You Aren't What You Were


 

None of you are what you were but what you were makes you what you are. 

 

The truth about Truth is that it is, and has always been, a stumbling block. Even for many who believe, it is, according to Christ, intended to be so.1 Truth gives us the reason and opportunity to change. Without it, it is impossible to repent and the chains of ignorance which hold us captive are maintained. It, truth, is the conveyance of accurate knowledge which, in a gospel sense, is dispensed by heaven as revelation. Truth drives, if not forces, the use of agency which in turn renders us accountable before God and is the warrant for him to dispense just judgments.2,3

 

Jehovah’s appointing a servant as a “a light to the gentiles, that you may be my salvation unto the end of the earth”4make ready the conditions which impose upon Jehovah’s people, indeed all people, a choice.  Choose what is bitter—the darkness of spiritual blindness5 or, pay attention to what he is doing and choose that which is sweet; Jehovah’s light or the terms of his covenant.6 Not from men nor their religions but through his servant—who like Moses personifies Jehovah’s righteousness and light and from whom his precepts, laws and teachings go forth.7  While the wicked may reject the servant, with his presence, the fate of nations and peoples hangs in the balance.

 

Choosing the light appears to be an easy choice. Yes? But it is clothed in conflict.

 

What the carnal man wants, the spiritual man doesn’t need

What the spiritual man needs, the carnal man doesn’t want 

 

Sometimes the carnal man seems like an insuperable obstacle to the spiritual man yet Truth insists each of us decide which man governs the other.  Spiritual man in us leads to light, life and covenant blessings.  Carnal man to blinding darkness and covenant curses. 

 

“The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.  And that is why at the end of all things, when the sun rises on the good and the twilight turns to blackness on the bad, the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,’ and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”8

 

Truth’s offer?  --  Change from what you were to what you are and may become.

 

But it shouldn’t surprise us, Isaiah said that would happen.

 

 

Signed

 

John The-Not-So-Beloved

 

1.     NC Luke 8:28

2.     T&C Glossary, Truth

3.     T&C Glossary, Agency

4.     OC Isaiah 17:6; 20:1

5.     OC Isaiah 21:2

6.     OC Isaiah 18:2

7.     OC Isaiah 15:7; 15:10; 20:1

8.     C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce Chapter 9 [not an exact recitation]

9.      

 

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