Learn Your Lessons Well

alvation is a gift that God freely offers us through His beloved and powerful Son, Jesus Christ. We can’t do anything to earn it. He’s given this overwhelming gift to us because He loves us so much. Ephesians 2:8(NLT) says, “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God.” Jesus Christ gave his life on Calvary as a sacrifice for our sins. He died an agonizing death on the cross and after three days in the grave, Heavenly Father resurrected him from the dead. By this we can be sure that everything needed to secure our victory over sin and death, Jesus Christ has perfectly completed. He left no ‘i’ undotted and no ‘t’ uncrossed. The only thing left for you and me to do is to accept what our Master Jesus has accomplished for us and to believe and trust it in the depths of our hearts. It is our great privilege to do this, and it must be done to become born again and receive God’s salvation. Many of us that have accepted him as our Lord and Savior, and made him the head of our lives are not trusting in his love as we should. We are building our faith in our victory in Christ at a snail’s pace. Know this resolutely, it’s time to accelerate the pace. Through Christ, God has redeemed us from the curse of the law. Once we become born-again, our lives are saved! We have the awesome opportunity to bring our hearts and minds in alignment with our new reality and new nature, and this requires us to renew our minds to God’s Word. All of us are born into a sinful world with sin in our bodies. Up until the point that we accept God’s love into our hearts, we were trained in part by the world and its systems. After becoming a new creature in Christ, our human spirits come alive to God, and we need to be trained spiritually. We must learn to walk in God’s Holy Spirit, and as we do this, our hearts and minds must be transformed. God tells us in Romans 12:2 (NKJV), “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” We are spiritual beings having an earth experience. 1Thessalonians 5:23 tells us that we are threepart beings, spirit, soul, and body. The salvation that God freely offers us is a spiritual transformation, but He tells us in Philippians 2:12 that you and I must work out the salvation of our souls. This is because the soul is governed by us, whereas our human spirits are governed by the Holy Spirit once they are made brand new. So, it is very important that we understand the free-will agency God has given us, because He will not force us to change how we act, think, speak, and feel. Once the Father gives us a spiritual gift, Romans 11:29 affirms that He will never withdraw it. This means that He will not overstep our free-will. We are the ones to govern what we do, think, feel, and say. Our Heavenly Father knows that if we truly love and honor Him, we will line up our actions, thoughts, feelings, and confessions to mirror the example of Jesus Christ. Our hearts and minds are a part of our souls and they are indeed the gateways into the soul; the heart and mind let information in and they let information out. The soul is the innermost part of our beings, and we interact with other people and situations based on what is in it. Both our emotions and thoughts come from the soul, and these get expressed through our actions. In other words, a person can know a lot about us by how we choose to express our emotions and thoughts outwardly. If we smile and do good deeds, people assume that goodness is on the inside of us. By the same token, if we’re angry all the time, and we speak and behave in a way that causes harm to ourselves or other people, they assume there’s evil in us. Jesus Christ put it best in Luke 6:45 by teaching us, “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.” A person can be saved by the blood of the Lamb, and still walk around with a bad treasury in their hearts and minds. No doubt you have come across many people like this. They profess to be Christians, but they do not have the heart of Christ. God wants them to be transformed, but they will not give Him permission, because they have refused to renew their minds and line up their thoughts and behaviors with those of Christ. CONTINUED ON PAGE 25