Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Behold, the hope of him is in vain.
    Won’t one be cast down even at the sight of him?
None is so fierce that he dare stir him up.
    Who then is he who can stand before me?
Who has first given to me, that I should repay him?
    Everything under the heavens is mine.”
(Job 41:9-11)

“Therefore, my brothers, you also were made dead to the law through the body of Christ, that you would be joined to another, to him who was raised from the dead, that we might produce fruit to God. For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were through the law worked in our members to bring out fruit to death. But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that in which we were held; so that we serve in newness of the spirit, and not in oldness of the letter.”
(Romans 7:4-6)

No matter how awesome we think we are, we are nothing compared to God. We spend so much time and effort trying to conquer this world. To master it. To prove ourselves better than the creatures within it – yet how often they get the better of us. We have entire industries that we have created full of terrible technologies, just so that we can capture them. And still we don’t always win. Yet all of it belongs to God. All of it is under His feet. He is so much better than the best that we can muster or imagine. We have no ground to stand on. We cannot do better than Him. On our own, we are terribly fragile and so very limited in our accomplishments.

God did it for us. Knowing our powerlessness. Knowing our limits. Knowing our inability to conquer what was coming against us. God did it for us. God gave us the Law so that we could see and understand our condition. So that we had an example of how we could be made whole. So that we could cover Sin and our iniquities with His mercy. And then God did it for us. Paid the price. Not COVERED the price, PAID the price. We no longer have to struggle. We no longer have to get covered. We can get transformed. We can get saved. We can get renewed. And God did it for us. What we could not do, what the Law proved to us we could not do, God did so that His righteousness could be upheld. So that we could be obedient. So that the beast was locked away and we could walk in freedom.

Summary

We are DEAD to Sin. Dead. It no longer has a hold of us. It doesn’t control us. It is not the motivation that we operate under. We are FREE in Jesus. We have been given a new nature with new inclinations – and those are aligned with God’s moral character. We are OBEDIENT children now. We only sin when we go back to old thinking. We only sin when we take our eye off of Him. We only sin when we forget who we are in Jesus and try to do something ourselves. When we trust in Jesus, we CANNOT sin. The fight is not old vs new nature. Old nature is DEAD. The fight is mental. It is whether we choose to listen to our new nature and be obedient or whether we choose to do what WE want and go along with what WE know. The fight is whether to rely on Him or rely on ourselves. We have been given a spirit of trusting in God. We have been given a nature that craves His presence. The choice is ours. Lean into Him or walk away.