Then the LORD said, “Has anyone ever heard of such a thing, even among the pagan nations? My virgin Israel has done something too terrible to understand! Does the snow ever melt high up in the mountains of Lebanon? Do the cold, flowing streams from the crags of Mount Hermon ever run dry? Jeremiah 18:13-14 NLT
When my son was little he loved to pretend. One of his favorite characters was Superman. He had a red cape, red boots, and a Superman t-shirt. He could run around the house, jump off the coffee table, and even hold his eye a certain way and pretend to have x-ray vision. As hard as he tried, however, he was never Superman. He couldn’t fly. He didn’t have strength of steel and he didn’t really have x-ray vision. I tried to encourage him, but the whole time He was just Nathaniel pretending to be something he wasn’t. He was playing.
You and I were created by God to obey God. We were created to bring God glory. That’s who a believer is really designed to be. We weren’t created to run away from God’s plan in disobedience. We are given freedom, and we often use that freedom wrongly, but that isn’t God’s plan for His children. When we sin, we are walking away from God’s ultimate design for the life of a child of God.
If you are a Christian who is walking contrary to God’s plan for your life, you are only imitating a person who does not know Christ, but that is not the real you. Simply put, you are pretending to be someone you are not. You have been set free from the power of sin in your life and no longer have to be held captive by your past, but you are living contrary to who you were designed to be.
If you are a Christian, why not quit the pretense, drop the costumes, and get in on the life that God intended for you? Start acting like whom you really are; a child of God, bought with a price, born again for a purpose of glorifying God. Start being like Jesus!
When you sin, isn’t there a part of you that realizes it’s no longer who you really are supposed to be?
That cuts 2 ways, doesn't it? On the one hand, we pretend to be Christian, but our actions belie that … and we act in a certain way that lies against the truth of our redemption in Christ. Intriguingly, that's been exactly the approach I've had to take when faced with temptation. I AM IN CHRIST THEREFORE I NO LONGER THINK OR ACT THIS WAY. There's something about that that is so much more effective than "intellectualizing" the situation: the truth is that it's no longer part of our DNA — and that is only achieved in Christ.
Yes! Good thought!