We know that God’s unconditional love for us is not dependent upon us — on what we do or what we don’t do. It is only dependent upon Jesus, and what he has done for us, and on our belief and trust in Jesus, and his truth he tells us to believe. “Father, I know you love them as much as you love me.”
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The New Testament tells us often: “The Old Testament law was abolished.” But most folks can’t bring themselves to believe this, so they mix the Testaments. This results in guilt, fear judgment, and ignorance of God’s righteousness in us. This is all corrected if we live Christ’s gospel truth.
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Mercy is God’s gift to us who live in his New Covenant. And God says, “My grace is sufficient for you.” We often think this only means for our ability to ‘cope with life.’ But it means a lot more. Grace is a ‘warfare’ term. It delivers to us all the things of God’s Kingdom that we don’t really deserve or merit — but God ‘graces us’ with them.
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God has made us to be the righteousness of Jesus. We sometimes hear this preached. But until we ‘own it’ by totally trusting in God’s word to us, and totally believing it, we cannot experience Christ’s ministry and the joint equality of our inheritance in him here on earth.
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Many think ‘love’ is the greatest command. But that spoke of the Old Covenant. In the NEW, gospel belief is our greatest command. We’ll be judged for not believing and living it. We can’t love God and others as we should, until we know and believe the gospel: we are all equal. If we’re not equal, all we can do is compare and judge, which makes loving impossible.