Your daily goal:
Philippians 3:14 “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”
(Monday-Friday, from my morning quiet time, I will write a short thought for that day which I pray God will use to motivate you to ‘GO’ for that day. Your objective is simple…to GO…to GO OUT and share the love of Christ with someone in that day….to GO and bear fruit …to be light to the world.)
Today’s Daily Light
More on ‘understanding’ how FAITH works….
(Some content from John Piper)
Romans 12:1-8 Paul wrote ” I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. 3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one wholeads,with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness. “
What we see in Romans 12:2 is that in order to discern the revealed will of God—to see it rightly in the Bible, and to apply it wisely in complex situations today, and to spill over with it spontaneously in thousands of actions and attitudes that are unpremeditated—we must be transformed in the renewal of our minds. Understanding and embracing the truth of the Bible, applying this truth in real life, and overflowing spontaneously with Biblical love and holiness requires not a new list of behaviors, but a new mind and new heart.
Christian living is not will-power religion. It’s the overflow of a new mind and new heart created by the Holy Spirit. It is supernatural. You can’t produce it on your own. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” (Ephesians 2:10). So “we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit” (Romans 7:6). “For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). “You have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator” (Colossians 3:10).
Everything written in Romans 12 is a description of the way the new self—the new mind and new heart—thinks and feels and acts. We need to saturate our minds with this God-breathed description of life in Romans 12. That is what we are want to do ‘today’ as we focus on verse 3.
In choosing faith as the measure of the new self, Paul is choosing an absolutely unique act of the new mind. What is the essence of faith? Faith is looking away from ourselves to another. Faith is total dependence on another. When faith stands in front of a mirror, the mirror becomes a window with the glory of Christ on the other side. Faith looks to Christ and enjoys him as the sum and judge of all that is true and good and right and beautiful and valuable and satisfying.
So what Paul is saying is that the essence of the new Christian mind is that we see and savor—we behold and we embrace—Jesus Christ and not ourselves as the supreme truth and supreme treasure in the universe. Amen.
Let There Be Light 