Joyfully Shedding the Corruption of Our Flesh

Matthew 5:20

For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

No man can make himself pure enough to enter heaven by obeying the laws.  The Pharisees created laws upon laws that were supposedly put in place to prepare them for their way to heaven.  Jesus put to rest the folly in their thinking.  Jesus taught that there was no possibility for anyone to enter heaven without accepting Him as Savior.

It is also revealed to us in the Holy Word that no one can stand before the eternal light and consummate holiness of Almighty God with the slightest taint of sin.  Thus there is the need for us to accept Our Savior, Jesus Christ.  It is He, and He alone, that washes us clean of our sin. It is His shed blood that makes us worthy to stand before the Most Holy, Almighty God of the Universe.  It is the Son of God that secures our eternal destination in heaven.

As babes in Christ, we joyfully celebrate our eternal gift as heirs to the kingdom of God.  But our joy is quickly challenged when we realize that we must still deal with the sin nature within us.  Through the work of the Holy Spirit, we become cognizant of how wretched we are in our carnal nature.  We also come to the place we recognize that we are incapable of overcoming our wretchedness on our own.  But we must not let this steal our joy.  In fact, we should experience an even greater joy as the Holy Spirit teaches us just how essential our decision was to accept Jesus Christ as Our Savior.

Let us not lose our joy as we struggle with our carnal nature.  Let us remain in the joy that we experienced as new babes in Christ.  Let us rejoice in knowing that we will stand before Almighty God with the assurance in Christ that the Father in heaven will only see our holiness.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we thank You for making it possible for us to stand in Your presence one day.  We praise You for making The Word flesh so that we could be inheritors of the only bloodline without sin.  We rejoice in knowing that one day our holiness will be complete as we shed our earthly bodies and take on the pure, supernatural bodies that You have set aside for us.  We pray, Lord, that the Holy Spirit guide us and strengthen us as we learn to shed the corruption of our flesh here on earth in preparation for the time that we go to our full glory with You in heaven.  We ask all these things in the name of the Son of the Most High God, Jesus Christ.