Relapse is Not a part of Freedom – Self-Deception Series 9 – Purity 1098

Relapse is Not a part of Freedom – Self-Deception
Series 9 – Purity 1098

Purity 1098 07/19/2023  Purity 1098 Podcas (Sorry for the “jump Cut”

Purity 1098 on YouTube: Coming Soon!

Good morning,

Today’s photo of a grey peak of volcanic sand and
rock, dotted with green trees, under a clear blue sky comes to us from Nik Harrang
as he shared this scene from his recent “Knight’s Crossing Lassen Camping
Adventure” somewhere near the Lassen Volcanic National Park (or the Lassen
National Forrest) in northeastern California.  

Well, It’s Wednesday, and sharing Nik’s photo was a
“No brainer” as it’s clear beauty and ashy peak seemed to be a perfect way to
visually represent our arrival to another “hump day” and to express a feeling
of peaceful clarity.  

Because my local church is hosting a children’s
vacation Bible School this week, the Celebrate Freedom (discipleship/recovery)
Growth Group is “on vacation” this week too and I am please to say that I have
already prepared the lessons for the next few weeks and enter into today with a
“peaceful” easy feeling because, not only do I have the “night off”, and have
done what’s needed to be done for the weeks ahead, as I will be going on
vacation for the first two Wednesday’s in August, our “program” isn’t about
regular “meetings”.  Celebrate Freedom is
about forming a relationship with God and the personal transformation that
comes from “abiding in God’s presence and following Jesus in spirit and in
truth.   

So, I am not “white knuckling” my sobriety or sanity
because our group isn’t meeting tonight. 
The path of Christian Discipleship isn’t about a strict regimen of
rules, requirements, or meetings. The path of Christian Discipleship isn’t
“behavior modification” as much as it is “spiritual formation”. It isn’t about
recovery as much as it is about receiving healing – by allowing God to change
your heart, mind, and behavior from the inside out.  

While many recovery programs seem to stress the
absolute importance of “touching home base” with a strict adherence to
attending meetings, the path of Christian recommends “regular meetings” with
God through Bible Study, prayer, and just “walking and talking with God.”   As much as regular recovery meetings and
accountability groups can help in recovery, forming a relationship with God and
seeking to surrender to His will for your life can result in freedom.  

While “relapse is a part of recovery” is a saying
that is intended to help people who slip up to not feel so condemned, but it is
actually a contradiction in terms, a lie, and can lead to acceptance of
periodic failures and a belief that “you will never be completely free” when Jesus
tells us that:

John 8:36 (NKJV)
³⁶  … if the Son makes you
free, you shall be free indeed.

And Apostle Paul explains that:

Romans
8:2 (NKJV)
²  For the law of the Spirit
of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.

Jesus
has set us free, indeed, and we are free from the “law of sin” – the authority
of sin in our lives – we can say no to sin, because we are free now in a way
that we never were before coming to Christ. 
Through our faith in Christ, we are free over sin and death.  

But
we have to believe it and live according to that truth to experience it.  And we have to reject the lies that
contradict that truth and keep us from experiencing our freedom in Christ, like
“relapse is part of recovery”.

And that brings us to our current series on Self-
Deception, where we have decided to investigate some of the ways we deceive
ourselves by walking through Step 2, Deception Vs. Truth, of the Steps to
Freedom in Christ to see what ways we may have been deceived by “the world” and
ourselves and in what ways we have wrongly defended ourselves. 

So we present the eighth “Way You Can Be Deceived By
the World”:

8. Believing that people who refuse to receive Jesus
will go to heaven anyway.

The scripture reference for this point is:

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (NLT2)
⁹  Don’t you realize that
those who do wrong will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Don’t fool yourselves.
Those who indulge in sexual sin, or who worship idols, or commit adultery, or
are male prostitutes, or practice homosexuality,
¹⁰  or are thieves, or greedy
people, or drunkards, or are abusive, or cheat people—none of these will
inherit the Kingdom of God.
¹¹  Some of you were once like
that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God
by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

As much as the verses point out the “bad news” for
sinners, the emphasis is on the good news that we are “made right with God” and
were “cleansed” and “made holy the minute we called on the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.   

This of course is the good news of the gospel but the
most pervasive lie of the enemy that persists in our world today is that there
are “other ways to God” – that it’s not all about Jesus.  

As much as we would like to think that everyone will
be accepted by God, it is logically inconsistent to think that God would have
His beloved Son to come and live a holy life, suffer and die, and be
resurrected to only save some – that Jesus only suffered for the Christians and
the rest of the world can come into God’s kingdom by other means, like good
works.  Jesus Himself declared that He is:

John 14:6 (NKJV)
^… the way, the truth, and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through Me.

 

Jesus is the only way to be reconciled
with God and if we deny the exclusivity of Christ to save we are deceived.  So stand in the truth and safety of the
gospel of Jesus Christ and don’t entertain any ideas to the contrary, because
they are not true and lead to death and eternals separation from God and
suffering in hell.   

——————————————————————————————–

Today’s
Bible verse comes to us from “The Quick Scripture Reference for Counseling” By
John G. Kruis.

(
While Bible verses on various topics of Counseling can be found with a quick
google search, we encourage you to purchase this resource to support the late
author’s work. (https://www.amazon.com/Quick-Scripture-Reference-Counseling-Kruis-ebook/dp/B00CIUJZT2?ref_=ast_author_dp )

This
morning’s meditation verse come from the section on Adultery:

Matthew 19:9 (ESV)
⁹  And I say to you: whoever
divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits
adultery.”

Today’s verse falls under
the 18^th point of our counseling reference guide resource’s section
on adultery, 18. “Anyone who divorces his or her spouse for any reason other
than adultery and marries another commits adultery.”

Today’s verse continues
the truth about legitimate divorce and the sin of adultery that is committed
when one remarries if their divorce is not for legitimate reasons that was
presented yesterday with Matthew 5:31-32.  

As disturbing as the idea
that we could unintentionally commit the sin of adultery after a bad marriage,
divorce, and being remarried is, we have to remember that Christ paid for all
of our sins – even adultery – whether flat out and intentional or through one’s
own ignorance of the spiritual realities that encompass marriage
covenants.  

While we are guilty of
breaking the law regardless of whether we are ignorant or not, we are forgiven
all things through our faith in Christ.   
So even our sin of “unintentional or ignorant adultery” would be
forgiven, if we realize we unwittingly committed it we should still confess it
and come before God to make sure that we are living in harmony with Him going
forward.  

Whether or not that means
breaking off relationships or reconciling old ones would be a matter to take
before the Lord in prayer, to seek His will for your life going forward.  

As discussed yesterday,
the word of God also indicates divorcing or separating from “the unbeliever” is
also permitted and the fact that unforgiveness or abuse may have led to divorce
could indicate that our ex-“Christian spouse” wasn’t believing God in the way
they should have, indicating their profession of faith may be false. They
certainly didn’t live out their faith…

Anyway the point is
marriage, divorce, and adultery are very serious matters and we should live
according to God’s word regarding them. 
While we may not be able to change the mistakes of the past, we can be
forgiven for them and seek to live according to God’s word going forward.  

——————————————————————–

As always, I invite all to go to mt4christ.org where I
always share insights from prominent Christian theologians and counselors to
assist my brothers and sisters in Christ with their walk.

Today we continue sharing from  The Holy Spirit By A.W. Pink.

As always, I share this information for educational
purposes and encourage you all to purchase A.W. Pink’s books for your own
private study and to support his work.  This resource is available online
for $0.99 (https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Spirit-Arthur-Pink-Collection-ebook/dp/B008CM5292/ref=sr_1_3?crid=AHKAQOM39CTN&keywords=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit&qid=1684376225&sprefix=a.w.+pink+the+holy+spirit+%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-3) 

A.W. Pink’s The Holy Spirit

14 – The Spirit Comforting

The
Nature of the Spirit’s Comforting in Suffering

Though God acts as a sovereign, and does not
always shine in the same conspicuous way into the hearts of all His children,
nevertheless, He brings them all to see
light in His light: to know and feel that there can be no salvation for
them but in the Lord alone. By the Spirit’s powerful illuminating and
convicting operations the sinner is made to realize the awful disparity there
is between God and himself, so that he feebly cries, “How can a poor wretch
like me ever stand before such a holy God, whose righteous Law I have broken in
so many ways, and whose ineffable majesty I have so often insulted?” By that
light the convicted soul, eventually, is made to feel its utter inability to
help itself, or take one step toward the obtainment of holiness and happiness.
By that light the quickened soul both sees and feels there can be no access to
God, no acceptance with Him, save through the Person and blood of Christ; but
how to get at Christ the stricken soul knows not.

“And I will give her
vineyards from thence, and the valley
of Achor for a door of hope” (Hosea 2:15): such is the comforting promise of
God to the one whom He proposes to “allure” or win unto Himself. First, He
hedges up the sinner’s way with “thorns” (Hosea 2:6), piercing his conscience
with the sharp arrows of conviction. Second, He effectually battles all his
attempts to drown his sorrows and find satisfaction again in his former lovers
(v. 7). Third, He discovers his spiritual nakedness, and makes all his mirth to
cease (vv. 10, 11). Fourth, He brings him into “the wilderness” (v. 14), making
him feel his case is desperate indeed. And then, when all hope is gone, when
the poor sinner feels there is no salvation for him, “a door of hope” is opened for him even in “the
valley of Achor” or “trouble,” and what is that “door of hope” but the mercy of God!

It is by putting into
his mind thoughts of God’s mercy that the Spirit supports the fainting heart of
the convicted sinner from sinking beneath abject despair. Now it is that the
blessed Spirit helps his infirmities with “groanings that cannot be uttered,”
and in the midst of a thousand fears he is moved to cry, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” But “we must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom
of God” (Acts 14:22)—true alike of the initial entrance into the kingdom of
grace and the ultimate entrance into the kingdom of glory. The Lord heard the
“groaning” of the poor Hebrews in Egypt, and “had respect unto them” (Ex.
2:23–25), nevertheless, He saw it was good for them to pass through yet sorer
trials before He delivered them. The deliverer was presented to them and hope
was kindled in their hearts (Ex. 4:29–31), yet the time appointed for their
exodus from the house of bondage had not yet arrived.

And why was the deliverance of the Hebrews
delayed after Moses had been made manifest before them? Why were they caused to
experience yet more sorely the enmity of Pharaoh? Ah, the Lord would make them
to feel their impotence as well as
their wretchedness, and would exhibit more fully His power over the enemy. So it is very often (if not always) in
the experience of the quickened soul. Satan is now permitted to rage against
him with increased violence and fury (Zech. 3:1). The Devil accuses him of his
innumerable iniquities, intensifies his remorse, seeks to persuade him that he
has committed the unpardonable sin, assures him he has transgressed beyond all
possibility of Divine mercy, and tells him his case is hopeless. And, my
reader, were the poor sinner left to himself, the Devil would surely succeed in
making him do as Judas did!

But, blessed be His
name, the Holy Spirit does not desert the convicted soul, even in its darkest
hour: He secretly upholds it and grants at least temporary respites, as the
Lord did the Hebrews in Egypt. The poor Satan-harassed soul is enabled “against hope to believe in hope” (Rom. 4:18) and to cry, “Let
the sighing of the prisoner come before Thee: according to the greatness of Thy
power, preserve Thou those that are appointed to destruction” (Ps. 79:11). Yet
before deliverance is actually experienced, before that peace which passeth all
understanding is communicated to his heart, before the redemption “which is in
Christ Jesus” becomes his conscious portion, the soul is made to feel its
complete impotence to advance one step toward the same, that it is entirely
dependent upon the Spirit for that faith which will enable him to “lay hold of
Christ.”^[1]

—————————more
tomorrow————————

Join our “Victory over the Darkness”, “The Bondage
Breaker”, “Freedom in Christ” series of Discipleship Classes via the
mt4christ247 podcast!

at https://mt4christ247.podbean.com, You can also find it on Apple podcasts

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These teachings are also available on the
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Email me at mt4christ247@gmail.com to receive the class materials, share your progress, and
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My wife, TammyLyn, also offers Christian
encouragement via her Ask Seek Knock blog (https://tammylynask.blogspot.com/ ),  her
Facebook Group: Ask, Seek, Knock (https://www.facebook.com/groups/529047851449098 ) and her podcast Ask, Seek, and Knock on
Podbean (https://feed.podbean.com/tammalyn78/feed.xml)

For those who require the assistance of a Deeper
Walk International Prayer Minister to experience healing or your freedom in
Christ, I highly recommend Christy Edge’s Life on the Edge Freedom Prayer
Ministry. You can schedule a session by going to : https://cedge216.wixsite.com/life-on-the-edge     

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Encouragement
for the Path of Christian Discipleship