Snap!

The Word for today:

Romans 5:12-21

We enter, in Romans chapters 5 through 8, the heart of the gospel--the good news; the startlingly good news; the radically good news.

The gospel, the Good News, overcomes the law and is the prevailing eternal truth.   The law was never meant to save.  It was only meant to be a tutor, to show us our need for a Savior and point the way to Jesus Christ.  

But, by faith, we graduated:

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  (Romans 5:1)

So I'm never going back to my old school.  I'm not under the tutelage of the law anymore.  Since I died with Christ the law is as good as dead to me:

The law no longer holds you in its power, because you died to its power when you died with Christ on the cross…Now we can really serve God, not in the old way by obeying the letter of the law, but in the new way, by the Spirit.  (See Romans 7:4-6.)

Graduation…becoming a widow…these pictures of real-life events mark radical departures from the past.

Graduation means (well, it used to) that we move out from under our parents' roof and their rules.  Bewidowment (you just witnessed the birth of a word!) means that we are beholden no longer.

You have broken from the past if you have received the salvation of the LORD Jesus Christ.  When you made the break, I hope you heard the stick--the old-school life you were stuck with--snap.

Snap!  If you haven't heard it, if you haven't decisively entered the new realm of faith in the salvation that was forever settled by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then perhaps you never really left your old school behind.  Perhaps you never departed from former ways and old assumptions.

The most radical thinker who ever lived is the Christ whose name we have taken.  The most radical thought ever thought is God's determination to take your place in order to save your soul.  And then (because the thoughts of God are as good as done) he did it.

For all the Bible teaching I do I rarely tell people how to live their lives, because my advice never did anything for anybody. The only thing that works is to practice the presence of the LORD--to stand in the rain, as it were, and become one with the Word that baptizes you.

But if I were to adjure Christians to do just one thing, it would be to make a radical departure from the old school and the old religion and the old law and the old assumptions.

The essence of salvation is to become ever more and more like the Savior who saved you.  So get out of the old "house" where you were raised; get out from under your "parents'" rules; leave the "marriage" they'd arranged for you and fiercely embrace the new life that gets newer with each passing day:

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31-32, quoting Genesis 2:24)

Make the break.  Make the break so vehemently and decisively that family and friends and church hear something snap.

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