November 05, 2010
Victory
Recently I attended an event that recognizes special needs folks and one of the honorees was a man I’ve known for many years. When I went to speak to him before the program I couldn’t help but admire the huge gold medal hanging around his neck. I assumed he’d been in the Special Olympics and I wanted to give him an opportunity to boast about his accomplishment so I asked where he got his medal. Beaming with pride Clayton said, “Bought it at a yard sale!” Have you ever noticed that God sometimes gives us the victory before we’ve even run the race?
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Gail;
-----After Paul listed his reasons for confidence in the flesh and his reasons for hope through faith in Christ, he states, “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me His own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Phili 3:12-14) I have seen the temporal situations of good Christians thoroughly crash and burn. They have gone down to disease, accident, financial disaster, the fraud and deceit of lying accusers, and numerous other causes, some in which they have shared responsibility, others for which they were not at all responsible. All the same, holding to their victory in Jesus Christ had no effect upon their physical situations’ eventual defeat, sometimes total defeat. And sadly, I have seen very earnest minded Christians even succumb to the spiritual defeat of denying the power and truth of Christ before they reached their final day.
-----We will receive our crowns of victory upon entering His eternal kingdom after Christ has cleared us on the Day of Judgment. Before then, our victory is not actualized at any particular moment. Rather, it is being actualized by our pressing on to make it our own through all the moments which lead up to that Day of Judgment. Then we will receive it free of charge. But today we can only have it through great cost; we must buy it as Clayton bought his gold meddle.
-----That is not a concept usually passed around the Christian circles. However, Jesus Himself said, “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who does not take his cross and follow Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.” (Mat 10:37-39) The cost of victory in Christ is your life. Now, that certainly is not to mean you go out and lose your life by suicide, or stop working to buy your food and shelter, or continue working but buy food and shelter for only others such that you starve or freeze to death or die of thirst within weeks. It means your payment for the gold Christ sells is your moment by moment decisions regarding life. By paying those decisions the indispensable purposes of your life shift from securing the temporal to securing the eternal, while the temporal purposes submit to dispensability, however, without being summarily dispensed.
-----Thus, Jesus bids us, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” In the model prayer He teaches is the request for the coming of His kingdom. Paul revealed that the kingdom is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit - making our decisions according to what the Word defines as right, having peace with God by submission to Him and peace with others through seeking peaceable solutions for differences, and founding the joy of our souls upon the effects of the new life rather than those of the old. Our moment by moment transferal of indispensability from temporal purposes to those of walking in His Spirit buys the gold we can enjoy today. Doing this until the end only brings us to the place where eternal gold is freely given.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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