I've been meaning to write about the church we went to in Phnom Penh for a while now. It was a church geared towards Westerners, like missionaries, so it was in English. It was a really incredible service and I am so glad I took notes! Sorry if this post is a little bit scatterbrained; I wish I could have taken better notes, but here is what I got:
--
God is inexhaustible and incomprehensible.
Often, we divert God's glory to somewhere or something else (Think of Israel and the golden calf...). We are made to give glory, but our sing nature causes us to misdirect it.
We celebrate for many things with intense excitement and joy (Example: VE Day); why don't we get so excited about the gospel? We don't see the battle of the spiritual realms, the war for every single soul in the world.
Foundations of the gospel:
1. The gospel is about God
2. The gospel is for man
3. The gospel is about Christ
4. The gospel calls us to a response
We must understand these things to truly understand the gospel.
We find ourselves in our everyday lives, living in a way that God doesn't matter; we have self supporting attitudes.
With post modernism, we believe that God's word is truth but we interpret it situation by situation because of our sinful nature.
When we realize that God is as glorious as the bible says He is, and we are as sinful as the bible says we are, the gospel becomes even more glorious.
Jesus is the son of God and God! When we understand that God himself died on the cross for us, the gospel becomes even more glorious!
The glory of God is revealed in the cross by the atonement of the shedding of God's blood. God's love cannot be understood without the cross. The cross is where God's justice and love meet. The death of Jesus on the cross is the gauge of what God thinks about our own sin.
The gospel becomes more glorious every day as we begin to understand our sin more fully.
Challenge: Is the gospel more glorious to you today than it was when you first came to salvation? What is your response to the gospel?
No matter where we are or what we are doing, the glory of God is such that we shouldn't be able to do anything but share the love of God.
--
Ok, so that's a lot of scattered thoughts. I think it all boils down to living like Romans 3:19-25 is true:
"Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it -- the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith."
We need to live in a way that shows our appreciation for what God has done for us. When we truly understand our sin and God's sacrifice, we can't help but devote ourselves to His glory!
Cambodia was such a picture of this! Believers that I saw there were truly living all for the glory of God! When they shared their testimonies, I heard their understanding of who they were without Jesus and who they are now, with Jesus. I hope my life is as clear a picture of faith as the lives I saw there!
No comments:
Post a Comment