John Chapter 8
34Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.
skipping a verse
36"So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.
37"I know that you are Abraham's descendants; yet you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you.
38"I speak the things which I have seen with My Father; therefore you also do the things which you heard from your father."
skipping a few verses43"Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you cannot hear My word.
44"You are of your father the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
What if there are slaves of sin, sinning without end? Jesus was speaking this to the teachers of the Torah, who obeyed the law, memorized the first five books of the Bible by the age 15, and did all the things commendable in the site of men! (BTW, can you imagine spending your formative years memorizing Leviticus?!?!)
Jesus sets the slaves free, so that they may do something besides sin (which otherwise they would continually do!)
There is no truth in anything that an unbeliever does, because The Truth is not in them. None of it pleases God at all. Though it is deemed commendable or damnable by men, God turns away from all they do, for they are turned away from Him.
Hebrews 11:6
And without faith it is impossible to please God, ...
To be SET FREE from being a complete slave to sin ... is to believe upon the Lord Jesus, to welcome into your life, so that just as the Father lived through Him, He might live through you and produce good fruit that you might bear.
A branch that is not attached to Him, produces nothing. Who has ever seen a dead branch produce fruit? It cannot happen, but grafted into the Life giving Vine, so will God's work be manifest in that which was once dead and fruitless!
EXCHANGED LIFE
By: Major W. Ian ThomasChristian living is not a method or technique; it is an entirely different, revolutionary principle of life. It is the principle of an exchanged life" not I, but Christ liveth in me" (Galatians 2:20).
This is all part of our Gospel - it is not the Gospel plus! We must not get our terminology wrong. To divorce the behavior of the Christian from the Gospel is entirely false and is not true to the Word of God, yet all too often such is the characteristic of gospel preaching.
I would like to explore with you what is the true spiritual content of our Gospel not just heaven one day, but Christ right now! Christ in you, on the grounds of redemption this is the Gospel! To preach anything less than this must inevitably produce "Evan-jellyfish" folk with no spiritual vertebrae, whose faith does not "behave!"
Do you remember what James says in his epistle? "As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead" (chapter 2:26). The "spirit" there means breath, and a body without breath is dead. Stop breathing and folk will bury you! In other words, a living body breathes, and a living faith breathes, and a living faith breaths with divine action. A living faith breathes with the activity of Jesus Christ. That is why the Lord Jesus, in John 6:29, said, "This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent."
That is the work of God. It is your living faith in the adequacy of the One who is in you, which releases His divine action through you. It is the kind of activity that the Bible calls "good works," as opposed to "dead works."
"Good works" are those works that have their origin in Jesus Christ - - whose activity is released through your body, presented to Him as a living sacrifice by a faith that expresses total dependence, as opposed to the Adamic independence (Romans 12: 1,2).
It is only the life of the Lord Jesus -- His activity, clothed with you and displayed through you, that ultimately will find the approval of God.
From: The Saving Life of Christ. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House. ©1961.
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