The Plumbline

So now anyone who is in Christ Jesus is not judged guilty.   That is because in Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit that brings life made you free. It made you free from the law that brings sin and death.  T he law was without power because it was made weak by our sinful selves. But God did what the law could not do: He sent his own Son to earth with the same human life that everyone else uses for sin . God sent him to be an offering to pay for sin. So God used a human life to destroy sin.  H e did this so that we could be right just as the law said we must be. Now we don’t live following our sinful selves. We live following the Spirit. (Romans 8:1-4) God used a human life to destroy sin - but that human life was the Son of God, come to earth with the specific mission of taking our sins to the cross. Does it ever surprise you that God used 'human life' to destroy sin? Jesus experienced what we experience from day to day, growing hungry, weary, sweating from hard work....

When we are no longer able to change a situation - we are challenged to change ourselves. (Viktor E. Frankl) I would challenge this thought a bit to remind each of us that change is not our job alone. We try a lot of things to change things about ourselves. We diet, wanting to look a certain way in our clothes - but then we bounce back to needing to wear that bigger size. We deep clean our homes, wanting that 'clean and fresh' look - but then we drift back into allowing the clutter to build and the dust bunnies to collect. WE try, but God asks us to allow him to transform us. You didn’t think, did you, that just by pointing your finger at others you would distract God from seeing all your misdoings and from coming down on you hard? Or did you think that because he’s such a nice God, he’d let you off the hook? Better think this one through from the beginning. God is kind, but he’s not soft. In kindness he takes us firmly by the hand and leads us into a radical life-change. (Roma...

Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself? (Thomas Kempis) Every God-born person conquers the world’s ways. The conquering power that brings the world to its knees is our faith. The person who wins out over the world’s ways is simply the one who believes Jesus is the Son of God. (I John 5:4-5) It is indeed a hard fight to live as an overcomer in this world, is it not? There are all manner of temptations just lurking around every corner. If you don't see something on TV that gets your mind to consider things that bring fear into your heart, you have ample opportunity to glean some fear-invoking thing from any number of social media sites. We are inundated with all manner of seed thoughts that could take root if we aren't careful. The media attempts to spin fear with reports of shortages of all kinds. You may not even have considered 'laying up storehouses' of goods until you hear these bleak reports of doom and gloom. One thing I have had to lear...