Lord We're Prone to Wander

The Christians (true believers) in the Body of Christ, the church, represent a vast collection of levels of spiritual maturity. Some are fairly mature while others are depressingly children in the faith. But when our Great High Priest cares for them by interceding for them before the Father, He does not show favorites and treats His elect, the immature and the mature, on an equal basis. The most immature Christian is as precious to Him as is the greatest man or woman of God.

Young Christians are so prone to be all over the place doctrinally and not know the basics of the faith or how to trust God. Much like human toddlers, they are constantly falling down and getting bloodied noses, scraped knees, and eating what they shouldn't be eating. They need tender care with firm but gentle leading and correction. Christ, the Great Shepherd, protects the weak in faith to guide them to some semblance of spiritual maturity.

No matter our level of spiritual maturity when we are waning, on the verge of shipwreck, God comes swiftly with just the right spiritual food to satisfy our hungry souls. When our hearts are ready to break from the stress of life, God comforts fully and leaves nothing to our sinful selves. He knows how to strengthen us, and He does so. We are never left abandoned.

I think of His effective graciousness in bringing me to faith and trust in His Son and how many are the times I have strayed. Yet, lovingly, and not always gently, He worked providentially to bring me back into His fellowship. He loves those whom He disciplines.

Why do we stray? Why do we, no matter our level of spiritual maturity in Christ, seem to lose steam at times in our Walk with God? Why does our fellowship with the Divine sometimes suffer? In a word: tribulations.

I have been writing about the necessity of trials and tribulations in believers’ lives as THE means to stretch us and make our faith grow. James 1:3,4 is a famous example that a lot of Christians memorize and quote to themselves in the midst of the storms for comfort and grace.

“knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”

But, is it not interesting how no matter how long you have been in the faith, no matter how long you have been walking, hopefully, by faith in God and the promises of His Word, that He knows just how to jar you to your soul with a tribulation designed especially for you? And, invariably we are brought so close to the precipice that we end up asking, “Why are you doing this to me, Oh God?” I've asked, “Why?”

In January 2003, my mother suddenly died. She had been sick but told none of us, her children. Less than five months later, my grandnephew lived but a few hours after birth. Two months later, my younger brother was murdered. (We had just moved out of the country and could not get to the funeral.) Nine months later, my best friend, the guy with whom I grew up, who was the best man in my wedding, and whom I had known since we were fourteen years old, died of cancer. To say I felt devastated would be putting it mildly. I asked, “Why?”

To prevent a wandering from my Lord, here is what I did and I suggest the same for you:

1. Look to God and His holiness. Concentrate on the verses that tell us that He is not only Holy, but also that without the holiness of God, no man shall stand in His sight (1 Peter 1:16; Heb. 12:14).
2. Look at your union with Christ in His death, burial, resurrection (Romans 6:1-14), and realize that the same God who brought the terrible trials into your life is the same God who graciously, in His mercy, brought you to union in Christ and imputed to you the Righteousness of Christ without which no man shall see God (Heb. 12:14; 2 Cor. 5:21).
3. Look at the fact of Scripture that it is in the fires of tribulation that what is left of your dependence on your sinful flesh is purged from your body (Dan. 9,24; Psalms 66:10-12).
4. Look at your identification in Christ and know that in addition to what is mentioned in point #2, we have been co-ascended with Christ (see Colossians 3:1-4) and co-seated with Him in the heavenly places. He, in whom we are united, co-ascended and co-seated, has all principalities, power, and dominion; yes, even all things beneath His feet (Eph. 1: 20-23). The demonic powers that seek to shipwreck your faith are in submission to Him in whom we live and He in us (Gal. 2:20). HE HAS ALL THINGS UNDER HIS FEET!

Those of us prone to wander He is faithful to bring us back to His fold.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above. ¹

1 Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing; 18th century pastor and hymnist Robert Robinson

Following Christ

Are you a Christian, dear reader? What I mean to say is did you, under the crushing weight of your sin, cry out to God for mercy and confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead kind of Christian? (Romans 10:9) If you are that kind of Christian then you are not only saved from the penalty and power of sin but are also a follower of Christ your Lord and King.

“My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” (John 10:27)

Just as sheep hear and follow the sound of their shepherd's voice, so do we when we hear the voice of The Great Shepherd, Jesus Christ. In fact, our Great Shepherd has the right to lead us wherever He deems fit since as His sheep, we are not our own. He bought us with the price of His own blood when He redeemed us (1 Corinthians 6:20). We are His.

It should be noted that we betray our profession of faith in Christ as our Lord and Savior if we dare shut our ears to His calling and directing. We have no right to question His leading and, if we do, we do so at our peril. Obedience to our Lord and King is our solemn duty.

But, some may say, “What if I cannot go where He leads and do what He demands?” Know this, that where and how God leads us, it is His doing and He will provide the means, the needs, the strength, the protection, the courage to do what it is He is directing us to do and where He commands us to go.

Augustine's Confessions: "Give me what you command and command what you will".

Whatever our Prophet, Priest, and King commands you to do, know that He is already there (Omnipresence), He already knows what you need to do His will (Omniscience), and He has the absolute glorious power to supply what you need to do His will (Omnipotence).

No matter if the road to which Christ is directing us is hard, perilous, long, and exhausting, we can have assurance that it will end in everlasting glory with us in the perfect will of God and His loving care. Even if following our Lord's direction leads to death, it will have lead us to the city of God!

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. ” (Hebrews 11:10)

Follow your Lord and King no matter where and even if you do not know where you are going.

Put To Death The Deeds of The Flesh

I received a phone call from a woman, a professing believer in Jesus Christ, who was going through some sort of tribulation that was vexing her soul. Her first words after explaining to me what was happening were,

“God already knows I am a woman of great faith, so why is He bringing these trials and tribulations into my life?”

The only thing I can say in her favor is that she accurately understood the Biblical explanation for trials and tribulations in the lives of His people:

“My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.” (James 1: 2-4; NKJV)

My acquaintance got the connection between how God brings into His elect's lives trials and tribulations to test their faith with the consequent result of patience, a fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5: 22-23) being produced in the lives of Christians. She got that. A star for her.

What she so tragically did not get was that she was expressing to me on the phone that she believed she had arrived at such a place in her professed faith in Christ where she no longer needed God to produce patience in her life through the medium of trials and tribulation. In her mind, she had reached a level of perfect sanctification where it was, according to her, no longer a need that the Triune God keep perfecting or completing her.

“Why more trials when I am already there? I've reached the goal. I've arrived!”

“...being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ;” (Philippians 1:6; NKJV)

You see, what the Bible teaches is that the good work of salvation, initiated by God in the lives of His elect, won't be completed until the day of Christ Jesus. In other words, the work of completing or perfecting believers will never end until the death of the believer or the second coming of Jesus Christ for His church.

Yet, like so many others with dubious professions of faith in Christ, there is a kind of pride. It is a sinful boasting of having been perfected in grace when in reality there is a total lack of Biblical grace in their lives.

People like that, if they are even Christians to begin with, actually think they have reached a goal while the rest of us sit around in anguish lamenting our pain and suffering. They either are ill taught or are not believers to not know that “until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil 1:6) means that a continual flow of the Grace of God must be constant in their lives to enable them to cope with the multitudinous tribulations that God will indeed providentially bring into their lives.

To deny this is directly from their sinful flesh. In the boast of having arrived at some falsely conceived level of perfection the rest of us are still waiting for, is to glory in one's carnal and base instincts. It is to glory in the self-aggrandized “I have already arrived” state of thinking instead of glorying in the Person and work of Christ and the strength only He can work into your life to enable you to cope with the trials and tribulations God has ordained for your life.

Put to death the deeds of your body and mind (Romans 8:13) to keep yourself from reaching such a prideful notion that you have arrived at a level of completion or perfection and no longer need to have your faith tested by the Loving, Providential, and Sovereign Hand of God. Glorify in the One who can supply you the strength to endure by:

Spend a protracted amount of time in prayer seeking the strength of God.

Spend more time in meditating on the wonders and care of God in His Word. Read the Scriptures diligently and carefully.

Glory in God's strength, the only One who can keep you from falling.

Live nearer to God by watching and praying lest you fall into the temptation of pride and arrogance.

Let your conversation in front of the people of the world ALWAYS be seasoned with the Grace of God.

Let your heart be scented with the aroma of Biblical love for the lost souls of the world.

Let the words of your mouth and the meditations of your heart be such that men want to know what is in your life that's not in theirs.

“Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.” (1 Corinthians 10:12)

In God’s Image

Unlike some theological ideas and concepts which are implied strongly in Scripture but not explicitly mentioned, like The Trinity, the theological answer to the question, "What is man," is indeed explicitly spelled out in Holy Scripture. In Genesis 1:26, God said, "…Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." (NIV)

What it does not mean to be created in the image or likeness of God is that we, His creation, look like God. God does not have a material body. What is not in mind here when discussing man being created in the image of God is a "physical likeness." God does not have a fleshly body after which man was made. The Bible teaches that God is a spirit (John 4:24). What it does mean to be created in God's image is that man is the visible expression on Earth of God's invisible nature. Man is created in the likeness of God's mentality, morality, and sociability.

Mentality

Man can make deductions and, from those deductions, make a decision. The ability to make a judgment from his intellect and then choose is a mirror image of God's mental processes of intelligence and volition. Each time a member of the human race creates a mechanism, writes a college term paper, exercises creativity artistically, balances his or her checkbook, he or she is exercising his or her Imago Dei.

Morality

Man received from his creator perfect righteousness (see Eph. 4:24) and, because of The Fall, is lost but restored in Christ in the New Creation. When a man or woman, whether in Christ or unredeemed, obeys a law, opposes evil, praises and practices good behavior, accepts the consequence for his or her bad behavior, he or she is showing a remnant of his creature-Creator relationship.

Sociability

Another way in which mankind expresses his creature-Creator likeness is in wanting to have social associations with other humans. Man was made by God to have companionships, comradeships, and acquaintances with one another. Each time someone gets married, embraces someone, takes care of children, gathers with the Saints of God, that is an expression of his or her creature-Creator relationship.

God provided mankind, in the person of our first parents Adam and Eve, with a mind and the power of choice to be able to choose between good and evil. Mankind had the "light of reason" (John Calvin) as the means to make the choices to do what is right.

"Man in his first condition excelled in these pre-eminent endowments, so that his reason, understanding, prudence, and judgment not only sufficed for the direction of his earthly life, but by them men mounted up even to God and eternal bliss. Then was choice added, to direct the appetites and control all the organic motions, and thus make the will completely amenable to the guidance of the reason." (John Calvin, Institutes I. XV. 8)

Adam and Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden marred, tainted, and stained the Image in which they were made. This ruination of God's image has been passed on to all their subsequent offspring and is the source of our ruination today. We murder God's image bearers in our society and that is a reflection of what happened in the Garden when Adam chose to sin against God, our Creator. In fact, all one has to do is read history, even the history of the church, to see expressions of how marred the image of God is in mankind. And, though still bearing some remnant of God's image (James 3:9), we still curse our fellow image bearers.

The hope we have in the testimony of Holy Scripture is that in Christ, in His redemptive work, when man is brought to faith and repentance in Christ, God begins to make new that original image of God within us. In Christ, as new creations, we are commanded, "...and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." (Eph. 4:24 ESV).

Application

Far too often Christians are left in the Theological Stratosphere to ponder the things of the Doctrinal Milky Way without anyone showing them practical applications to profound Theological Concepts found in Scripture. Our Imago Dei is one such profound theological concept with profound applications.

An immediate practical application of Imago Dei is the mandate not to murder or hate our fellow image bearers of the Divine. Nor should we ignore the morality in our relationship with our fellow image bearers. The goodness or badness of our relationships with our fellow image bearers is determined by the morality within those relationships.

Though I did not understand the profundity of Imago Dei when God brought me to faith and repentance in Christ, what I did understand is that as someone making a profession of faith in Christ, having been made alive together with Christ while dead in my trespasses and sins,

"And have clothed yourselves with the new [spiritual self], which is [ever in the process of being] renewed and remolded into [fuller and more perfect knowledge upon] knowledge after the image (the likeness) of Him Who created it." Colossians 3:10 (Amplified Bible)

God had positionally made me alive together with Christ and had begun a process of making me in my condition, or walk, on Earth more conformed to that which I was in my heavenly position before God in Christ.

Even at the age of sixteen, an immediate change in me was that I hungered and thirsted after the things of God found in His Word. I was blessed beyond measure to have a Baptist pastor who met with me almost every Saturday afternoon to privately teach me how to study the Scriptures and to answer all my questions. This went on for three years until I went off to college.

Another vast difference in my life was the immediate desire to be like what I read in Scripture and not like that which I saw in the world. I was no longer comfortable "hanging out" with my teen peers and I sought out other believers. Our church had a "youth club building." An older high school student would pick me up on his motorcycle and we would use the building each Friday evening to pray for our Sunday schools fellows that they would come to faith in Christ.

Another almost inconceivable desire was to serve God full-time as a missionary. The thought never would have occurred to me before God drew me to Himself in repentance and faith. I maintained that desire until I was stricken with a neurological illness. However, I have managed, by God's Grace, to have a "ministry" online and in the Mexican church where we fellowship in Guanajuato, Mexico.

All of us are made, or created, in the Image or Likeness of God but cannot come into the realization of the full meaning of this apart from becoming New Creatures in Christ. We must come into a correct moral relationship with God, through His Son, in order to begin becoming conformed into the image of His Son (Rom. 12:1,2). This is what I believe to be a true, renewed Imago Dei.