WE have just completed Chapter 40—”Principles of Reckoning,” the first chapter in Part 4 of The Complete Green Letters – The Realization of Spiritual Growth. We now come to Chapter 41 – “Three Steps in Reckoning.”
OUR author outlines the three steps thus:
1) Know and Reckon
2) Abide and Rest
3) Depend and Walk
I ALWAYS find it instructive seeing this three-part theme repeated in different ways over and over again in Scripture.
“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” 1Cor. 13:13
WE are a people who live at once in three dimensions: a past, future, and present reality in Christ. – Selah.
With that, let’s get into the next chapter.
In the inexorable riches of Christ,
Joe
Neh. 8:10, Isa 30:15, Jas 1:2; Prov. 21:30
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Chapter 41—Three Steps in Reckoning
Everything that has to do with our Christian life, including the longed-for freedom from the power of sin and self is in our Lord Jesus Christ. Through our spiritual birth in Him, we know Him in His person to be the very source of our life. “Your life is hid with Christ in God … Christ, who is our life” (Col. 3:3, 4).
Now, failure in reckoning is certainly not failure of the truths reckoned upon. Never! Without the Scriptures we would have absolutely nothing. Our authoritative Bible is the only means in the universe by which we can ever know anything rightly and personally of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Sad to say, even with the revealed Word, there is little enough of this all-important spiritual knowledge among believers today.
We should remind ourselves that the written Word was designed specifically by God to bring us to know the Living Word. Never for a moment is the written revelation to be by-passed, or slighted in any way. We are to study, meditate, and count upon it through the ministry of the Spirit of Truth, in order that we may know the Lord Jesus. He is our all, by means of the Word. “Hisdivine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature.” “By him all things consist. And he is the head of the body.” “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (2 Pet. 1:3, 4; Col. 1:17, 18; 2:9).
Surely, it can be affirmed that the written Truth, authored and administered by the Holy Spirit, is the “vehicle” by which the Father and the Son come to us, and we to them. Still, as to reckoning upon the specific identification truths centered in Romans Six, nearly all of us stop at the written Word. It is as though we stand there, with a death-grip on a handful of truth, repeating with conviction: “I believe this is true, and I reckon, reckon, reckon!”
Much of the failure of our reckoning is due to erroneous expectation. We are not delivered by belief only in the liberation truths! Certainly we must believe and appropriate these truths, but the actual liberation comes as the result of our intimate, personal fellowship with the Lord Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Simply put, the principle is: liberation is in the Liberator. …..to be continued.
