Welcome to Hank’s Place – Florida!
Friends, no matter how unimportant, useless, we may feel, we have GOD’s attention always – just like the Colossians. Colossae was a small and unimportant city in the Roman empire, but Paul wrote to them because they MATTERED to Paul and to God!
In Colossae, just like today, religious mixing was going on, with people borrowing from this religion and from that and getting mixed up. Paul’s solution: a better understanding of Jesus. Knowing the real Jesus helps us to stay away from the counterfeit, no matter how it may be packaged.
So Paul tells them salvation is ALL GOD. GOD has qualified us. GOD has made us partakers of the rich inheritance in Him; it’s not our works. GOD has delivered us from the powers of darkness. GOD has translated us into the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, the son of His love. It is GOD the Father who has created the greatest love story ever told: His son Jesus and His bride: US!
Now JESUS has provided redemption, forgiveness of sin, through His blood. His doing. His work. Here at the beach there are some really misguided people. Some poor souls try to emulate Buddha, who was thought to have achieved god status, becoming one with the universe, by SELF-EFFORT. That’s total rubbish! Deception! What if a lifeguard yelled to a drowning man to swim to shore so the lifeguard could meet him?
Thankfully, God didn’t tell us to try anyhow as we were drowning in sin. And God didn’t meet us halfway. God met us all the way — and invites us to accept it. And that redemption was accomplished at the CROSS, through Jesus’ BODY, not in hell. The price for our release was the blood of Jesus. This is one reason why pleading the blood of Jesus – in the right sense, not in a magical or superstitious sense – has such great significance in spiritual warfare. It shows the “receipt” of our lawful purchase as redeemed people.
Also, the blood of His cross has given us peace with God. We don’t make our own peace with God, but Jesus made peace for us through His work on the cross. The blood of the cross speaks to us of the real, physical death of Jesus Christ in our place, on our behalf, before God. That literal death in our place, and the literal judgment He bore on our behalf, is what saves us.
So believe upon Jesus dear friend! He makes us holy, and blameless, and above reproach; approved by God, and far beyond merely escaping the fires of hell, we COME ALIVE!
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