“The path of the righteous is level;
you make level the way of the righteous.
In the path of your judgments,
O Lord, we wait for you;
your name and remembrance
are the desire of our soul.
My soul yearns for you in the night;
my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.
For when your judgments are in the earth,
the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.” (Isaiah 26:7-9 ESV)
What should this look like in the life of a true follower of Jesus Christ today? Well, if we read the New Testament books, book by book, and chapter by chapter, and verse by verse, chronologically, in context, we are taught over and over what it means to believe in Jesus Christ and what that faith should look like for it to be genuine God-provided, God-gifted, and God-persuaded faith which saves us from our sins and which gives us the hope of eternal life with God in heaven. It means dying to sin and obeying our Lord, in practice.
It means we have forsaken our lives of living in sin and for self to now live for the glory and praise of God in walks of obedience to him in honoring him with our lives. It means that he is now our Lord (Owner-Master) and we are his possession, and our lives no longer belong to us to be lived however we want to live them, but they now belong to God to be lived the way in which he designed and purposed for us to live as slaves of God and of his righteousness, in full surrender to his will and purpose for our lives daily.
So, if this is how we are living, then God is #1 in our lives, and he gets top priority, and our goal and purpose is to serve him with our lives in walks of obedience to his will and to his ways. So, we are no longer people who live in sexual immorality, lying, cheating, stealing, defrauding, hating, killing, and manipulating, but we are trustworthy, honest, faithful, morally pure, upright, and godly people whose desire it is to do the will of God and to get the truth of the gospel out to the people of the world for their salvation.
And so not only are we living righteously, by the grace of God, in his power, although not necessarily in absolute perfection, but we are those who are teaching and instructing others to deny self, die daily to sin, and follow Jesus in obedience to his commands, by God-gifted faith in Jesus Christ. And we are warning against liars and deceivers and false gospels which do not teach the truth of the gospel. For if sin is what we practice, and not obedience to God, we will not inherit eternal life with God, regardless of our lip service.
[Matt 7:21-23; Lu 9:23-26; John 10:27-30; Acts 26:18; Rom 2:6-8; Rom 6:1-23; Rom 8:1-14; Rom 12:1-2; 1 Co 6:9-10,19-20; 1 Co 10:1-22; 2 Co 5:10,15,21; Gal 5:16-24; Gal 6:7-8; Eph 2:8-10; Eph 4:17-32; Eph 5:3-6; Col 1:21-23; Col 3:1-17; Titus 2:11-14; 1 Jn 1:5-10; 1 Jn 2:3-6,15-17; 1 Jn 3:4-10; 1 Pet 2:24; Heb 3:1-19; Heb 4:1-13; Heb 10:23-31; Heb 12:1-2]
“If favor is shown to the wicked,
he does not learn righteousness;
in the land of uprightness he deals corruptly
and does not see the majesty of the Lord.
O Lord, your hand is lifted up,
but they do not see it.
Let them see your zeal for your people, and be ashamed.
Let the fire for your adversaries consume them.” (Isaiah 26:10-11 ESV)
Now, this is very critical that we get what this is saying here, for it is extremely relevant to what is happening in the life of “the church” today, at least here in America. We have so many “shepherds” of the people who are leading them astray to what is false, and to what is of Satan, and to what is not of God, but in the name of God and of Jesus Christ and of the gospel of Christ and of our salvation from sin and eternal life with God. But they are liars and deceivers who manipulate the truth in order to tell their lies.
And realize with me here that the lies are not all outright and obvious. Many of them are very subtle and twisted and altered truths which give the appearance of truth outwardly, for the undiscerning, but are half-truths (lies blended in with truth). Many people are using the means of misimpressions to spread the lies, for they are indirect lies, and so they are harder to prove, but they give out deliberate and false impressions in order to deceive the people. Another form of this are non-denial denials, which are indirect lies.
The manipulators (pastors, elders, missionaries, evangelists, etc.) who make a practice of manipulation and misimpressions and the twisting of the truth and indirect lies are very skilled at this. So they dance all over the place in order to avoid telling the truth. And this is how many of them are teaching the Scriptures, by skipping over parts of Scriptures in order to teach them out of context, in order to make them say what they do not say if taught within the correct context. And many people are following their lies.
But it isn’t just that they avoid telling the whole truth and that they manipulate the Scriptures to make them say what they want them to say, but they ignore the pleas of those who are calling for them to tell the truth. And not only that, but they are then turning around and they are making out the righteous (in the eyes of God) to be the enemy, and the true gospel to be the false gospel, and so everything is turned inside out. But the people love it because it makes them feel good, and so the masses follow them.
“O Lord, you will ordain peace for us,
for you have indeed done for us all our works.
O Lord our God,
other lords besides you have ruled over us,
but your name alone we bring to remembrance.
They are dead, they will not live;
they are shades, they will not arise;
to that end you have visited them with destruction
and wiped out all remembrance of them.
But you have increased the nation, O Lord,
you have increased the nation; you are glorified;
you have enlarged all the borders of the land.” (Isaiah 26:12-15 ESV)
Now, these “other lords” can be sinful habits which we used to participate in, or the trappings of this sinful world, and worldliness and worldly thinking. And this can include compromise with the ungodly and with the self-indulgent of the world who would try to convince us of their lies, or who would try to trip us up or to get us to come more their way and to not be so “religious.” For a while we may have given in to their influence until the Lord really got a hold of our lives and turned our lives around for our good.
“Other lords” can also be anyone worshiped above God, like the US government via the pledge (vow) of allegiance (worship, devotion) to our form of government to the point to where we believe the government over God and his word, to where we are not discerning people who test everything that we hear, but to where we believe the lies as though they are truth just because the lies come from the government or the media or pastors or any other “trusted” sources which may not be trustworthy.
So, the encouragement for us here is to be first and foremost those whose lives are dedicated to the forsaking of our sins and to following our Lord Jesus in walks of obedience to his commands. Then, we must be dedicated to learning the truth of God’s word and to sharing the truth and to refuting the lies of the enemy so that many will be saved with genuine faith. And then Jesus/God must be the only Lord of our lives who we worship. And we must forsake all other gods and then be people who test everything.
Oh, to be like Thee! Oh, to be like Thee,
Blessèd Redeemer, pure as Thou art;
Come in Thy sweetness, come in Thy fullness;
Stamp Thine own image deep on my heart.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrYhiK2nQBg
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