'How To'
Instructions in Righteousness
printer-friendly Lesson 7: Overcome sin. Repent. Key verse: Ezek 18:31 Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? Though spoken by God to Israel, this admonition is a
primary one for our walk in righteousness within the confines of the Salvation
Process. Cast away from you all your transgressions-for the
cause of your evil rests with yourselves; your sole way of escape is to be
reconciled to God (Eph 4:22-23). Matthew Henry’s Commentary puts it this way: “we must abandon and forsake them with a resolution never to return to them again, give sin a bill of divorce, break all the leagues we have made with it, throw it overboard, as the mariners did Jonah (for it has raised the storm), cast it out of the soul, and crucify it as a malefactor.”
Make you a new heart and a new
spirit: [Make you a new heart] Call upon God for it, and he will
give it: "Make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit:" a man
cannot, indeed, create either of these by his own power; God alone can give them
(Ezek 11:19). But a man both can and should come to God to receive them: in
other words, he can turn to God, and let both heart and spirit be renewed by the
Spirit of God. And this God is willing to do; for He has no pleasure hameet
(OT:4191) bŞmowt (OT:4194), in the death of the dying one. This shows, not what man can do, but what he ought to do:
what God requires of us. God alone can make us a new heart (Ezek 11:19;
36:26-27). The command to do what men cannot themselves do is designed to drive
them (instead of laying the blame, as the Jews did, elsewhere, rather than on
themselves) to feel their own helplessness, and to seek God's Holy Spirit (Ps
51:10,12). |