BLESSING

PART ONE

“To you first,
God, having raised up His Servant Jesus, sent Him to bless you,
in turning away every one of you from your iniquities”
ACTS 3:26

We hear much about blessing today and as we read here that is one of the reasons that Jesus came. However, let us note that the blessing spoken of here comes in the form of an enabling to turn from our iniquities. That blessing can only be realized by the power of the SON being received into our hearts by faith. The tenets of the Christian Teaching HAVE NO INTRINSIC POWER IN THEMSELVES! The power and the life of the New Covenant is not in words (1 Corinthians 4:20); the POWER of the New Covenant is solely based on the RESURRECTION LIFE OF THE SON. “God HAVING (past tense) RAISED UP….JESUS”! This same resurrected Jesus is NOW SENT to us for the purpose of blessing us IN turning us from our iniquities. He did not come to leave us in our carnality, our warped and corrupted ways, our malice, evil reasoning and lust; HE came to save us FROM our sins! For it is SIN that keeps us from the way of peace, SIN that perverts our interactions with other people, and SIN that prevents us from the WAY of LIFE. A salvation that leaves us in bondage and sin is unthinkable!

“…thou shalt call his name JESUS:
for he shall save his people FROM their sins”
MATTHEW 1:21

His blessing has come. It rests upon HIS people like a cloud of glory and power. This blessing seeks to permeate every aspect of our life, freeing us from the corruption of the First Adam and bringing us into the LIFE of the Last Adam! This Blessing is ever active IN our lives to “work in us to WILL and to DO of HIS good pleasure”. This Blessing is ever seeking, ever drawing and ever calling us to turn from our ways unto HIS. Our salvation rests in the resurrection LIFE of the SON not in the will power of men.

“For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ:
And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
But NOW is Christ risen from the dead…”
1 CORINTHIANS 15:16 – 20

It is in our yielding to that BLESSING that all that God has purposed in Christ begins to become a reality in our daily lives. HE IS OUR SALVATION AND HIS NAME IS JESUS FOR HE HAS COME TO SAVE US FROM OUR SINS.

Ω

Souls are not made sweet by taking [ill tempers] out,
but by putting something in – a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ.
Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all.
This can only eradicate what is wrong, renovate and regenerate,
and rehabilitate the inner man. Will-power does not change men.
Time does not change men. Christ does.
Therefore “Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.”
Henry Drummond

Brian Troxel