WE are in the fourth chapter in Principles of Spiritual Growth (Part One of the Complete Green Letters), dealing with a singularly important topic – Purpose. It is so important to know what God is doing, where I’m at in His plan, and where I am going according to His purposes. We spent a great deal of time looking at the first aspect of this, in seeing that we are in Christ – that is where we are positioned or in union with Christ. It is in Him who is our life and hope that our position come in full force giving witness to this vital truth. But where is God taking us “In Christ?” The answer is, further into Him, Rom 8:29. That is what our author will present to us today, taking up this vital question where he left off last week saying, Our Heavenly Father is still carrying out His purpose of making man in His image.
WITHOUT further delay we will get right to it.
In the wondrous blessings of Christ,
Joe
Neh. 8:10, Isa. 30:15 & Job 2:10
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Chapter 4—Purpose …continued
Our Heavenly Father is still carrying out His purpose of making man in His image. Although His original purpose is the same, He is not using the original man to bring it about. All is now centered in the Last Adam, our Lord Jesus. Being born into Him through faith, we became “partakers of the divine nature” (II Pet. 1:4). And as the Lord Jesus is allowed to express Himself through our personality, this poor, sin-sick world will see “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). In I Corinthians 15:49 Paul gives us the heartening promise: “As we have borne the image of the earthy [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the heavenly [Christ].”
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:28, 29). Here is the “good” for which God is working all things together—His original purpose of making us in His image, which is centered and expressed in His Son, Christ who is our life. Paul’s determination for each of his converts was: “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19).
The open secret of healthy spiritual growth is to know and settle upon this fact as set forth in Romans 8:28, 29. When we see that all things are working together to make us more and more like the Lord Jesus, we will not be frustrated and upset when some of these “things” are hard, difficult to understand, and often contain an element of death. We will be able to rest in our Lord Jesus and say to our Father, “Thy will be done.” And our constant attitude of faith will be: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15). This is our matriculation to spiritual maturity!
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (II Cor. 3:18). It is one thing to know what God’s purpose is for our lives, and it is another to know something of the “how” as to entering into it all right here and now. ….to be continued.
