Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore, let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach. For we have no continuing city here, but we seek one to come.
Select a thought to read by choosing a collection, the month, and then the day:
Paul desired the saints in Corinth to "be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace." He exhorted the Philippians to live so as to "be blameless and harmless, the sons of God without rebuke". He told Timothy, his dearly loved son in the faith, to "keep thyself pure." And he himself lived so as to have "a conscience void of offense toward both God and man."
Jesus told those who followed him closely to "be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." Once, when he was teaching on the kind of life that was expected of God's children, his disciples gasped, "Who then can be saved?" Then Jesus answered, "With men it is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
"If any man be in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature", wrote Paul, and Peter added that this new creature is "a partaker of the divine nature." When you receive God's Spirit, a miraculous transition is completed within you, one that is so great that you yourself cannot understand it without help from God. When you are baptized with the holy Ghost, you are re-created. You become a new kind of being: a human with an earthly body and a heavenly spirit. Before the day of Pentecost (Acts 2), no such creature existed, except for Jesus. This new creature has power in his soul sufficient to subdue the covetousness, the ungodly lusts, and the pride that is embedded in the human, fleshly nature.
Jesus is not in heaven wrestling with the awful spirits of envy, strife, and lust. Neither did he wrestle with them on earth after his temptation in the wilderness because he learned to let that divine nature live in him. So did Paul and others. Paul said, "For me to live is Christ." And "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God." Paul did not pass his time on earth constantly struggling against the pressure of lust, nor fighting against spirits of envy and pride, nor yet trying to talk himself out of gambling away his money. The divine nature within him was alive! And that life of the holy Ghost is so far superior to this world that the world could not attract his attention and allure him to sin. Neither can the world allure you to sin, my brother, if you stay filled with the holy Ghost as Paul did. In the Spirit is the nature of God, and God is not tempted to sin.
In a sermon in 1979, my father said, "If you have the mind of Christ, you are not tempted. The mind of Christ is not tempted." Another way to describe this is "walking in the Spirit". Paul said that those who walk in the Spirit "do not fulfill the lusts of the flesh."
This is true. Temptation is an event that takes place when a man desires something that is evil. Men are tempted to do evil when they are drawn away from righteousness by their own lusts. Those who are partakers of God's divine nature, and who learn to continually walk in it, are not tempted to do evil, are not drawn away from God by the desires of the flesh. Their minds are in an entirely different place from where sin is.
Riding down the highway today, my wife and I passed by a billboard advertising a "gentleman's club". On the billboard were pictures of two beautiful women posing in a manner that was intended to lure men to that nightclub. But what it made me feel was sadness. I tried to imagine those two beautiful women as they once were: innocent little girls at play. And I wondered what had happened to them to make them who they are today. Who had stolen their long-ago innocence? Who brought black night into their little girl world and snuffed out the brightness of youthful days of play? What horrible events, I wondered, transformed them from innocent little girls, somebody's precious little daughters, into women using the shapely bodies and beauty that God gave them now to lure men from their homes and families, away from Jesus and the hope of eternal life?
Tears came to my eyes as I thought on this and as my wife and I talked about it. I felt such a deep grief for their loss. I feel it now. To consider what those young women, and so many others like them, have missed in life by following the bitter path of sin is so sad to me. No, they do not attract me at all with their seductively parted lips. They do not make me want to go see their wretched nightclub acts. What they do to me is cause me pain for the tragedy of sin that has ruined their once unsullied lives.
This is how the mind of Christ works when it lives in us. His thoughts are not men's thoughts, and his ways are not their ways. And when we learn to let him live through us, we are spared a world of regret and shame.