AUTHORITY OF THE BELIEVER.

DAILY DEVOTION.

DAY THIRTY TWO.

MATTHEW 28:18-20.   And Jesus came and spoke to them saying, "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth, Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age."Amen.
Jesus here is now commissioning His disciples to go out into the world to take the gospel to all nations and to make disciples. He tells them that He now has all authority both in heaven and on earth and it is in this authority that they are to go, He is giving them His authority, the right to go out in His name to share the gospel. When He tells them to baptise people in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit He is referring to the complete authority that is found in the Godhead. So on what basis was Jesus able to do this? in Colossians 2:14-15 we see that through His death on the cross He totally deals with the issue of sin and takes back the authority that was handed to Satan by Adam at the fall, Satan now legally has no authority over your life and mine, as Paul said in Colossians 1:13 "He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love." In John 17:15-16 Jesus is praying for the disciples and He asks that the Father would not remove them from the world but that He would protect them from Satan because as He was not part of the world, neither are they. We are no longer part of this world system and Jesus has given us His authority or delegated power to live as His disciples through the Holy Spirit. So how do we receive that power? Firstly we must be born again, the disciples were born again in John 20:22 when Jesus breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit" at that point He imparted Spiritual life back to them, the Spiritual life that Adam lost when he sinned. We are all born dead in sin as a result, spiritually cut off from God,when we are born again the Jesus breathes on us and imparts His Spirit into our spirit and we receive that Spiritual life back again. In Acts 1:4-8 Jesus here commands his disciples not to leave Jerusalem until they have received the promise of the Father, until they are baptised in the Holy Spirit. He tells them that at that time they will receive the power to be His witnesses as they go out into the world. The word power there is "Dynamis" in the Greek and means the ability or abundance of power, also implies the ability to work miracles. It is through the Baptism of the Holy Spirit that we receive the ability to walk in the authority that Jesus gives us. We see in the life of Jesus Himself that He walked and ministered out the power of the Holy Spirit, at His baptism the Holy Spirit came on His life and we see that when He came out of the wilderness after the forty days in Luke 4:14 it says that He returned in the power of the Holy Spirit. If the ministry of Jesus was dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit how much more is ours? If we want to know and walk in the authority and the power that Jesus has given us through His death and resurrection our desire must be to know the fullness of the Spirit. Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5 said that when he was among them he was determined to preach nothing but Christ and Him crucified, He did so in much fear and trembling, realizing the importance and responsibility that he had not to rely on his own wisdom or power but that he had to preach in the power of the Holy Spirit so that their faith would not be in mans wisdom but in the power of God, Sadly today too many Christians do not know or understand the power and authority that we have in Christ, not in our own wisdom or our own ability, but in Him, through what Jesus did for us at the cross. It is time for the Church to rise up and begin to walk in the authority and the power that Jesus has given us, to take the Gospel into the world with the demonstrations of power of the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Gospel of Christ and Him crucified. AMEN.   

HIS WORKMANSHIP.

DAILY DEVOTION

DAY THIRTY ONE.

EPHESIANS 2:10.   For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
My question today is this; What are we here for, what is our purpose? This verse shows us that God has done a work in us, we are now His workmanship in Christ, 2 Corinthians 5:17 tells us that we are now new creations in Christ, There is now a new man living on the inside, God has removed the old dead spirit and given us a new heart, and He has put His Spirit within us. So what is the purpose of that? Yes it is to bring us back into relationship with God as our heavenly Father, but it is for more. The rest of Ephesians 2:10 says that we are in Christ for good works, the works that God has prepared for us, even before we were saved and born again. In Christ we now have a new destiny, a new hope, Jeremiah 29:11 says that Gods thoughts are towards us, thoughts of peace and not for evil but to give us a hope and a future. God is continually thinking about you and the plans He has for your life, David said in Psalm 139:17-18 "How precious are you thoughts to me O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand; When I awake, I am still with You" This such a powerful concept, that you and I are never out of the mind of God. He is continually wanting to reveal to us on a daily basis His plans and purpose for us. Jesus said in John 15:5 that He is the vine and that we are the branches, that apart from Him we can do nothing. He is our very life source, what happens if you separate a branch from the vine? it will surely die. We must continue to abide in Christ, in His word, in His love, in His Spirit because if we don't we will die and not achieve what He has created us for. As Christians, as ones who have been purchased at an amazing cost, through the blood of Jesus through His death and resurrection, we now have a huge responsibility to serve God, to fulfill what He has called us into. In Ephesians 4:1 Paul says that we are to walk worthy of the calling with which we were called, He goes as far as to say that he beseeches us to do this, there is a real urgency in what Paul is saying here. To walk worthy here comes out of the knowledge and the understanding of what Christ has done in us, it does not come out of our sense of self worth, but the realization that it is Christ in us, His life in us, as Paul said in Galatians 2:20, That it is no longer him who lives, he has been crucified with Christ, and the life that he now lives he lives by faith in Christ, Paul's faith was in the fact that his life was now in Christ because Christ had been prepared to give His life for him. This is such an important point to realize, that we can only have the life of Christ in us because of the fact that Jesus was prepared to lay His life down for us and go to the cross. You might say at this point; "But you don't know my past, you don't know what I have done, how could God want to use me?" Well again Paul's life gives us an answer to this. We are all aware of the life of Paul, as Saul he was a Pharisee, a teacher of the law and a staunch opponent to the Gospel, to the point he went out and persecuted Christians and was present at the stoning of Stephen, yet in Philippians 3:12-14 he is able to write that he was aware that he had not yet attained perfection but that he must press on, that he would take a hold of what Christ had called him to do, he would not look back, he would forget the self effort and mistakes of the past and continue to press forward to the high calling that was on his life in Christ, realizing that the prize was in that calling, in his fulfillment of what God had called him to do. If we doubt that God has a purpose or a calling on our lives let us come back to the original verse, We are His workmanship in Christ Jesus, it is not about us, but it is all about Christ in us and what he wants to do in us and through us. AMEN