Lay it Down by Bill Tell

Helping you find freedom by laying down performance-driven Christianity. There is a place for you here. Welcome.

Obedience is the Evidence of My Trust. (55 seconds)

Posted on Written by Leave a Comment

If God has given me a new nature and a new heart that is already righteous (Ephesians 4:24) – then my new nature is already pleasing to God. Now my flesh is not, but I am stuck with it until the day I die – and it is not going to be transformed. God is not in the business of transforming it, and neither should I. Romans 8:7 tells how the flesh cannot submit to God and it will not. The more I focus on living out of my new nature, the less the desires of the flesh will characterize my behavior.

So I have a new nature that is righteous and pleasing to God…so doing obedient things does not increase God’s love or His pleasure. What pleases God is when I trust that what He says about me is true…and I then live accordingly. It is my trust that pleases God! This is Hebrews 11:6, “And without faith (I like to insert “trust” here – it is the verb form of “faith”)…without trust it is impossible to please God.”

So why do I obey? What causes it to be a reality in my life? It is because I trust…it is the result of my trust. Here is the principle: Obedience is always the evidence of my trust. It is not my effort to please Him.

Next post: How does this change my time with God in the Scriptures? Saturday, October 23.

Is it my behavior that pleases God? (55 sec)

Posted on Written by Leave a Comment

Okay – time to get back with it. If I not only relate to God on the basis of the life and death of Christ (and not on the basis of my behavior)…and God also relates to me on the basis of the life and death of Christ (and not my behavior) – this means that I am set free from attempting to please Him by my obedience. He looks at me through the life and death of Jesus and is already pleased. There is nothing I can do to make Him love me more than he already loves me in Christ Jesus. And there is nothing I can do to make Him love me less. Might this mean that the motive or the purpose behind my obedience is not pleasing God? This could prove revolutionary to me.

Let me say all this another way. God does not love me more when I resist sin, He does not love me less when I give in. If He loves me less, I am under law and not grace. Does this give me permission to sin? Absolutely not. Grace will never inflame the heart of the saint to sin. Our new redeemed heart does not want to sin, and so being out from under the law and in the freedom of grace does not create a desire in our heart to run wild and sin.

So then – what about obedience? What is it’s place? What is its role? How should I think about it? Check the next blog, Wednesday, October 20.

Removing the Scare from Fear (60 seconds)

Posted on Written by Leave a Comment

We have talked a number of times about “the fear of God” and how for the believer it no longer contains the fear of being punished for our sins…because of the cross – judgement, condemnation and punishment are gone for us.

Over vacation I was reading Living the Resurrection by Eugene Peterson and he has some interesting thoughts on the fear of God for the believer. Let me quote some for you.

“…in the Hebrew culture and the Hebrew Scriptures in which the word fear is frequently used in a way that means far more than simply being scared…It includes all the emotions that accompany being scared- disorientation, not knowing what is going to happen, the realization that there is far more here than we had any idea of. But that ‘more and other’ is God.”

“Fear of the Lord is the stock biblical term for this either sudden or cultivated awareness…We are not the center of our existence. We are not the sum total of what matters. We don’t know what is going to happen next.”

“Fear-of-the-Lord keeps us on our toes with our eyes open…prevents us from acting presumptuously…”

“Fear-of-the-Lord is fear with the scary element deleted.”

I like that – it reminds me of Brennan Manning’s NT definition of the fear of God as “silent wonder, radical amazement, affectionate awe – at the infinite goodness of God.”