Perspicacious Perspective

This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture that rejects fear in any form. Fear is a spiritual force used by Satan to keep people down. The main idea is to champion faith as an allegiance to God and to accept the evidence of His word as truth. Pain is temporary, and the focus should be on eternity. Jesus commands us not to fear pain and death, but to think in terms of eternal morality and righteousness. There are two doors: one leads to living with God forever, and the other leads to living without God forever. The choice is made during life, and Jesus is the door to life with God. If we reject God, we face eternal judgment. The gospel is a message of love and redemption, and Jesus offers payment for our sins because He loves us and wants us to be with Him. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Matthew 10.28 Don't be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. Pain is a great motivator. We feel it, and we stop. We're threatened with it, and we back down. We use it as a reason for others not to start something with us, because we'll send them into a world of pain. We idolize those who manage to go through painful experiences and triumph. Pain is a sensation that tells us that all is not well. It is a signal. We like being well. We listen to that signal almost to the exclusion of all other signals, because if we keep things well, we will be all right. But pain is temporary. Why do we go to such lengths to avoid it? Wait now, you say. There are conditions, both mental and physical, that produce significant pain over long periods of time, sometimes a lifetime. These can be incurable conditions where the only hope is to manage the pain, and frequently we're forced to endure it. I will not discount or sweep these instances under the mat, but they're still temporary. Even if they last a lifetime, that's what? 80 years? 120? 150? That's not that much. It can seem like an eternity for those experiencing it, but once your flesh is dead, that pain is gone. Now you continue throughout eternity. Eternity is so much more vast than a mere 120 years, even years spent in agony. We are spirit beings. We are eternal. We need to shift our perspective from the arrow of time to the timeless. Jesus is pointing us to a shift in perspective. If we let pain, the desire to avoid pain, and the fear of pain to dominate our thinking, we can end up as an eternal loser. If I am going to lose, I want it to be on a temporary scale. A moment, a string of years, a decade or seven. All of these are preferable to eternity. Of course, best practice is to avoid it at all, but we here are looking at perspective. Jesus is not making a suggestion. Jesus is giving a command. We are not to fear pain and death of the flesh. It isn't important. Sooner or later, the pain and the torture will stop. It literally cannot go on forever. And at the death of the flesh, the real forever begins, or the rest of our forever. Jesus is exhorting us to look at the big picture, not the natural world. Jesus is not telling us to fear the enemy. Satan has no power. No power here, and certainly no power in eternity. He is a dead entity walking. All he has is what we give him. It's been that way since the garden, Genesis 3. He can exhort, coerce, bribe, trick, and cajole humans into hurting and killing other humans. He can take advantage of our words to bring the curse into our lives and thereby kill our flesh. That's about it. Eternal dispensations are the jurisdiction of the Lord. And here, Jesus reminds us not to fear in the sense of afraid, but in the sense of reverence, of paying attention to what the final judge desires, to think in terms of eternal morality, eternal riches, eternal location, and true righteousness. Read the verse like this. Don't be afraid of those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul. Rather, reverence him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. We don't like thinking of heaven and hell and how or who is going where because it is so easy to attach fear to it, to use it as a threat, to take advantage of people using it as a club. But if you take fear out of it, something I highly recommend doing in every situation in life, if you take fear out, you're left with a simple fact. There are two doors. One door leads to living with God forever. One door leads to living without God forever. Our path as a spirit being takes us down a corridor, the arrow of time, to those two doors. At the death of the flesh, we will pass through the door Our spirit has reached out and turned the knob of. Essentially, the act of death is the act of pushing open the door and stepping through what we have already chosen and opened. The door will shut behind us. We cannot prevent it. There is no knob on the other side. We cannot open it again. The choice is made during life. Living with that choice is eternity. That's it. No fear, no threat. It is the path we travel. Go through door number one or door number two. If you want to put some humor into it, think of the two doors in the film Labyrinth that Sarah must pass. One leads to the next part of the labyrinth. The other to certain death in a version of the classic knights and knaves logic puzzle. One set of door guardians only able to tell the truth and the other pair only able to lie and the applicant only able to ask one question. But for us, there is no puzzle. No secret ways. No. The living God is merciful and good and gracious. We only have simple truth freely given and distributed. Either we want to be with God or we want to be without God. The catch, although it isn't much of one, is that we either accept God on his terms or we reject him on ours. So what's the catch? Free will. What does that mean? Well, he's righteous and therefore only righteousness can exist with him. Matthew 5, 19 to 20. To get through the door that leads to life with God, a human must go in and through what Jesus did on the cross. We must believe that he died for our sins. We must believe that he was resurrected again to life. We must confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord. We must accept him on his terms and in his way. Romans 10, 9 to 10. The result, the end result, is verse 11. For the scripture says, whoever believes in him will not be disappointed. That scripture is Isaiah 28, 16. Jesus is the door to life with the Lord God Almighty. I am the door. If anyone enters in by me, he will be saved and will go in and go out and will find pasture. John 10, 9. Jesus is the I am the way door. In Jesus, we are righteous because we have his righteousness. 1 Corinthians 1, 30 to 31. We go through the door that is Jesus in his righteousness and enter eternity as spirit beings inside righteousness. The opposite is also true. If we do not go through the door that is Jesus, we are going our own way. We are saying we want to do things on our terms and will not accept God's. We go through a door in our own unrighteousness and enter eternity as spirit beings inside unrighteousness. The problem is that the only beings in the universe who were unrighteous were Satan and those angels who followed him. Punishment for that treason was prepared for them. They were the damned. They were those who would exist forever outside the presence of the God they knowingly rejected. Satan tried to get back at God by convincing humanity to also commit treason against God. Willingly and in full knowledge that it was wrong, Adam chose to reject God's way in favor of his own. 1 Timothy 2, 13 to 15. Because of that, every human being after Adam shared his selfish nature, his sinful nature, his treasonous nature. All humanity doomed to life away from God because of unrighteousness until Jesus became a man and as man paid the penalty for treason against God that man was under, death. Jesus died so sin was paid for. No more cost to sin. We can have it washed away, expunged forever. If we go through his door. But if we don't want to, if we reject the gift, we can go through the door of my way. That door leads to the place without God. The one created for treasonous angels. Matthew 25, 41. The one humans were never meant to go through. The door that can only be walked through by choice. By choosing not to choose God. God is eternal. If you choose to be without him, you will have to be judged and judged eternally. God wants no one under that judgment. But if you choose it, you will receive it. And Hebrews 10, 31 tells us about that judgment when it says, it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. God doesn't present this as fear or a threat. The message of the gospel is not you're going to hell. The message of the gospel is you can live with God. It is a message of love. The world is in sin. Jesus paid the price for sin. And he says each and every human who ever lived or is living or will ever live, can accept his gift and be wiped clean of sin, as if it never existed in the first place. He does it in love. Want proof? Proverbs 5.13 says, For until the law, sin was in the world, but sin is not charged when there is no law. That means that those who didn't know the law, that didn't know about this, were not considered to be in sin. It wasn't charged to their account. They were kept aside until they could hear the truth, the message of redemption. 1 Peter 3.19 Jesus paid for us. Jesus is offering that payment applied to our account, John 8.36, free of charge, because he loves us and wants us to be with him. Period. That's the gospel. That's the good news. But that can be hard for the natural mind to accept. That message of pure love and total payment of all that goes against our selfish, grasping nature. Flesh is sinful, and the natural mind is made of flesh. The natural mind is ruled by fear. Fear is a huge motivator for a wide range of behaviors. It is always a bad idea. If the economy were to collapse tomorrow, how many people would think the world was over? Yet we would still be breathing. We would still be able to survive. It wouldn't have been the end of the world. What if your body was in danger, beatings or torture? It happened to the apostles, and they sang their way through it. Acts 5.40-41. Why? How? Because in Jesus we can have perfect peace, no matter what is happening to us. We can be asleep in the boat instead of panicked about the storm. Mark 4.35-40. They had their eyes on Jesus and the kingdom of God. They didn't care to worry about this world, because they were told not to worry, and they believed Him who said it. We are called to the same perspective. We too are called to keep our minds on the door that leads to God and all the peace, joy and victory that Jesus brings us into as that door. Don't fear this world and what can happen to our flesh. Don't fear the upheaval and change and problems and possible discomfort. They are guaranteed to come. As birth pangs before a child is born, upheaval, pain and torment will occur in this world. Matthew 24.6-8. When we put our trust in the Lord and our belief in His Word, we are never disappointed. When we turn the knob of that door, we get to start walking through now. Eternity starts the moment you are born again. We can live in the Word and be guided by the heart and will of the Father, which are in the Word. There are verses in the Bible that speak to every situation that you can go through. There is something to stand on and to believe in, in every circumstance. Sometimes that means an absolute and complete change of perspective. Sometimes it means a small change of perspective. It is ever the Word perspective. It's constant. How much change is determined by where our own perspective is as we encounter God's will, desires and thoughts. Always it means lifting our eyes from the natural and looking to the spiritual, which is the source of all healing of our lives, be it a sickness, a need for His righteousness or a situational change. 1 Peter 2.24 and Matthew 8.16-17. Trust in the Word today and start to shift your perspective from temporary world things to eternal and everlasting things. Choose not to be afraid and embrace the freedom we have in Jesus to be at peace regardless of what is happening to us or around us. Our daily affirmation of God's love is 1 Thessalonians 4. We are called to look to heaven and not to earth, to be sanctified, not immoral, to be in the process of sanctification. The world will tell you lots of things and rely on science to prove their points. But we know a secret. Science deals with the natural and the natural is fallen. All of creation has been affected by sin. All of creation is twisted from what God intended it to be to what we chose to accept it being. Now while in some ways science is awesome, it cannot be trusted when we start dealing with truth as laid down by the Lord Almighty, when we move beyond what we can see, touch, and test. In spite of what the natural tells us, God is telling us to avoid some things, that not everything that feels good is good, that not everything that is permissible is wise. 1 Corinthians 10.23 Not as a tyrant to deprive us of freedom or fun, but as a loving Father who wants us to have freedom with responsibility, freedom with blessing, freedom in Him, an eternal freedom better than anything else that we can hope or imagine. He loves us. He wants only the best for us. Isaiah 55.2 says, Why do you spend money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which doesn't satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in richness. The Lord loves us so much. He wants us to have richness, richness of spirit, as well as richness of life. He wants good things for us, true pleasure, true enjoyment, and true love, His love. Start listening today. It will bring nothing but good if you listen and obey. As we close, remember that you have worth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today, God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love, and no end to the things about you that He loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4 9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent His only-born Son into the world, that we might live through Him. And this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin, and it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because He first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.