LET’S LEAVE

By Rick Mathes

John 14:31 (NASB77) ³¹  but that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go from here.

Everyone is always coming or going somewhere. When you walk in one direction you are leaving the other. Duhh! This certainly applies to sin. The conviction repels the sin and attracts us to repentance: from the old to the new, death to life.

As an elect believer, we are not comfortable with this unsaved, secular or carnal world. In fact, the Word says that if you love the world the love of the Father is not in you. This is serious business to distance ourselves from anything or person that has Satan’s fingerprints. So then as a consequence we need to be “out of this world” so to speak.

That means we need to distance ourselves from the sin group we were so involved with; those social attachments with the wrong people, those that we are hell-bound and a bad influence on us. A person becomes a convict because he makes wrong decisions and hangs out with the wrong people. The same axiom applies to every sinner: it is their common denominator.

When you turn from those sinful attachments to the Savior you can’t help but get into faithful service for the King. What once were sinful episodes become wholesome in time, and need to be filled with your best effort to conform to others: they all do it don’t they?

One such activity that immediately and naturally kicks in is to defend your faith and extraordinary change of life. People will attack and ridicule the Word but they can’t attack your personal testimony.

Another measure of those who have crossed over from death to life is persecution. For whatever reason you want to attach to it, Christians and Jews are always open game for the devil and his kingdoms. The hounds of hell are always nipping at our heals because we are all so committed to Biblical perfection yet so endlessly full of faults we openly display and repent of.

How you live, in the final analysis, is displayed by how you die. If eternal life in heaven isn’t worth dying for, it wasn’t worth living for. Let’s leave the old behind.