“Now if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
When Jesus was talking with Nicodemus about the new life God was preparing to introduce to the world through the work He was going to do, He used the language of being born again. Nicodemus had a lot of trouble wrapping his mind around this, but Jesus wanted him to understand that the transformation this new life would work in a person would be like they were born entirely anew and starting life over again. In other words, it’s a pretty extreme transformation. Paul here uses another analogy to make the same point. This one is even more graphic. Let’s take a look.
“As Moses descended from Mount Sinai — with the two tablets of the testimony in his hands as he descended the mountain — he did not realize that the skin of his face shone as a result of his speaking with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face shone! They were afraid to come near him. But Moses called out to them, so Aaron and all the leaders of the community returned to him, and Moses spoke to them. Afterward all the Israelites came near, and he commanded them to do everything the Lord had told him on Mount Sinai. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face. But whenever Moses went before the Lord to speak with him, he would remove the veil until he came out. After he came out, he would tell the Israelites what he had been commanded, and the Israelites would see that Moses’s face was radiant. Then Moses would put the veil over his face again until he went to speak with the Lord.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? I’m talking about high school – or maybe even junior high – puppy love. With a bit of life experience under your belt, you quickly recognize that’s not the real thing, but don’t bother trying to convince the starry-eyed youth of that. You’ll be wasting your breath. Thinking back to that time, when you got to spend some time around your crush…excuse me…the love of your life…you weren’t the same as you were before. You were a little spacey. You probably had a sappy grin on your face. Maybe you even whistled a tune. Anybody who was around could tell that you had been around your heartthrob. You weren’t the same as you were before. When Moses had spent some time with the Lord, he wasn’t the same, and everybody could see it. Let’s see what kind of sense we can make out of this interesting end to the chapter.
“And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.” (ESV – Read the chapter)
This is one of the great promises of God in the Old Testament. Apart from Christ, people lack both the will and the ability to pursue a relationship with God. It’s not just that we want to, but can’t, or even that we are able, but don’t really want it. We couldn’t do it even if our heart desired it. Read the rest…
In part two of our Christmas series, God Moved into the Neighborhood, we begin looking at how the process of transformation unfolds. Initially, it’s not very comfortable. In order to fix the system, we first have to see where and how it’s broken. Keep reading to see how this works and how to overcome the biggest challenge to it happening.
Light to Live By
Have you ever gotten unwanted advice before? Now, probably there are some folks out there who are far more gracious than I am, but usually when I get unwanted advice my first thought is, “Buzz off, Mr. Busy-Body!” Who’s with me? There’s just something a little cynical in most of us that thinks, “You know, they probably mess up at this just as much as I do. They are in no position to be giving me advice.” But, there is an exception to this rule. We as a culture are slavishly reliant on the advice of experts. If we think someone is an expert, we will listen to just about anything they say. This phenomenon explains how we got shows like Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz. They were both regular “experts” on Oprah who became popular enough to get their own shows. And perhaps you’re sitting there thinking, “Well I certainly don’t listen to those quacks! You can’t really trust anything you see on TV anyway.” Read the rest…
This past Sunday we began a brand-new teaching series at First Baptist, Oakboro, called God Moved into the Neighborhood. Over the course of the next few weeks leading up to Christmas, we are going to unpack the marvelous truth that when our world was broken nearly beyond repair, God moved into the neighborhood in the person of Jesus Christ in order to transform it from the inside out. With the help of some unexpected passages of Scripture for this time of year, we will unpack just how amazing this truth is, how the process of transformation unfolds, and how we should respond to it. Don’t miss a single part of this powerful story.
A Crazy Idea
Have you ever had the opportunity to drive through an old neighborhood and thought, “Why haven’t they just bulldozed this whole place? This is a mess! This is an eyesore! The people still living here should get a medal.” You may have heard about the challenges facing the city of Detroit over the past few years. World Magazine did a feature story on one neighborhood in the city a couple of years ago as a way of giving some perspective on how things really are. Because of the city’s well-publicized problems, the neighborhood had been pretty much forgotten. One in three homes had been abandoned. Street lights didn’t have power going to them anymore. There was no police coverage for the neighborhood due to budget restrictions. There are no good grocery stores nearby. Jobs are scarce. Folks in the neighborhood have started doing basically some urban farming in order to provide food for themselves and their neighbors. They raise a variety of produce as well as chickens and goats. And when asked whether or not all this was legal within city limits they essentially said, “We’ll worry about forgiveness if we ever get caught…in the meantime, we’ve got to survive.” Closer to home, though, some of you have perhaps driven through some of the more run-down neighborhoods of Charlotte or even Albemarle; neighborhoods where you didn’t really feel safe even driving down the street. How do we respond to a place like this? Read the rest…
The Nexus 