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For I know the plans I have for you,declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jer 29:11 |
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| Archived Manna: | |
Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Today's Passage : Today's Passage :The Law and Sin [Part 1] Bible Verse:Romans 7:7-12 (ESV) "hat then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good." Message:
Picture yourself standing in a dimly lit room. You cannot see very much at all, except that there is a white wall in front of you. Suddenly, someone turns on a light. And when the light is on, you can see something you could not see before — the wall is covered with all kinds of dirt, stains and mold. The room seemed perfectly clean before. But now, you now see that it is filthy.
Before the law of Moses, people were not righteous before God, but they could not see it. Then the law, like the light in the room, showed them all the wrong they were committing in their lives. Before the law, if someone craved their neighbor’s house, they did not realize they were coveting it, or that it was sinful. The people of earth did not know what coveting was until the law told them, “Thou shalt not covet.”
Moses praying
What Paul is saying today, is: You can’t blame the light for making the room dirty. It might appear to a person standing in the room that the light created the dirt and mold, but of course, it did not. The dirt and mold and stain were always there; it was just that we were blind to it.
This is what Paul means when he says that the law created sin. God shined a light on our lives that exposed our actions as sinful. But the law — the light that went on in the room — is not evil. The light actually gives us the ability to clean up the room, just as the law gives us the ability to correct our sinful actions, because it shows us what is right and what is wrong.
But there is another angle to this. We may have felt happier in the darkness! We were able to delude ourselves that everything was fine.
This lesson from Romans is as true today as it was then. Resentment against morality in society has never been greater than it is today, and the trend is growing.
Those who have turned away from God are in full-out attack against morality and Christianity. They want to indulge their lust, their greed, their pride; and so, instead of trying to correct their sinful activity, they attack the moral code that shows it to be wrong. People are screaming: “Turn out the light, it makes the room look dirty”. But it is utter foolishness. God’s law, like the light in the room, is “holy and righteous and good.”
We can now understand how Paul was able to say, in the verses immediately preceding, that we have died to the law and are released from the law (Romans 7:1-6). It seems to create a contradiction, because now he tells us that the Law is holy and righteous. But our dirty room analogy helps us understand; for, instead of turning off the light, Christ cleans up the room!
Meditation : Prayer : Now, to God the Father, who first loved us, and made us accepted in the Beloved; to God the Son, who loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood; to God the Holy Ghost, who sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts, be all love and all glory in time and to all eternity......Amen |
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