receive the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba Father. The Spirit himself beareth witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified with him.
Goal of holiness? The development of our character, so that we, being children of God through faith in the Lord Jesus, learn to grow up and develop as grown up sons and daughters of the living God. Of course, a baby boy is a son, isn't he? Legally speaking. Well, the baby boy, while he looks like his father, or some people say he looks more like his mother, he looks very funny indeed, all wrinkled noses and things, eh, when he's first born, but anyway, whoever he's like, growing up and developing the character, that's another thing, isn't it?
And I repeat, we are all who have trusted Christ. We are all children of God. Now, the Holy Spirit's intention is to have us grow up and mature and grow into sons and daughters, responsible sons and daughters of the living God, so that in character and behavior, we rightly represent and resemble God our Father. That's his work. We have not received the spirit of bondage, of slavery again to fear, says Paul. We have received the spirit of, uh, God, whereby we cry, Abba Father.
When I was a little boy, and we lived in a country place, and I would go out to play, and, uh, be tempted I'd, I'd forgotten something in the house. I'd run in the house with mud on my feet all over the carpet, you see? And my father thought that was, uh, not fair to mother and others who were supposed to keep these floors clean, you see. So I was duly admonished in a way that parents know how, you'll see. To observe the rule. Nuisance it was when you were intent on something and having a good game to have to stop and obey the rule. Do you know what?
Now I grow up, I don't normally run in from the garden with mud on my boots, all over the carpet. You say you don't? No. Why not? You're afraid you'll get the cane or something? No. No? I've just grown up, you see. And now I can see my father's set of values and my mother's set of values, you see, and you know I want to keep them. I've even learned to take my shoes off here in PEI, where you do it far better than we do in our country. Well. Growing up's the thing, isn't it? Becoming ever more like our father. The goal is one day that we shall be conformed to God's own Son, be completely like him.
And the finishing stage will be this: we know not what we shall be, but that we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. We're not left to ourselves. As we go along the pathway, we know what the goal is. Those God has predestined to be like his son, he's called, he's justified them, he's in the process of sanctify them, sanctifying them, he will one day glorify them.
Suppose I were to ask you, you've been a believer how long? Two years? No, say fifty. On the way to becoming like the Son of God. What would you say would be the next step in life that you would need to take to develop the next bit. Would you profit from being put through a big test to mature and purify your faith? Or would you profit from a time of comparative ease and sunshine after the storms.
Do you know which? What do you think is the best thing to ask for? Well, ask away, for the Lord hears your prayers, knows how to interpret them. But thank God it's not left to us. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us, according to God, for he knows what the mind of God is. And within us deeply, he who searches our hearts and knows the mind of God and God's purpose for us, intercedes for us with the Father, and plots and guides the pathway of our development, be it rain or sun, storm or calm, as is necessary on the next step to bring us home to God.
He could, God thinks of everything, doesn't he? You say, what's the purpose of it all in the end? To be conformed to the image of his son? Yes. There's another side to it. The creation around us, says Paul, groans and travails in sorrow even till now. It has been made subject to frustration, just going around in circles and apparently getting nowhere, with groanings and diseases and what have you. It shan't always be like that. One day, creation itself is going to be delivered from its bondage to corruption and delivered and put into the glory of the children of God.
Well, you say, if that's the purpose, why doesn't God hurry it up then and and start? What's he waiting for? Well, he's waiting for you, my brother, my sister. Waiting for me. Waiting for enough. You say, what for? Well, when God transforms nature and there comes the new nature delivered from her bondage, he'll still need people to run it. The present universe is run by angels, you know, though we see them not.
But not unto angels has he put in subjection the world to come of which we speak. One in a certain place testified, saying, what is man? And the age to come is going to be ruled by our glorified Lord. All the choirs of earth and heaven and beyond shall sing his worthiness to receive the honor, the power, and the riches in the economy and run it as it should be run. The exciting news is this, that when the Lord Jesus reigns, those who have trusted him and received him and been trained and eventually perfected by the work of his Holy Spirit are going to be glorified with Christ and reign with him.
Can you imagine it? Well, I find it difficult, but I try sometimes, you see, because sometimes I get a bit down in my spiritual progress and a bit frustrated and feel, shall I ever be what I should be? And then I remember what these chapters say, that one day every believer is going to be like the Lord Jesus and shall reign with him when he reigns. And creation is waiting for that revelation of the children of God. And we live in hope. It's real, you know. I trust that when I get home at last and see the Lord, I don't have to look back upon my Christian life and say, oh my good man, what time you did waste, what energies you did use on worthless things.
Why didn't you take God, his salvation, and his training in holiness more in seriously than you did?
