Re: nest

Tim -

Thanks for putting into words that which is true, but which so few of us have had the courage to admit. You are right about the nests in our hearts. We all fight against various nests within us. Some of us need to fight more or to fight harder. You are right about the fact that we all have them. If we say we do not have any such thing in our lives, we lie (1 John 1:8-10). If we did not have any such thing within us, we would be as perfect as Jesus, and we would no longer need a savior. Just like Paul, we must keep under our bodies as he said in 1 Corinthians 9:27 to keeps ourselves in check.

Anyone who says he does not have to do that is just lying because we all have nests. But our walk with the Lord starts, ends, and consists of being willing to walk in the light (1 John 1:7) even when doing so exposes things within us we wholeheartedly wish were not there.

There is always at least one more nest to deal with. The question is: are we helping the Lord to tear it down, or are we working to make it larger?

Ed

Re: nest

All we can do is admit to God our helplessness and deliver those things over to death and ask God to put it under the blood of our dear Lord Jesus and to apply the power of the dying of our dear Lord Jesus and HE WILL SURELY DO IT in the might of His glorious power! Praise God! All blessing, honour, power and glory be unto Him Who is Faithful and True! If we walk in the light as He is in the light, the blood of Jesus cleanses us of ALL our sin. Walk in the Spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. The Lord is definitely not short on grace to deliver us! That's Good News! Stand, Withstand, and having done all...to Stand in all the good of His finished work of Calvary and all that the finished work of Calvary means in victory over sin, self, the world, and Satan. Not only did Christ die "for" us, He died "as" us. Knowing this, that our "old man" was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be anulled, that henceforth we should not serve sin......Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord......Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death. Therefore, if we walk not after the flesh we shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh, and if we walk after the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, the Spirit of Life sets us free from the law of sin and death. Therefore, the way of life is death! By knowing and reckoning! So we don't have to learn how to live...we need to learn how to die and be conformed unto His death in our union with Him and the same power that raised Jesus from the dead will also raise us up with Him. We were put in Christ by God, therefore we were crucified with Him, buried with Him, raised to newness of life with Him, ascended with Him, and seated together with Him in the heavenlies! Good News! Fact, faith, experience....always in that order.....God says it, I believe it, He causes me to experience it. That is laying hold of His precious promises by faith. Knowing and reckoning. He is able to perform all that in which He has promised! His grace is enough! The efficacy of His blood is sufficient! And His finished work complete! Worthy is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world!

Re: nest

R. E.

What you say is true, but there is more to the picture than that, namely the inward war to which Paul refers in Romans 7:23 (see the whole chapter), Romans 12:1+2, and 1 Corinthians 9:26+27. By Paul's own words in 1 Cor 9, it is a fight to bring our bodies under subjection. As spiritual as Paul was, and with as much revelation as he had received, he nevertheless had to battle an inward war against the things that would draw his steps away from Christ's. Yes, we must die to self and learn to be conformed to Christ, but that does not mean we have no inward battles to fight in that process.

In revealing truths about certain subjects to us, the Lord will often relate things to us from multiple scriptural perspectives. Each scriptural point of view reveals something significant about the subject under study. But rarely is only one perspective the entire truth of the matter. To understand any given subject, we must, with the help of the Holy Spirit, combine all available scriptural perspectives into one all-encompassing body of truth about the subject in order to understand the full counsel of God on the matter. As long as even one verse of scripture does not fit a teaching, our understanding of that subject is at best incomplete. We do not understand the whole picture on a subject until all available verses relevant to that subject fit together into one self-consistent whole. We can speak of this further offline, for the subject covers much territory.

Your brother in Christ,

Ed

Re: nest

Hey Ed!
Grace to you my dear brother! I understand the Scripture interpreting Scripture. The "Way of the Cross" can be found in all 66 books of the Bible if you ask God to show you. Chapter 7 of Romans in which you are talking is showing the believer as espoused to the Law. Verses 7 through 11 show how the believer can't be made holy by the Law, verses 15 on show the strife of the two natures under the Law, then a cross experience, and then beginning in chapter 8 verse 2 he shows us the new law of the Spirit delivers. So in Chapter 8 Paul shows the way of victory. Paul shows us in his own experience how he got the victory. So Paul is showing God's dear children the way of victory! Not defeat. Not by self-effort or by obedience to the law. But by the new law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. In all of his epistles he is leading the believers who were in error to stand in all the good of the finished work of Christ. In which the Holy Spirit wrote for us today.
In his letter to the Corinthian believers he was telling them that the natural mind cannot know the things of God because they were yet in a carnal state. So he sought to know nothing among them save "Christ and Him crucified" which would deliver them from a carnal state to a spiritual state and then they could understand spiritual things. So if we read the Bible with the natural mind we won't understand spiritual truths. We have to deliver the natural mind over to death and ask God to breath upon His Word and cause it to become Spirit and Life in us. He is very faithful when we seek His mind and His interpretation and to give us the "witness of the Spirit". But when we try to use our natural intellect He will NOT oblige us on that.
Just yesterday I was thinking back on a period that I had fallen hard, and it seemed that deep down in my spirit I knew something so I wrote it down. This is what I wrote:

"When we fall, we fall from where we have lifted ourselves up to. We fall from
our own throne. And praise God it is so! For He alone is worthy! So if we fall
it is His mercy. We are only falling from somewhere that He never lifted us
up to in the first place. Now that is mercy and love!"

Yours in Him Who is Faithful and True,
R.E. Gombach