You Can Know You Have Eternal Life
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677 – Man's Search for Inner Peace (91)
Honorable Citizenship in Jesus’ Kingdom (13)
by Jim Mettenbrink

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     God has planted in each of us the strong desire to live as long as we are able to do so.  Most people spend a fortune on chemo therapy to outlive the cancer by just a few more months, maybe a year if fortunate.  However, not many will take the measures to prevent the cancer in the first place.  All of us have these “radical” cells in our body which can become cancerous.  Sugar feeds cancer cells, but how many will reduce or eliminate sugar from their diet?  What will it take to change?

     In the same way, the cigarette pack gives stark warning, smoking causes cancer!  Yet folks smoke.  Pay for the pack now and pay again later (cancer)!  Is that rational?  No.  What is it about us humans that we act irrationally?  Seems cancer is largely a result of a contradictory diet and behavior.

     The first, actually the second, is the human weakness to deny reality (psychologists soften it with a fancy term - “normalcy bias”).  The reality is we deceive ourselves, thinking what is dangerous is not.  The prophet Jeremiah warned, “
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9).  A person deceives himself first and foremost.

     The first is our own selfishness.  We do what we want to do.  The American religion has become “feelism.”  Self-satisfaction!  Exhilaration!  No pain!  Ecstasy!  Do whatever makes you feel good at the moment.  It is almost a sin not to feel good.  Feelism is self worship, the means of which are emotional highs by alcohol, drugs, sex, and the various forms of recreation and entertainment by which a person desires to feel good.  Feelism is an idolatrous religion of selfishness.

     Selfishness is sacrificed by citizens of Jesus kingdom.  And must be supplanted with selflessness.  This necessarily means a radical change in thought and behavior (Romans 12:1-2).  This change will be governed by a discipline, called self control.
Recently we considered eight aspects of the fruit of the Spirit to be developed in the citizens of Jesus kingdom.  The last aspect of this fruit is self-control, a vital foundation block to the other eight aspects.

     Like today’s world, the Greco-Roman era was licentious, i.e., if it feels good do it!  The apostle Paul made three points in his judicial hearing before Felix, the Roman governor of Judea - “
...he reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come” (Acts 24:25).  That self control was a necessary topic was highlighted shortly when Paul also testified before Herod Agrippa II who was committing incest with his sister (widow of her uncle, also incestuous) (Source: Josephus) (Acts 25:13, 23ff).

     Self-control is necessary to conquer the works of the flesh (which will prevent citizens from going to heaven) which Paul listed just before revealing the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:19-21).  Chastity was the almost unique moral introduced to the world.  It was done so by the discipline of self-control by citizens of Jesus kingdom.  Chastity endorsed monogamous lifetime marriage into the world, which in-turn fostered stable societies.

     In his defense of Christianity to the Caesar Hadrian, Aristides (Christian Athenian philosopher) wrote regarding Christians “...their wives, O king, are pure as virgins, and their daughters modest: and their men abstain from all unlawful wedlock and from all impurity...”  Self-control the challenge for the committed citizen of Jesus kingdom!

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      © Jim Mettenbrink; used by permission. rev.161101
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