Basic Training - Part Two: Law and Grace

Welcome to the second post dealing with the basics of Christianity and how God created us as human beings.  This information is the basis of the Christian faith and the foundation that a Christian marriage is based on.  These are concepts that are taken directly from the Bible.  The material and diagrams are produced by the Association of Exchanged Life Ministries (www.aelm.org).

There are diagrams to the right of the post that go along with the information.  If they seem small on your monitor feel free to right click on them and download them to your computer.  This is NOT copyrighted material.  Each post will remain here for a week with the respective diagrams.  At the beginning of a new week, a new post will appear with new diagrams.  The previous post will of course be beneath the new post, but the diagrams for the previous post will be gone.  

Again, because this is a blog specifically focused on men - men will be specifically referred to.  Yet the information here applies equally to both men and women.  

Part Two - Grace and Law.

Okay.  So now you're sitting in your big comfy chair.  It's Sunday afternoon.  You're watching the big game on the big screen with a cold drink, a ham sandwich, and your gift of Grace.

Now what?  I don't have to worry about sinning anymore?  What does that mean?  I don't have to be ashamed of having too many beers on Saturday at the game?  I can vent my road rage and not worry about it?  Am I free to pursue my golf game regardless of how much time it takes and how much my wife complains about it?  Can I do anything I want?

Technically, yes.  You have salvation in Jesus Christ and you have the Holy Spirit inside you.  You can't lose your salvation.  Still, God didn't choose to have his only son sacrifice himself on the cross so you can get drunk, curse other motorists, and neglect your family.  

Let's look at some basics.

LAW is defined as the system of performance (or behavior) which God set up to bless those who fulfill its requirements and to curse those who do not.  It's based on the 10 commandments. 

Dueteronomy 28:1 says If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow al his command I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth.

This is an achievement based system.  All non-Christians operate under this set of standards (Actually, some Christians still operate under this set of standards when, in reality, they don't have to).  This is the system of thou shalts and thou shalt nots.  If you can do everything right, you gain acceptance - maybe even eternal life.  

Here's the problem - you can't.  There's no way you can reach perfection on your own.  To grab a phrase from my childhood - you're dead meat.  As a result we tend to get on this treadmill of the law shown in Figure 1.  We try, fail, confess our sins, receive forgiveness, and try again.  This will make you crazy!  You see, the system based on the law makes you religious, but it keeps the Holy Spirit inside you pressed down and makes you ineffective as a Christian.  

This is how the Jews in the New Testament were messed up.  Everything was done in order to show others how closely they followed the law.  They were deeply religious people but they had no relationship with Jesus Christ.  In fact, they murdered him.  They were self-righteous - that is trying to be righteous by their own power.  

It was this deeply chilling and self-righteous religion that caused God to send his Son to die for us.  Let's apply that to you and me.  If we try to gain acceptance based on our performance measured against the law of right and wrong a number of character traits are going to float to the top.   

• We won't be able to handle rejection or criticism
• We won't be free to fail and to learn from our mistakes.
• We'll be defensive and poor listeners.
• We'll be prideful - happy when someone else fails because it lifts up our standing.
• At the same time we'll have low self-esteem because we know the reality of our failures.
• We'll never be at peace with  ourselves.
• We'll constantly find fault with others and be very judgmental.
• We'll be very afraid of God.  Our relationship with him will be out of fear of punishment for the wrong we've done. God will be distant and cold because we avoid him out of fear. 

This is so NOT what God wants for us.  God loves us and wants a close personal relationship with each of us.  To accomplish that, he did something radical and new.  

Consider this:

Hebrews 7:18, 19  The former regulation is set aside because it was weak and useless (for the law made nothing perfect), and a better hope is introduced, by which we draw near to God.

Hebrews 8:13  By calling this covenant "new" He has made the first one obsolete., and what is obsolete and aging will soon disappear.  

Galatians 3:21  Is the law therefore opposed to the promises of God?  Absolutely not!  For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.

When you read that last verse from Galatians you see that simply knowing the difference between right and wrong and banging your head on the wall to do good things doesn't make you alive in the Spirit (Review the diagram in Figure 2).  

GRACE is defined as the system of faith (trust, dependence) which God set up to Bless those who are in Christ only because they are in Christ.  

Grace is given as a gift - just because you believe - nothing more.  It's not based on your performance against the law of right and wrong.  It's receiving - not achieving.  Any Christian who accepts Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior (born again) can receive this gift.  

I know you're thinking "Whoa man!  There's got to be more to it than that."   Well, yes, there is.  Jesus Christ came to earth, was put to death by the Jews, and was brought back to life again by God.  When this happened, Jesus Christ made everything you do right for God.  He justified you in the eyes of God.  As a Christian are you going to live from this point forward never sinning again?  No.  It's impossible for you to live a sin-less life.  But through the lens of Grace through Jesus Christ, you are perfect to God.  

Look at this:

Matthew 5:17  Do you think that I have come to abolish the law or the Prophets:  I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.  

II Corinthians 5:21  God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.  

God had Jesus Christ, his son, die for us so that we could be perfect for God.  This is so amazing that someone wrote a song about it!  

This is the basics of God's Grace through Jesus Christ.  This is what it means to be saved.  The logical next step for this is how do live this in an every day kind of way.   How do I identify myself with Grace?  I hate to leave you hanging, but that is what's on tap for next week.  

Stay tuned!

Basic Training - Part One: Three Part Man

Welcome to the first of 4 posts dealing with the basics of Christianity and how God created us as human beings.  This information is the basis of the Christian faith and the foundation that a Christian marriage is based on.  These are concepts that are taken directly from the Bible.  The material and diagrams are produced by the Association of Exchanged Life Ministries (www.aelm.org).

There are diagrams to the right of the post that go along with the information.  If they seem small on your monitor feel free to right click on them and download them to your computer.  This is NOT copyrighted material.  Each post will remain here for a week with the respective diagrams.  At the beginning of a new week, a new post will appear with new diagrams.  The previous post will of course be beneath the new post, but the diagrams for the previous post will be gone.  

Again, because this is a blog specifically focused on men - men will be specifically referred to.  Yet the information here applies equally to both men and women.  

Part One - The Three Part Man.

God created human beings.  A man is essentially a spirit, who has a soul, and lives in a body.  Figure 1 shows the diagram of a 3-part man.  The Bible specifies this in I Thessalonians 5:23.  

"May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.  May your whole spirit soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ"

The body is the earthly dwelling - an "earth-suit" if you will.  It's how we get around and how we express ourselves.  It's our 5 senses and how we carry out our actions.  It's the physical area through which we relate to our environment.

The soul is not the body.   It handles, sorts out, and reacts to all events and circumstances, as well as memories of the past.  The soul houses our mind (our thinker), our emotions (our feeler), and our will (our chooser).  The soul is our personality. It's what makes us different from each other (an individual).

The spirit is what makes man (humans) different from the rest of creation.  The spirit determines our identity.  It's a component of human life where worship, fellowship, and where the Holy Spirit dwells in us.  

Before a person becomes a Christian his spirit is dead and he is separated from God by sin. Figure 2 shows what this looks like.  

Isaiah 29:2 states - "But your iniquities have separated you from God; your sins have hidden his face from you so that He will not hear."

Ephesians 2:1-3 - "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.  Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath."

In the diagram, the "F*" represents flesh.   Flesh is a term that refers to doing things my way, separate from God.  Sometimes referred to as "self", flesh is centered over the link between our soul and our body because the wrong we do is the result of our choices (our will/thinker) carried out by our body.  The upper right corner the figure 2 shows how we are separated from God by our sin.  

Here's the cool part.   God knows that there is no way we are ever good enough to meet his measurement for eternal life.  Since He loves us so much He sent an intercessor to take care of things for us - His son, Jesus Christ.  He died on the cross and took the punishment for our sins so we don't have to.  He was raised from the dead by God and was taken up into heaven to sit with God.  His death and resurrection made possible the gift of Grace and forgiveness for anyone willing to accept it.  

Here's an important thing to know.   When I became a Christian I died in spirit with Jesus Christ on the cross.  My spirit was buried with Him.  When He was resurrected from the dead I was also resurrected and I now sit with God along with him.  Figure 4 shows this progression and the following verses from the Bible support it.  

Galatians 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives in me.  The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God.

Romans 6:4, 5 "We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may life a new life.  If we have been united with Him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection."

Ephesians 2:4-6  "But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by Grace you have been saved.  And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.

Grace is a gift.  You can't earn it.  No amount of doing good things will get you into heaven.  You can't buy it.  Giving money to charitable causes and helping those in need won't get you there.  You have to believe - and you have to receive the gift.  It's that simple.  What's more - when you accept the gift of Grace you exchange your sinful and dead spirit for the life of the Holy  Spirit.  I know I have the Holy Spirit in me.  He lives His life through me.  Jesus Christ is alive in me and I am no longer dead in my spirit.  

Romans 5:9-11 spells this out pretty clearly.  

"Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him!  For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!  Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in  God through our Lord jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation."

Ephesians 1:7 also confirms this.  "In him we have redemption through his blood, for forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace."

This is awesome stuff!  There is no way, in and of ourselves, that we can ever be good enough to get ourselves into eternal life with God in heaven.  God knew this - and sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross and pay the price for all of our sins - past, present, and future.  Jesus Christ paid the bill for us.  All we have to do is accept the give of salvation.   And when we do, the Holy Spirit comes inside us and makes a home, giving us strength and hope to live for God.  Once you accept that gift of grace you're automatically good enough.  You can rest in it, knowing that it's all taken care of.  

As a husband (or as a man planning to marry) this is the foundation for life together with your spouse.  This is what makes you so grateful for for richer and it's what carries you through for poorer.  It's what helps you manage in sickness and how you enjoy and in health.  This - the gift of grace through the Holy Spirit inside yourself - is what makes for better so cool and manages for worse so you don't have to do it all on your own.

Thanks for checking in.

Basic Training Notice

Starting Monday, October 20, my wife and I are going to post a collaborative series of messages that address the basics of being a married Christian.  While this blog is specifically addressed to men, the content of these posts apply to both men and women. 

There will be 4 posts dealing with what happens when you become a Christian, the power of the Holy Spirit inside us, the gift of Grace and how it gives us freedom from sin, and how we live having won the battle over sin.  I'll put up a new post each monday starting Oct 20 with the last post on Nov 10.  This series is intended to be a check-up, putting us all on the same page as I go forward with the mission of supporting Christian married men.  

If you receive 4BetterOr4Worse posts through an RSS feed you'll want to actually go to the site and bookmark it.   The RSS feed will not bring over the visual aids that go along with this series that will really help you understand how to apply this information.  

I want to thank my wife Jann for helping me put these things together.   She has received formal training on all of the information covered and she's helping me condense a huge amount of information into 4 posts. 

See you next week!

Grace and Peace

I've been doing some work in the Bible - specifically First Peter.  For those of you not as familiar with the Bible as others - a lot of the books in the New Testament are letters written to groups of people - most often churches.  Each letter starts out with a greeting.  When I read these letters i tend to blow through the greetings and get to the heart of the letter.  But when I started it this time I was stopped short by a very small sentence at the end of the greeting.  

"Grace and Peace be with you in abundance."  

I thought about this for a while and wondered how that fits in marriage relationships.  I've decided that, in a marriage, grace and peace isn't something that appears with the wave of a magic wand.  It isn't a supernatural state of being that you pray for and, through an act of God, appears in your home.  Grace and peace is something you work for.   It's a practice - a lifestyle choice, if you will.  

Grace is defined as the gift from God.  The gift is forgiveness of sins.  Because through the gift of grace our sins are forgiven, we are held up as perfect and so we have eternal life.  Grace was made possible ONLY through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  You can't buy it.  You can't earn it like a paycheck.  Once you accept the the gift of grace you can't lose it.  Claim it as your own and it's yours - it's that simple.  Okay - end of Bible school.

In a marriage, peace follows grace.  Grace is when you've been wronged by your spouse, but you realize the goodness in them as a whole and make the decision to forgive.  Through open communication and forgiveness peace happens.  Forgiveness and humility go hand in hand.  Nothing diffuses a tension and brings about peace faster than an apology made with sincerity and a soft heart.  This I know from experience.  

Now, I can hear you sound off with two objections.  First, "If I tell her that she's hurt me and I forgive her, I'll come off as condescending and she'll snap!"  My response to you is that, if your marriage is like mine, there's enough hurt to go around.  So put the two together.  Diffuse the situation with the "I'm sorry" (sincerely and with a soft heart).   Then you can open up the communication and talk about your hurts and offer your own grace to the situation.  The second objection I hear is "I don't want to say I'm sorry!  I didn't start this!"  The truth is that if grace needs to be restored to your relationship and "she's lost that lovin' feelin", you need to set your pride aside and get over yourself.  After all - do you want to be right -  or do you want the grace and peace?

Don't get discouraged if you try this and it doesn't work the first time.  Grace and peace in your marriage is like your golf swing.  It takes practice - effort - you have to "work" at it.  What's more, don't do this on your own.  Share the concept with your spouse so they know what's going on.  It works better if both of you know what's going on.  

One last point.  What this does NOT say is that you need to become a doormat and be taken advantage of or be abused.  If that's happening to you, get some help.  Talk to your pastor, see a counselor, or start with a note here for a second opinion.  

Thanks for stopping by.

Men and Purity! Wait - What?

I recently had a chat with a very good friend about the divorce he's going through.  It's getting ugly and he's concerned about a number of things, most important are his children.  I've recently re-established connection with him after losing touch for a few years.  Our discussion went back and forth and the threads of our dialog were woven in and out of the divorce, catching up on things, and reminiscing about old times.   

In this time of great uncertainty in his life, it seems he's found some ground to make a stand on some principles.  I was pleased to see that he's making a great effort to give the whole thing up to God.  I say great effort because I know that's a very difficult thing to do.  He and I are wired a lot the same way and it's instinctive with guys like us to take the ol' bull by the horns and go after it with our own strength, our own plan, and our own will.  Being able to admit that we can't handle this and looking to God for ALL the answers is a tough thing to do.  I admire him for making the fight to keep God at the center of all the crap he has going on.  

Another thing really stood out to me in our time together.   At a time where it would be very easy for a man to grasp at just about anything to replace the intimacy he once had in his life, he's committed himself to purity.  Purity?  Isn't that for girls?  Purity is such a feminine word.  When I think of purity I think of a virginal expression, pale soft skin, and a white dress.  The truth is that I - and I suspect a lot of others - don't include men when they think or speak of purity.  It used to be that men were associated with rough and rugged attitudes - the Marlboro Man, Jack Palance, John Wayne, and Sylvester Stalone.  Purity was MaryAnn on Gilligan's Island, and Cindy Brady.  In today's popular culture with men getting manicures and facials I'm not sure what attitudes are conjured up when thinking of men.   Still, purity is probably not one of them.   

The truth is that my old friend is exactly right.  If the old boy chooses to marry again some day (which I'm sure he will), what better gift to give his new spouse than a man who's kept his mind and his body free from the garbage and baggage that comes from casual sex and a habit of pornography?  

What's more, I took a lesson from this as a married man in a mostly stable relationship.   Purity applies just as much to the married man as the single man.  Keeping my own thoughts, attitudes, and actions directed solely and specifically toward my wife is marital purity.  The pretty face smiling at me in the other traffic lane isn't mine - she doesn't belong to me.  Entertaining even the smallest thought about her is out of bounds.  The one that belongs to me is at home helping with homework, at work helping to pay the bills, or out on the road getting little people where they need to go.  My wife is the one God gave to me - that one is mine to smile at, wink at, lust after, and have desire for.  

Remember - you promised.   "In sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer - 4BetterOr4Worse.

Thanks for taking the time.