May 22, 2013 – Authored by Daniel Holdings
Few things in life carry the weight of God’s grace.
No doubt, someone will say to me, “But Jesus said His yoke was easy and His burden light!”
While this is true, when we come to Him for the first time, we would be foolish to think that a relationship with the Creator of the Universe would cost us nothing.
The initiation into this relationship was His alone to bear. 
He paid the price on the cross because there was nothing we could ever do to affect change in our minuscule, sinful, eternal position. Mankind was separated from God forever – unable to cross over the divide of righteous judgment. Only the blood of Yeshua (Jesus) could bridge that gap.
But what about now… on the other side of that gorge of judgment?
Our lives and relationship with Him should change when we get on the other side of that canyon. If we have an intertwined heart with God, that union requires that we strip off all personages of our former selves. What follows should be the launching of ourselves headlong into the life we are called to live.
Sound fanatical? You bet it is, but Jesus Himself said, “He who loves his life shall lose it for My sake. And he who hates his life shall find it.” Sounds pretty fanatical to me.
That intertwining of our life with His, means that our former habits, attitudes, selfishness and self-centeredness must fall off like dead scales.
Yes – I said dead. Because the thing that most professing Believers do not agree to, is the dying of one’s self. This is more evident today than ever. Such an accommodation to our old nature should give us great pause. Nonetheless, we are warned in the Bible that the “Church” would become like this:
2 Timothy 3:1-7 “But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
Yes, I said THE CHURCH!
Don’t believe me? Paul said that such people would hold to “a form of godliness”. If a person isn’t in a relationship with God, why would they care about being godly?
This is why we have become the Laodicean Church in Rev 3:14-19. The Church, as a whole, refuses to die to ourselves!
It is the same stiff-necked attitude that caused the Israelites to wander in the desert for forty years. But while God gave them a generation to repent and turn back to him, we have only a small window of opportunity to repent before the end of the age.
With the last grains of sand in history’s hourglass, our opportunity to die to our flesh (Gal 2:20, Luke 9:23, Gal 5:24, Mark 8:25, Rom 6:1-23) slips away. Like those spent sands of time, will you “Christian”, waste your opportunity to seal that professed relationship with Jesus? Only with a true repentance and dedication to the things that He has called us too, will we be able to stand before Him.
Or, have you chosen to go into the annuals of human history as that lukewarm, godly acting, slave to the world, Church that the Apostle Paul warned Timothy about?
The choice is yours… but don’t wait too long.
Time is almost up.