The Vow
February 17, 2022

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The Vow

Romans 8 Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self, ignores God and ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored. But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go! This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

• Love is

V14
I love that God beckons us to action, to be a risk taker for him.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

• Love is

v9-11
Now love and humility are like twin virtues. In Matthew 11, Jesus said, “Take My yoke and learn from Me, because I am humble” Now, this is the only character trait that Jesus ever identified about Himself.

• Love is

V7-9
Obsessed: means to be excessively preoccupied with a single emotion or topic.

“As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love.” (Jn. 15:9) …that the world may know that You…have loved them as You have loved Me. (Jn. 17:23)

We will only enter into our full inheritance (destiny) as we love God with all of our heart. What is love? It is an action, with a reaction…it’s an expression. It is more than a feeling; love can be seen. It can be felt.