You In Christ and Christ in You

OK, we are in lesson twenty nine, right? And Courtney thought we got to question six. I want to encourage you to keep it in your mind that we're now down to how many weeks we got left for. I mean, you know, let's see. Calendar. We've got this week and three more. OK, so Courtney and I would like to have at least one session that is question and answer.

So please, as you as you look over your stuff in the next few weeks, that you can sit wherever you want. I know it's confusing because the tables are all moved. So if you have any questions, you know, write them down or we'll just have a time where you can ask them. OK, because I'm sure that our teaching is so clear, we only going to need about 15 minutes for questions.

Well, you have to understand, I messed up the numbers. I messed up the numbers. The first question is, is read Ephesians one. OK, that's twenty nine. And I think there's if anybody needs one, there's some over there. And last week you talked about some of the elements of your position. Everybody understand the difference between position and condition. Everybody know what that is? Okay. Is your position, is the position the same for every believer? Absolutely. It's absolutely the same.

I remember as a young believer, I was single, and I went to some singles party where they went to see a movie, and the movie was Oh God, right? And afterwards we had a discussion about, did we gain anything from the movie? And so the discussion went around and there were some people in the group that disagreed with each other. And one of the guys said to another guy, well, it's okay that your theology is different than mine. And another guy said, no, our position is the same. Well, that was an uproar. People didn't understand what that meant.

Is God doing the same thing in my life that He's doing in your life? On the bottom line it is, because He's conforming us all to His image. That's right. He may use different methods, but the purpose is the same. We're all being conformed to the image of Christ. So our position and the conformity, the goal, is the same.

And question six, is it okay to go to question six? These verses describe our condition. First of all, let's talk about our condition. What is it? Position and condition. These are these two things. The old brethren used to call them standing and state. Position and condition are probably more descriptive terms. How would you describe your condition? If your position is the same for every believer, It's immutable and never changes. The purpose of God is to conform every one of us to Christ. What about your condition? How would you describe your condition? It changes. Daily walks is a good one. It's your everyday walking around existence and experience that you have on this planet. It may or it may not line up with your position, right? It fluctuates.

So, I gave you a couple of verses, Colossians 3.1, it says, therefore if you have been raised with Christ, keep on seeking those things above where Christ is at the right hand of God. That's an imperative given to a believer from his position. You alright with that?

When you get like in Ephesians 6, 10 through 12, finally be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. And then it says, put on the full armor of God so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers, against powers, against the world forces of darkness, against spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places. When the Word of God says, be strong in the Lord, how do you do that? You just suck it up and go for it? What spiritual push-ups? Yeah, do 55 of those and then you'll be strong in the Lord. How are you strong in the Lord? What's the criteria for your strength?

You trust Him. Who's the one that's strong, by the way, in this equation? Is it you? It's Him. And so your response to be strong in the Lord is to walk by faith. So then he says, put on the full armor of God. How do you put that on? Come see me. I have it in my position, right? Don't I have all of the things that are described in the armor of God in Ephesians. I have every one of them positionally. But here comes the imperative to put on, to put it on. So how do you put it on? Don't waver. So if I say to you, put on the full armor of God, how do you do it? You believe in the facts. Believe in the facts. And the facts are? That you already have it. So really, putting on the full armor of God is doing what? Resting by faith in the facts that you already are on. It already is on you.

Do you see how that works? That's a hard one because it sounds like, well, there's a whole bunch of things I need to do. I need to pray and fast and, you know, go to church on Sunday and all this stuff and then I'll be have the whole armor of God on. Well, when you understand the concept of position and condition, and you know what your position is, and then the command comes, put on the full armor of God, you begin to realize, wait a minute, I already have everything that I'm asked to put on. And put on is a term that's like, a lot of you this morning, because of this weather, got up and put your coat on.

That's what that word means. Yes, sinking into the garment. The full armor of God is like a garment. And when it says, you put it on, you just sink into it like a big coat. Now, yes, yes. Oh, that's a great question. And here's why it's such a great question.

Because there's a when you when you get into these discussions about choice and will and all of that, you have a tendency to think, I have to exercise my will to implement the behavior patterns required by the Word of God. Right? Doesn't it sound like that? But really, what do you use your will to do as a Christian? What do you use it for? That's exactly right. You use your will to believe. You do not use your will to implement You alright with that?

It's really important because when the appeal to the will is put on the full armor of God, what's He asking you to do? To believe that you already have it on. When He says, Reckon yourself indeed dead unto sin, but alive unto God. What's the appeal to your will to believe that you are in fact dead unto sin and alive unto God? You see that?

The confusion comes when you talk about will, is that, gee, God has given me all these commands to do all this stuff, and I've got to exercise my will on a continual basis so that I can function like a Christian. No. The purpose is to believe God when he tells you. We've gone through this before. When God lays out a position, is it future tense, present tense, perfect tense? What is it? What's that?

It's always something that's true of you right now, and has been true of you since the day you became a believer. And you may be ignorant of what it is, have no idea what it is, or may know what it is and really don't believe it, so it doesn't manifest itself in your life. But at some point you see it, and the appeal is always for you to believe. Use your will to believe.

How do you mean? You know, you read it in the Word and say, okay, but you have to outwork it. Yeah. What do you think about that? That's a good question, too. Reckoning? So you see, you're cruising along in the Bible one day and the Lord shows you something that's new to you. Okay? And your reaction is what? If you're a young believer, I think you look at it and say, wow, that's exciting, that's something new. I think if you're an older believer, you're willing to accept whatever God tells you. It doesn't matter to you what it is.

If He shows it to you, you buy it. You believe it. But then there comes this intervening period in which the positional truth that you have now seen and believe, the Spirit of God works it into you. You agree with that period that's there? I think that that's exactly what he does. He'll show you something in the Word, and you believe him, even though you don't have a whole lot of comprehension about it. The first time you saw that you were crucified with Christ, if you're like me, you thought, what?

What do you mean I died? I'm sitting here reading that I died. It doesn't make any sense to me. And I died 2,000 years ago. That's fun. But I believe God because he's the one that told me. And over time, I began to see him get cemented in on that truth. I don't know that I ever really believed that until later years, that I was actually crucified. I didn't think of it so much in terms of I had died. It was that I had to be crucified. I'm supposed to act like I've been crucified. I'm not supposed to want that as bad as I should have. Yeah, yeah. There was no reckoning involved. That's exactly right. I don't think I knew if it was because of chance. I don't know that I would have thought so. Sure, sure. Until later.

I was thinking of this as a new believer. I thought, well, you know, I can believe all this stuff because I should believe it. Like if it says in the Bible that pigs can fly, I should believe it. And then I thought, oh, that's good, that's good. And then I thought, no, that isn't right, because I need to believe what is in the Bible, what's true. I think if I just said, oh, I'll believe anything, because that's what's sort of fed to me, I don't think that's good either.

No, that's a great point because that's the other element of the focus of your faith. It has to be on what the Word of God says. And oh, by the way, it has to be on what the Word of God says to you as a believer as opposed to you as not a Jew that lived in Palestine 2,000 years ago. in this was like that position. We now have crucified.

Well, you know what's interesting about the identification truths, you have to really, as you examine those truths, study them and pick them apart and look at them really close because it isn't long after you learn that truth and you believe that truth that, good old Adam, your condition doesn't line up with what...

I used to say to myself, well if I died, how come every time the music plays my feet are moving? How come every time I'm tempted I'm going there? The interesting thing is that my old man didn't die. He ceased to exist. And I had to discover what the word death meant. The word death means separation. It doesn't mean annihilation. Well, that was a big revelation to me. I thought, that's really cool. So my old man is alive and well inside of me, rocking and rolling, hoping to have the capacity or the ability to express himself. Right?

But God says to me, you are dead unto it. Do you see that? It isn't dead, but you're dead to it. It's like when the Lord took Hal Molloy home, the world didn't cease to exist. He left. He's no longer alive to the world. Right? So are we. We are no longer alive to the world. We are no longer alive to sin. Even though sin is doing this, you know, right in front of us. with the temptation all the time, and the world and its whole system, and all of that keeps right on going, and God comes along and says, well, you died to all that. Did I? Really? I'm really interested in the outcome of the Broncos game today. I'm very interested if my son graduates from high school. I'm really interested in who my president is going to be.

But God says, I have been crucified with Christ. Which means I got separated from the world, the flesh, the law, Satan's dominion and power over me. Isn't that something? Yet my condition may or may not line up with that. But as I grow in the knowledge and grace of what that is, the reckoning kicks in, and it gets to be a stronger and stronger issue with me, so that when the world, the flesh, or the devil, or somebody comes at me, I can look at it and say, wait a minute, I'm dead to that, and walk away from it. Because I've been persuaded spiritually that what I have believed is true. That's the intervening time. between the time you see the truth and believe it, and the time you really can reckon on it to be so for you.

See that? Is that okay? Steve? I was just going to ask kind of a closing question. So what aspect of the I are we talking about? I mean, I'm not leaning in a ditch. I'm responsive to anything going on. So isn't that I something that's internally, spiritually going on that ultimately expresses itself as far as my choices like what you just talked about.

How long has God seen everybody in this room in Christ? Since eternity passed. Since eternity passed, right? But, oh wait a minute, I was born X amount of years ago and I was born in Adam. But God still sees me in Christ, right? I'm the same person that I was when I was born in Adam as I am now, recreated in Christ. Am I not? I'm still the same person. The difference is my nature is different. Courtney and I have had this discussion for a long time and I think it's been a really beneficial one for both of us.

When you're in Adam, when you're born physically and you come on this planet in Adam, you are identified with and have the nature of a human being that is a time-space guy. He had a beginning, did he not? Didn't God create him in the garden? You can trace your history all the way back to that day in the garden when God created Adam, right? But you can't go any farther back than that, right? How come?

Because Adam didn't exist. So here you go, cruising down the road in your position of Adam, and the gospel comes to you, and you exercise your will, and you believe in the person and work of Christ, and you become saved. What you don't know at the time is that you got crucified with Christ, you were separated from your whole association with Adam, you were buried and resurrected in Christ. Christ is now your life. your history ceased in Adam and now your history is in Christ. How long has he been around? How long has he been around? How long? Eternity. So our Father can say, I've known you in Christ since the foundations of eternity.

Oh, I see how that works. You see, when you leave a finite man and enter into an eternal man, God now looks at you from an eternal standpoint. We look at eternity spreading out. I love what Hal Malloy used to say. Eternity is everything compressed. It's all going on right now. It isn't endless eons of time. To me, that makes a lot more sense. Eternity being everything going.

Because God's knowledge. He's all-knowable. He's all-knowledgeable, right? But He doesn't think sequentially, like you and I do. We think this thought, and then there's the next one. He has all knowledge in play right now, all the time. That's eternal. I can't understand it, but I think that's the way to describe it. So, personhood is the thing that doesn't change.

My identity with either Adam or Christ is the thing that changes, and I have a nature that either is the nature of the resurrected Christ or that of Adam. Now, the believer actually has two natures. He's identified and tied to and cemented to and united to one of them, which is the resurrected life of Christ.

He's no longer identified, united to, cemented to, the old Adamic life. My buddy who lives across the street over here that's not a Christian, are his sins paid for on the cross? And why is he going to hell if he doesn't believe in Christ? He didn't accept it, but what's the mechanics of it? He's attached to Adam. And what's the deal with Adam's nature? What's God's pronouncement on the Adamic nature? It's condemned. So if you're tied to it, I don't care what Christ did on the cross, He condemned that nature. He paid the penalty for the sins, but He condemned the nature.

So if you're attached to it and you leave the planet, you're going where it's going. Just like us, we're attached to the resurrected, glorified Christ. When we leave the planet, where do we go? to be with him. See that? Person's the same, it's who you're united to. Did you have a question? I don't think he did.

Because the Old Testament, there's a lot of Old Testament men and women that God accounted righteous because they believed God, like Abraham. When God brought Adam, when Adam first sinned, he felt naked and so he covered himself, right? That was his remedy to the sin. God brought him skins, right? And said, put these on as a covering. And he accepted them and put them on. I think he believed God about that. And so that's all it takes in the Old Testament is to believe whatever God tells you, you're in. Abraham was declared righteous because he believed God. Did God give him the gospel? No. He gave him some information about what he was going to do through him and make him a great nation, and he believed him, so God accounted him righteous. He said, you're righteous before me. Question? Okay.

Can you describe some of the elements of your condition? We did some of them. It's variable with changes. It's experiential. It's the experiential aspect of the Christian walk. And as a believer, it's totally dependent on your position, isn't it? Totally dependent on your position. So what that does to us, or says to me, is it puts a real emphasis on us learning what our position is. Do you see that?

Our faith has to have an object. We have to know what to believe. If you come out of Catholicism like I did, they had a deal that said, well you have to have faith in faith. Whatever that means. Faith has a specific object. Everything you believe is a specific truth and a specific person, Christ himself.

So that's why you have Bible study. That's why you spend time reading the Bible. What are you finding out? You're really finding out your position. So that as the Spirit of God works in you, your position, you operate by faith, in believing the facts and the person about the facts, and the Holy Spirit is conforming you to the one that you believe in. Kind of cool, right?

Your condition can fluctuate, but really, what God is trying to do is get your condition to line up with your position. That glorious day when God takes you home, that process is going to be over. Because your position and your condition will be the same. And the reason it will be the same is because you will find yourself instantly face-to-face in front of the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Full-on. Isn't that cool? That's why none of those guys that died ever want to come back to our Bible study. Yes, I think that's really well said. Initially, your condition is totally self-centered. It's all about you. It's all about my spiritual growth. It's all about how the Lord relates to me. And as you grow spiritually and you're conformed to the image, it gets to be not I, but Christ's life. He becomes the center of your focus. That is really cool. Do you know that the greatest liberty God gave us is to be free from us? That's the greatest liberty we have. Yeah, don't have to mess with me anymore.

So, is the condition of every believer the same? Answer, no. Question nine. What will be the results if a believer does not know his position in the Lord Jesus and how to abide at Him as His very life? What's going to be the results of somebody like that? What's going to happen? His growth would certainly be hindered. Do you agree with that? If he doesn't know his position, his growth has to be hindered. Because what is the growth process? You're already in the grace. It's growing in the knowledge and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's being conformed to him. It's so important that we know.

Miles Stanford used to say, only the believers that know grow. So you can't be one of those warm, fuzzy guys that sing songs all the time but you never open your Bible. You're not going to grow. You've got to know. Your faith must have an object. You must know these truths about yourself and about who Christ is in order for you to grow. Because otherwise, if you don't know anything, how are you going to function?

There you go. That's really a good answer. You ride the roller coaster of trying to keep a law of principle, because no matter what church you go to, the Christians you hang around with, they're going to give you a list of things to do, and good Christians act like this, and they behave this way, and you can be involved in a fellowship, that doesn't study their Bible, but boy, they got a list of rules of how you're supposed to act as a Christian, don't they? And if you can do that, then maybe you're accepted. Problem is, that's not spiritual growth. It has to be. Yeah.

And I have to tell you, There's no more exciting enterprise that a human being can enter into than seeking the truth and the word of God. That's the most exciting thing you can do. There's nothing cooler than that. Whether you believe me or not, give it a go. Because it's really exciting.

And take it from a guy who wasn't a believer until he was 35. I was chasing a lot of rabbits up until then, looking for excitement. There's nothing like the Christian life for excitement. The Christian who does come to see his position in the Lord Jesus begins to experience the benefits of it. And the fact that he is in Christ. His daily state is developed from the source of his eternal standing. Then why will a believer who doesn't know of their position not grow? How come they won't grow? Just other than the obvious. I'll give you my own answer.

I put that in there because my thought process was like this. It might be said that knowledge about the Father is derived from study and revelation as a result of that study. Wisdom is based upon that knowledge and has developed into knowing the Father through the long-range spiritual growth in Christ. and I do mean long, throughout all eternity. Do you realize that we are going to continue to grow in the knowledge of God for all eternity? You know, you guys all think you've arrived because you got here this morning. We're just beginning this process of growing in the glory of Christ.

I would say too, I think, If you don't know, you can't receive. You can't accept the gift. That's good. Sure. And the gift that God has for you and me in the Word is a gift that you would never come up with in your own mind. The world won't dream this kind of stuff up.

The fact that you were crucified with Christ, is that a good thing? Is that something to be joyful about? How about when Peter says, count it all joy when you suffer? How about that one? So, so, I mean, So how would, you know, a believer who's reading down through Peter one day and he sees this, count it all joy, and if he's an honest person like you are, says, yeah, sure.

I'm not going there. I've had enough joy, thank you. There's a little bug that I still can't think. God makes all things beautiful and sometimes, well, we haven't got to that time yet. Sure. But have you not, at certain points in your life, seen how the suffering of this present time, whatever it might be, has produced fruit that was unheard of in your life before then? Have you not?

And I'm not talking about physical, most of it's emotional, or fear, or loneliness, or I don't know, a bunch of things, that it does produce because I've often thought that God, in dealing with my Adam, puts me in a circumstance that my Adam can't deal with.

And I'm screaming and yelling at him and complaining, but what am I discovering? I'm discovering a truth that he already knew, and that is that my old Adamic nature, which I'm not tied to but I've been depending on, You cannot meet whatever this stress is.

And I have to trust the Lord about it. I have to, because I have nowhere else to go. I can't do it in my own strength. So if I begin to learn that process, I can understand when Peter says, count it all joy, because God has a specific thing he's doing in our lives, and that's separating us conditionally from Adam, so that we would abide conditionally and trust Christ moment by moment. Well, we are not going to abandon Adam until we discover every day that he's not trustworthy. That he won't hold you up. That you can't cut it. That's a wonderful thing. But it was painful getting there. Count it all joy? Maybe today. Maybe not tomorrow.

If we're to grow in grace, in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. We ask, like in Ephesians, that the Father would give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. Not necessarily the knowledge of the Word, but of Christ Himself. Now that's another aspect that we haven't talked about much. Why do you study the Word of God? So that you can learn these truths? Right? So you can have an object for your faith, right? Food for your soul? What's a better reason? There you go. Why do you study the Word?

Because that's where you get to know Him. All of the truths that you learn are Him. And at some point in your Christian walk, it's going to go from objective fact to a person. And when the person begins to show up, you say, my goodness, the facts are wonderful, but what they're doing is they're revealing a person to me who is my very Lord. So you can say, you know, that's what spiritual fellowship is. That's really what it is. You have fellowship with the person.

Christ is the truth. He said, I am the way, the truth and the life, didn't he? He said, he didn't say, I am the truth. He said, I am truth. What is eternal life according to Jesus Christ? Eternal life is to know me and the one who sent me. It isn't I pulled into the gas station of eternal life and got loaded up. It's to know Christ and to know the Father through Christ via the word of God.

It's a personal thing. Do you see that? The believer that is growing, he's growing in his intimacy with Christ through this Word. That's what's really happening. And Christ is winning his heart over, so that he finds more value in Christ than he does in the desires of the flesh. Pretty cool. That's the Lord calling, telling me I can't. We study to know Him and that knowledge is developed into wisdom which is manifested in a worthy walk and a fruitful work. Colossians 1, 9 and 10. So even though the work is complete in Christ, there's nothing automatic about our experience of it.

Ours is a responsibility of faith. Do you understand what that sentence means? We have the responsibility of faith. You okay with that? You have the ability to respond in faith. That's our only responsibility, is to believe. What is the work? Paul said, what is the work? It's that we believe. That's the work.

You've got to know what you believe. You've got to know who you believe. We were not only born anew by faith, but we are to live, walk, and grow by faith, to enter intelligently and cooperatively into that which the Father has established for us in Christ. What makes the difference in the believer's condition is that he becomes clearly aware of his sanctified position in the risen Lord. Jude wrote this in his epistle to them that are sanctified by God the Father and preserved in Jesus Christ and called. Our Father has eternally set us apart and preserved us in His Son, and called us to His service. All of the growing believer's life is considered service, whether it's formal or otherwise.

You ever think about that? That everything you do is considered service to the Lord. When we get to the beam of judgment, we are all going to be rewarded. And I dare say, 80% of what we get rewarded for, you will have no idea. that it was Donna there. How do you know? Well, I think there are opportunities and there are things that come up in a Christian's life that happen that he's not even aware that he's serving the Lord just by his existence in the room. If God called you to be a flower along the road so that people could come by and just admire the glory of God in you, that's enough. That's enough. You don't have to be a missionary. You don't have to be on TV. You don't have to do any of that. Our job, when you think about it, we have one job. We're an ambassador of the reconciliation.

Isn't that right? Which means that we're not from here, we've been sent here to say to the world, I'm an ambassador of the God of the universe, and God has been reconciled about you because of the work of his Son on the cross. Now I can do that verbally, I can do it non-verbally, Paul says in Corinthians that you are epistles of Christ. You know what an epistle is? It's a letter. It's a non-verbal communication. It's an email from God. And you're the template on which people can see Christ. You may not ever know it happened. You have no idea.

I tell my story about Clyde. We were in Sacramento last week and I got to see a guy, his name is Clyde Mills, he's about 77, 78 years old. 35 years ago, when I was not a believer, I went to a funeral in Chicago and it was a terrible, morbid, Catholic deal. Except at the end of it, this Clyde stands up, who's a pastor, and he talks for just two or three minutes and he talked about life.

And what he talked about wouldn't leave my mind. It was just that little goad, you know, that God puts in you that somebody came along and said something and it's stuck. And I kept wondering, what did he mean by that? Because, you know, death is dead. So when I became a believer, I thought I'd gotten a message to him telling him, about that funeral.

And so I hadn't seen this man for 35 years. I saw him. And I sat in his living room, told him the story, and he didn't remember. But God used him for me and he didn't know. That's what I mean. So at the beam of judgment, he's going to get rewarded. And I said to him, see, there's stuff going on you don't know about. You know, you're going to get a reward because God used you for my salvation. Sorry. Okay, question 10.

Consider 2 Corinthians 3.18 in the light of position and condition.

Somebody read 2 Corinthians 3.18. Anybody? But we all, with open faith, we believe within a glass the glory of the Lord. Okay. We all with unveiled face. Why unveiled face? Unveiled means there's no barrier.

Remember the story about Moses and the cleft of the rock? And he'd come down and his face was veiled. But now, why wouldn't God let Moses see all of his glory? Why wouldn't he? And why would it blind him? Too much for him. Why? He's still an atom. But this says, because you're in Christ, guess what? Unveiled face. Beholding as in a mirror. What's the mirror? What's the reflector? Is that the first spell? This is it. You know what the word behold means? Anybody? Yeah, it's the word from theater to gaze upon. It means, what's the last play you ever saw that you really liked? A lot of people go see The Nutcracker this time of year. Some movies, some plays are so good that you project yourself into them.

So here you are beholding. You are so engaged with unveiled face. And what are you engaged with according to the verse? The glory of the Lord. How cool is that? So this is a process that the Spirit is promoting and working into every believer's life. So here you are beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled face in the Word of God. What happens? What's the result of doing that? According to the verse.

Yeah, I'm being transformed into his very image. Some people say, well, gee, it's the struggle and the suffering that transforms me. No, it's not. What transforms you is the beholding of the glory of the Lord. Now, the suffering and the count it all joy part might get you to the point where you do go into the Word looking for Christ, but the suffering just gets you ready. The actual conforming, transforming happens when you behold the glory of the Lord. Say that again? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And you know, really, when you think about it, The sufferings that the Lord sends us, sends our way, usually from the endemic viewpoint, it's suffering. From our position in Christ, it's not.

Do you understand what I'm saying? The old man suffers. The new man in Christ counts it all joy. Hal Maloy used to say, there's no such thing as a tragedy in a Christian's life. I agree with him. There isn't. Because God works all things together for good. Did something happen to you last week that God didn't know about? and he isn't using to conform you to Christ? No!

When you say a tragic to you, what you are you talking about? Old man, new man. How about your new man in Christ? It may not be a tragedy because you see that God is using it for your good. We are transformed into the same image from glory to glory. I like that it doesn't say from a dirty rotten sinner to a Christian. It says from one state of glory to another state.

So you already have some, he's already given you some, and by beholding his glory you are more and more transformed into his very image. And who does it? According to the verse. Who does it? It's the Spirit of God who's doing it. Isn't that cool? Are you engaged? Oh boy. But it's the Spirit of God that's doing everything. He's revealing Christ and He's transforming you. And you're exercising faith. If you concentrate on your condition, you're not living by faith. But you're living by feelings and appearances.

The inevitable result will be increasing self-consciousness and self-centeredness. As we behold the glory of the Lord, we begin to realize we can rest in Him and in our position. The one thing that takes away the self-centeredness of your life is to become Christ-centered. And Christ-centeredness is done by beholding His glory, by studying His Word.

You alright with that? So it isn't a matter of, back to Holly's initial question, it isn't a matter of me exercising my will to be self-centered or Christ-centered. I can't pull that one off. But I can exercise my will to believe what God has shown me in His Word. And by doing that, The Spirit of God reveals Christ to me and transforms me into His image.

Do you see that? And I become, conditionally, more Christ-centered. You alright with that? Father, how we thank you for your grace towards us. How we thank you for these principles you have in place that are designed specifically for us as believers to walk by faith by knowing and beholding the glory of your Son. Father, we thank you. We pray in his precious name. Amen.