July 2022 Welcome ...

Peter L. Meney | Added: Jul 06, 2022 | Category: Editorial

This issue of New Focus includes important articles about a believer’s sanctification and freedom from the law. It contains contributions from Don Fortner, Robert Hawker, and George Ella and a helpful extract from a Gospel Magazine from 1836, which we believe has aged rather well.

Many of the Lord’s people struggle to enjoy the blessed state of Christian liberty into which they have been brought by the cleansing blood of Jesus and the imputed righteousness of God. They have heard the Lord Jesus Christ called, ‘THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS’ but they have not yet begun to live in the fulness of that truth. 

Rather than rejoicing in the fulness of God’s provision they imagine there is yet something for them to add, to live up to, and to prove. Instead of resting in the joy of what the Lord has done for them they allow themselves to be brought again under the condemnation of the law and the bondage of guilt.

Despite reading such scriptures as, ‘thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God, and the LORD hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself’ and despite hearing the apostles confirm, ‘ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people’ many believers still cannot reconcile the clear testimony of God’s word with their personal awareness of sin, a sense of unworthiness, and the accusations of Satan in their conscience.

They fail to distinguish the holiness of the incorruptible new spiritual man, ‘which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness’, and which cannot be improved upon, and the incorrigible old man of flesh, who also cannot be improved upon. These two natures dwell in us like two armies, constantly at war. 

We do not say we are without sin. While we remain in the flesh we lament the sin that so easily besets us and must frequently return to the blood of Christ for forgiveness and peace of heart. Yet neither can we deny the sovereign grace of God that takes sinners like us and makes us holy by blood atonement, and righteous by the perfect obedience unto death of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Our God has sanctified every chosen, redeemed sinner by imputed righteousness in justification, and imparted righteousness in the new birth. He has given us a new, holy nature born of God that cannot sin. In the last day the Lord God will transform our flesh and ‘the dead shall be raised incorruptible’ and bring us into the perfection of holiness in resurrection glory. Then we shall be satisfied, when we awake with His likeness.

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