Lena's Journalin' to Luke 2 Today

“ …and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased”…..usually we hear, ”and good will toward men”. I just paid closer attention in the NKJV and the footnote reads, “towards men of goodwill.”
This changes the whole deal.
You do realize God’s Word is not having an effective work on those who merely skim through it?
When Jesus spoke in parables, His disciples would ask Him, what was going on? They could hardly understand a word of what He’d just spent the day talking about. The deal was what He was talking about was to spiritually stir up a desire for further eternal truth. It was also to show that God’s word is spirit and life and cannot be figured out and reasoned out with intellectual thought patterns. He and God both wanted to know who would “take the bait” or have their appetites wetted for more. The disciples always got up the nerve to ask questions, which caused them to dig deeper into a personal relationship with Jesus.
As they did this their love and trust in Him increased. As love and trust increase, so does obedience. Obedience is the only appropriate response to the love of God extended to man. Trust builds faith, and faith is the only action that pleases God.
So the angels said “peace towards all men with whom God is pleased” That speaks of those who are relational with God as Father, it speaks of those who obey His words in the spirit, not by reasoning and weighing it out with the mind, and it speaks of those who trust Him enough to follow after Him with intent to do more and more of what He says! These will be at peace, while all others will have turmoil in life, and struggle with the Word.
How does one come to know these dissections of the word? They become everyday students of the Word and seek its deep meanings out with spirit-led and humbly taught guidance. They seek to personally know the spirit of the written Words of God.
If I’m a disciple I comb through the Word, dig deeper, study and apply the word regularly. I ask questions of stronger disciples around me. Jesus set up THE model of discipleship for us. He had 12 men hang around Him, watch Him, help Him, serve Him, and purposely learn from Him. They pursue Him, because they deem the Words given by God, as important enough to guard and keep for greater understanding.
The gospel is offered to all, the peace is obtained by those who will seize it as their own. John the Baptist said, “The kingdom of God suffers violence, and violent men take it with force.”
Jesus took it violently, we must take what He paid for as something we truly desire and want to keep and then maintain it as though it is the greatest treasure in the whole world. A pearl of great price, one precious lamb lost from the sheepfold. How precious and priceless is it to us? It is priceless to God, and so are we.
Yesterday I was thinking of how just about every thing in life costs something to have, yet we want all God offers to us to be free to us, and for some reason we think it is.
Salvation is a free gift, in that it is even available for us to have at all. Before Jesus, it was not at all free to mankind, we rather tried to earn our way, hoping to someday be saved at least somewhat. After Jesus we can now freely accept what He did and be saved without ever having done anything correctly before this time of acceptance. He freely went to hell for mankind, and took back the keys of death, hell and the grave’s eternal power over us In fact even the good things we did in life are not on an eternal account with God, like a scoreboard of sorts, racking up points for or against us. They just don’t count where salvation is concerned; the only thing that does count is Jesus’ precious blood.
That blood shed is so precious to God that it is THE ONLY WAY to be made right with God at all ever. That is the free part.
Listen here – We have a FREE will to accept or reject THE ONE WAY God has deemed is THE WAY. That’s the free part, we can care to choose for or against!
BUT there was a cost, a very dear and high price! PAID in FULL by God, for us. We don’t have to shed our physical life and then die an eternal death for it! That was done for us. We believe and receive……AND THEN respond to that.
The response is where the life of the covenant begins for us individually. It is the activation of the covenant on our side.
He died for everyone, even those who do not yet believe. There must be a response and that will cost us dearly, but what does not cost us is not important to us.
In 2 Samuel 24:24 David himself states a principle for each human on earth in any day or age - "No, but I will surely buy it from you for a price, for I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God which cost me nothing."
That which costs me, is priceless to me. Each of us are required a response before God. Faith is dead without works. It is not validated without follow up corresponding action.
I love the word “responsibility”. Most American words came from other languages and they have root words that require the breaking up and defining of parts to understand the Word. I like to break this Word up in my mind as, “response – ability”. What’s my ability to respond? My ability to respond to God does not lie within my own strength. I am responsible, it is required of me, whether I know it or not. Each human must respond or give an account to God for their response to His Son, Jesus. The response is not based on how able I am, but how able He is, and how much do I believe, by faith, in that ability? That faith in something other than who I naturally am, is costly. I lay me down, in order to do that.
Not my will, but Thine, be done. It takes the giving up of my own life, because I’m responding, not because I have to, but because I freely want to. Again that is the free part. I give it up freely. I pay my portion into this deal, because I can and will. I choose freely to pay all to it. I choose it above other options available to me to freely choose in life.
I can choose another mode if I want, I can try anything I want, for I’m free to. There’ll be a consequence for wrong choices, as in any other area in life, but I can choose whichever way I want to go. I may suffer pain, agony, tragedy along the way, but I can choose that if I want. I’m free to choose whatever avenue I want. If I don’t pay sales tax, property taxes, subdivision taxes, gas taxes, electricity taxes, road tolls, parking fees, or my bills each month, there are consequences, but I can pay the consequences, if I want to. It’s up to me.
I am so thankful for consequences. I believe they are grace set before us to show us of the costs involved in what we really want, and they are also meant to be training in doing things another’s way. The consequences were set out by God to lead us home to His will and best laid out plan for eternity.