Making a Defferance

G.C.Morgan on the incarnation
“In proportion as men grew in their intellectual conception of God, it seemed increasingly unthinkable that He could be interested in their every-day life. Morality became something not of intimate relationship to Him, and therefore something that mattered far less.
The failure has ever been due to a lack of final knowledge concerning God.
The wide issues of the manifestation of God in Christ are the union of intellectual apprehension and moral improvement, and the relation of religion to life. In no system of religion in the world has there come to men the idea of God who unites religion with morals, save in this revelation of God in Jesus Christ (incarnation).”
This is that difference which makes the New Testament in Christ’s Blood totally unique and absolutely differ from the Mt Sinai covenant, and all of the other covenants of the time before the incarnation. That is the fact that all the covenants that God made with people had nothing to do with changing them, whereas The New Testament in Christ’s blood IS our salvation; it IS that which destroys that which was and makes a new start, the new birth “old things are passed away all things are new” ! “remember this, It was not by the eternal facts that sins were taken away, but by the manifestation of those facts. This text does not affirm, and there is no text that begins to affirm, that He before He was manifested, takes away sins.” G.C.M. on the incarnation. Jesus asked Philip “have you been with me for so long and not seen God?” We can not see God and go on and on and on ‘discussing’ what is right and what is wrong without some detriment to our vision. This is not to say that there is no right or wrong. There are absolutes. There is an AUN, Absolute Universal Norm for the uninitiated, which is “Be Holy” and is defined for us in the phrase spoken by God “as I am Holy”. That is pretty Holy. That does not leave much room for error, in fact it leaves absolutely no room for error or even anything that looooks like error “no shadow of turning” ! However We are not in the armed forces, more specifically navel inspection. When we spend too much time looking at our belly button we get a crick in our neck but far far worse than that we loose sight of, in this case, God and our fellow christian. This is the message of the gospel, we are free from the law, free from the condemnation of the law, free from the bondage, fear and guilt, of the law. We can look up. It is not that we do not need to know the difference between right and wrong but that we do not need to dwell on it, to focus on it, to act like that is what life consists of – obey the law line upon line ! We live on the other side of death. We live on the other side of punishment for sin. If the obedience that the NT calls for were obey the law –Jesus did it already, He lived a perfect life and He died for sin ! What is left for us is “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”, faith ! Sanctification is not learning obedience it is learning to trust God. Trusting is the obedience called for in the NT !
People make one of two errors. They make the NT into an extension of the OT and therefore fall into the problem that GCM is referring to or they take their freedom in Christ for granted and assume that they can live life how they want to forgetting that we are now slaves of Christ able to and free to do good works – benefiting others not ourselves.
Beginning at home, our family – fellow Christians. Be nice, don’t argue about who’s right and who’s wrong. Love covers a multitude of sins, but love for whom? When we do good works we minister to our Lord Jesus Christ but to whom do we do good works? Jesus said “in as much as you did it to one of mine you did it to me”. If we minister ‘Love’ and ‘Good Works’ to non Christians it is in a much different capacity than that ministered to our fellow Christian. Fortunately we do not have to be concerned with making sure that our fellow Christian is right, that is for the Holy Spirit to take care of; what we need to do is love them and do good works, to them. Even the ‘church’ is not responsible for the morals of it’s members. “Encourage each other”, if they need it “Exhort some” but keep your eye on God. If we keep ourselves busy doing those things there will not be a problem with moral uprightness, it will be there. “If any man sins we have an advocate”. Apologize ask for forgiveness and keep going. Yep, if moral uprightness is not apparent in someone’s life we have reason to question their relationship to God – being a Christian will make a difference to the way a person lives BUT not by anything that anyone but God can do ! !