Every Virtue We Possess --Oswald Chambers

(As we approach a New Year, many will make resolutions on this or that or the other thing...eating or drinking, losing some weight, gaining some strength, perhaps exercising regularly, etc... I don't make New Year's resolutions, but one year I did, I prayed I would fall in love with Jesus afresh, like when I first met Him and could resist Him no longer. That I would love Him like He loved me. He answered my prayer in February of that New Year and He has remained my first love (for the most part) since then. There is a truth in Oswald's devotion today, one we cannot miss. I need not comment, but here are some Bible verses that confirm Oswald is on to something:

2 Corinthians 5:17--"Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come."

Ezekiel 11:19--" I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh."

Ephesians 4:22-24--"You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness."

Colossians 3:9-11--"Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all."

Isaiah 43:18-19--"Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."

2 Corinthians 4:16-17--"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all."

Romans 6:4-7--"We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with,[a] that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been set free from sin."

Galatians 2:19-20--"“For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."

If you are a professed follower of Christ, you are now a saint who sometimes sins, not a sinner trying to be a saint. It is only through our surrender to Christ love that we find our victory. There is nothing good in us that God didn't put there. He redeems us, restores us and renews us to be all that He created us to be; holy and blameless in His sight, pure, holy and righteous. I dare say that if we believe these things, we will more likely walk in them than if we don't. My prayer is that we all take captive every thought, present it to the truth of God's Word, and then we act, for His glory which will always be for our good! Read on...MH)

“And Every Virtue We Possess”

…All my springs are in you.?Psalm 87:7

Our Lord never “patches up” our natural virtues, that is, our natural traits, qualities, or characteristics. He completely remakes a person on the inside— “…put on the new man…” (Ephesians 4:24). In other words, see that your natural human life is putting on all that is in keeping with the new life. The life God places within us develops its own new virtues, not the virtues of the seed of Adam, but of Jesus Christ. Once God has begun the process of sanctification in your life, watch and see how God causes your confidence in your own natural virtues and power to wither away. He will continue until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through this drying–up experience!

The sign that God is at work in us is that He is destroying our confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ— a life that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely on what they have by virtue of heredity. God does not take our natural virtues and transform them, because our natural virtues could never even come close to what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every part of our natural bodily life into harmony with the new life God has placed within us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.

And every virtue we possess

Is His alone.

--Oswald Chambers