Persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites, [instead they ought] to be endeavoring by all possible ways to inflame their desires and to obtain more spiritual pleasures… Our hungerings and thirstings after God and Jesus Christ and after holiness can’t be too great for the value of these things, for they are things of infinite value… [Therefore] endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement… There is no such thing as excess in our taking of this spiritual food. There is no such virtue as temperance in spiritual feasting.
Jonathan Edwards

82 A NEW WAY OF LIVING

82 A NEW WAY OF LIVING F O O T ================================

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READING

82 A NEW WAY OF LIVING

PRAY Don’t let me escape the power of the truths in this chapter today, heavenly Father. —————————————————————- READ Romans 8:1-17. —————————————————————- THINK Who is free from condemnation? —————————————————————- FOCUS Get ready. Here is another section of Romans which can set off an explosion in your mind! 1. THE DEMANDS OF THE LAW SATISFIED (3,4). ‘I’ll go straight in the future,’ says the law-breaker. ‘Good’, the judge may say, ‘but you still have to pay the penalty for the wrong you have done.’ Jesus does this for us. He has dealt with the problem of our pst failures to obey God’s law by offering his own perfect life as a sacrifice for sin on the cross. If we turn from sin and trust him, his obedience is credited to us. 2. A NEW WAY OF LIVING (5-8). Once the matter of our failure and guilt is settled we are free to set out on a new way of living ‘as the Spirit tells’ us(5). This is not something unusual or unnatural; it is what we were made for originally – to ‘walk with God’. 3. A NEW POWER FOR LIVING (9-11). Viewed from the outside, Christians look just like other people . . . usually! But look closer, there is a great difference between them and everybody else. Living in them is the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus (9- 11). For them the future means life, not death (11). 4. A NEW PATTERN FOR LIVING (12-17). We are debtors if we belong to Jesus Christ. Before we knew him we thought we were free to go our own way; actually we were slaves of sin (6:20). Now we are truly free to be what we were made to be – the obedient children of God our Creator; we owe him the debt of loving service. —————————————————————- PRAY Start the revolution today! Ask the Holy Spirit to enable you to live the way that God has planned.