by Eric Holter on February 5, 2007
Exodus Chapters 32 and 33
I try to maintain twin objectives in my day-to-day spiritual life. They run parallel to each other, like train tracks. If one or the other is lacking, bent, or damaged, my spiritual life tends to derail. One track is the daily mortification of sin, and the other is actively pursuing the glory of God in Christ. Seeing and knowing God is the positive and ultimate goal, but killing sin is the necessary and often more tangible exercise I engage in. Killing sin does not equal seeing God, nor does success in battle automatically result in a view of the glory of God. But, failure to mortify sin is certainly an effective preventor of seeing and delighting in God’s glory.
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by Eric Holter on July 5, 2004
“Shout for joy, O daughter of Zion! Shout in triumph, O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The LORD has taken away His judgments against you, He has cleared away your enemies. The King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst; You will fear disaster no more.”
“The LORD your God is in your midst, A victorious warrior. He will exult over you with joy, He will be quiet in His love, He will rejoice over you with shouts of joy.”
Zephaniah 3:14-15, 17
At, first, when I read verses like these in Zephaniah, verses that extol me to shout with joy, or to rejoice and exalt with all my heart, at first my heart rises with the possibility of such an astounding and consuming joy in God. Quickly following this spark, however, sadness often comes because my heart, in fact, is not like this. Such exuberance of joy and gladness displayed in such active expressions as shouting for joy are not typical of my emotional currents. Yet the occasion that calls for such joyful, glad celebration has been more completely delivered to me than it had been for those to whom these verses were originally written. They originally promised a physical deliverance from armies of oppressors. I have been given a greater deliverance; I have been delivered from sin. All God’s judgments have been thoroughly taken away from me. He has utterly defeated my enemies. Why shouldn’t my heart rejoice and shout joyfully since I have received, in full, these promises?
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by Eric Holter on January 5, 2004
The Mortification of Sin, John Owen. Chapter 4. point number 1
“The use of means for the obtaining of a peace is ours; the bestowing of it is God’s prerogative.”
John own writes this sentence in the context of waiting on God to restore peace to us, after we’ve repented of a particular sin. His advice is that we do not jump too quickly from confession to restoration. Yes it is blessedly true that we have been fully forgiven even from the time of Christ’s death on the cross. Yet God is the one with whom we are seeking peace, when we turn from our hostile activity of sinning, and so is God who must bestow it. Forgiveness and restoration are ours by possession; they have, in fact, been given to us in their entirety through Christ’s death, once for all. Yet its application, such that we are fully healed and relationally restored to God happens incrementally. God is faithful and dependable. We need not fear his rejection, but we must wait for Him to touch us, and move by his Holy Spirit, thus bring us deep and experiential peace. We must use all the means God has ordained – repentance, confession, restitution, and repudiation, among others, yet God is the one who will decide when it is best for us to obtain what we seek by them, in this case, peace with God.
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