Another Nature

"And you ... hath he reconciled in the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable" (Colossians 1:21-22)

For the moral unlikeness between man and God the Bible has a word, "alienation", and the Holy Spirit presents a frightful picture of this alienation as it works itself out in human character.

Fallen human nature is precisely opposite to the nature of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Because there is no moral likeness that is no communion, hence the sense of physical distance, the feeling that God is far away in space.

The new birth makes us partakers of the divine nature. There the work of undoing the dissimilarity between us and God begins. Fro there it progresses by the sanctifying operation of the Holy Spirit till God is satisfied.

The only remedy for human nature is to destroy it and receive instead the divine nature. God does not improve man. He crucifies the natural life with Christ and creates the new man in Christ Jesus.

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Practice the Presence

"I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved" (Psalm 16:8)

The scriptural way to see things is to set the Lord always before us, put Christ in the center of our vision, and if satan is lurking around he will appear on the margin only and be seen as but a shadow on the edge of the brightness. It is always wrong to reverse this - to set satan in the focus of our vision and push God out to the margin. Nothing but tragedy can come of such inversion.

The best way to keep the enemy out is to keep Christ in. The sheep need not be terrified by the wolf; they have but to stay close to the shepherd.

The instructed Christian will practice the presence of God and never allow himself to become devil-conscious.

Brother Lawrence wouldn't pick up a straw from the ground but for the love of God. When he was dying he said, "...When I die I won't change my occupation. I have just been worshipping God for 40 years on earth, and when I get to heaven I'll keep right on doing what I am doing."

~A. W. Tozer~