The thing about works is they need to be defined, the works of Abel were acceptable to God, the works of Cain were not. The works of the Pharisees were not acceptable, but their works could have been acceptable.
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The Danger of "Keeping Sabbath."
- Thread starter Mercy Shown
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Our works always need to be in aligned with obedience to God. We were created to do His good works. Ephesians 2:10 It's the only work that is acceptable to God because it shows faith and trust in Him instead of doing what we think is best.
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Obedience to God is what James called works, Luther was concerned with the works of Rome verses the faith of Rome; I always see Paul as Satan praising Christ.
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We can't do it. It must be achieved by Christ in us. If we seek Christ, his Kingdom and righteousness, it will be added onto us.
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Agreed. But we have our part John 14:15-18 Acts 5:32
Is seeking His righteousness being hostile to any of His commandments Rom 8:7-8 that He deems holy and righteous? Exo 20:8-11 Isa 56:1-6 Psa 119:172
How do we seek His righteousness?
Romans 6:16 gives us a clue
16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?
And John
1 John 3:7 Little children, let no one deceive you. He who practices righteousness is righteous, just as He is righteous.
As does Christ in His own Words
56 Thus says the Lord:
“Keep justice, and do righteousness,
For My salvation is about to come,
And My righteousness to be revealed.
2 Blessed is the man who does this,
And the son of man who lays hold on it;
Who keeps from defiling the Sabbath,
And keeps his hand from doing any evil.”
6 “Also the sons of the foreigner
Who join themselves to the Lord, to serve Him,
And to love the name of the Lord, to be His servants—
Everyone who keeps from defiling the Sabbath,
And holds fast My covenant
Isa 48:18
Oh, that you had heeded My commandments!
Then your peace would have been like a river,
And your righteousness like the waves of the sea.
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Let's start with John 14:15-18 “If you love me, keep my commands. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.
In order to divide this word correctly, we must address two fundamental considerations. The first is that we cannot choose to love something we do not love, if, indeed, we understand love at all.
Secondly, we must understand the difference between a descriptive text and a prescriptive text or else we will find ourselves trying to climb over the wall of the fold rather than entering through the door.
If John 14:15-18 is considered a command we will try to love God by keeping His commands and we will make a muck of it. We will end up inventing a standard that we can adhere to and consider ourselves commandment keepers.
Before attempting such a fool's errand, we must read and meditate upon the Sermon on The Mount. Then, we must hold up our best “love” and “affection” to the light found in 1 Corinthians 13. We must be honest and open to God’s words.
John 14:15-18 is not a requirement, it is a description of what is. If we love Him, we will be doing these things but we cannot love Him by doing these things. If we are not doing these things, we need to humble ourselves in the sight of God and pray for love from Him. Love that pushes all other loves below it. Only He can do this good work in us.
Acts 5:32 We are witnesses of these things, and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him.
This text follows the same truth as the previous text. It is descriptive. The Holy Spirit is given to those who obey God, but we cannot obey God to get the Holy Spirit. True obedience to God is engendered by the Holy Spirit; without the Holy Spirit and the indwelling of Christ, we can do nothing. (John 15:5)
Our duty is to walk after the Spirit. This is the key to seeking first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. The boots-on-the-ground meaning of this is to study, pray and submit. Pray that God will finish the good work He has begun in us. There will be many “commandment keepers” very shocked on the day of Judgement.
~Godspeed
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I must admit that many people have missed the meaning of my post. There is a reason that Sabbath Keeping is in quotes. The issue has never been about not keeping God's commands. It is about how to become one who keeps God's commands perfectly. God does not allow us to enter heaven because we try to keep His commands. He does not open the pearly gates because we kept them 90% or better during our sojourn on this mortal coil. He doesn't give us the nod because we kept the fourth commandment to our standard and pointed fingers at brothers and sisters who did not keep it as we thought they should.
No one should judge anyone about Sabbath days. No one would judge either way. We end up grabbing our favorite texts and beating each other with them. We don't want to be the servant who beats other servants when he thinks the master is away. We are not the Holy Spirit, and we should be concerned with leading others to Christ and allowing Christ's love to flow from us. We need to trust that others also have Christ, and He will finish the good work in them just as He is doing in us. Let's trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not onto our understanding.
We all have something to learn from one another if we all live our lives through Jesus Christ.
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So you do you not think love to God transpires into obedience to Him?
I disagree. Because we love God we want to obey Him. It's a pretty simple and straightforward concept.
Exodus 20:6 6 but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
1 John 5:3 For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.
John 15:10 If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.
Jesus repeated this very concept John 14:15-18 but said we don't have to obey on our own, but we do have to love Him, which is what transpires us to obey Him. IF- Jesus will not force us to love Him. Just like our children we cannot force them to love us, but when our children do, they obey us because they love us. This is what Jesus is looking for, love that leads to action.
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Well, part of what Jesus commissioned us to do was to teach each other the commandments Mat 5:19 and a warning many gloss over telling us what happens when we teach others to break or when we break the least of these- trying to give someone a lifejacket because they are sailing in the wrong direction is from love. Our obedience to God always needs to come from the heart but I think we need to be careful to teach we can disobey God and live, this was the very first lie in the Graden that sadly our first parents listened to the other spirit instead of listening to God.
There is no scripture that says we can break any of the commandments of God including the Sabbath commandment. Judging someone about the sabbath was not about the weekly Sabbath, but the annual sabbath(s) ordinances feast days. Col 2:14KJV. We will stand before Jesus I believe one day soon based on what we do 2 Cor 5:10 and we will all be judged by the Ten Commandments James 2:10-12 Ecc 12:13-14 Mat 5:19-30 Rev 22:14-15, no righteous judge can judge without a standard to judge by, and God is no different. It's why He pleads with us not to disobey Him Heb 3:7-8, because the problem is with the heart. When in Christ through His power, we want to keep everything He ask through love and faith and because we need His righteousness- what was Christ righteousness- how did He live what did He teach. If we are arguing against His teaching and examples, we are really arguing against Him, even if we don't think so.
To be honest I am not sure what the meaning of your post is. You say in one breath - keeping the Sabbath is dangerous, prideful, legalism etc, , but in another we should be obeying God's commandments, but yet on every turn you argue against the biblical way God shows us how to keep the Sabbath day holy and it is always should be from the heart- because we love Him, and want to join ourselves to Him, to be His servant and do what He deems righteous. Isa 56:1-6 instead of relying on our own righteousness.
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Not our natural selves Paul says that we cannot even know Him, But the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he is not able to understand them, because spiritually they are discerned. 1 Cor 2:14
Q: Why do we love God?
A: 1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us.
John further explains in chapter 4 verse10, In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
When we contemplate the cross and what it means for us, we see His immense love for us, His complete salvation bought with His blood and gifted to us, making us perfect forever (Heb 10:14). Then His love is born in us as we are born again.
These are all descriptions of saints. These are not a list of transactions we make to receive God's benefits. Do we seek Him out of love, or are we seeking His loaves and fishes?
How many think they do what He says but are eternally dead wrong? Our cooperation is not to resist. He does the Good work in us unless we resist. A sinner can resist God, but they'll naturally be drawn to Christ if they don't. Understanding God's plan will guide them to the cross, where they'll repent of their sins, realize the suffering they caused to God's beloved Son, and be saved.
God lights every man who enters this world with Jesus. (John 1:9) If they continually resist, God gives them what they want, and they destroy themselves.(Romans 1:24)
How perfectly must one follow Jesus' teachings and live by His every word? I can tell you now that anything short of perfect, as God is perfect, is a failure. So what are we going to do? Tech others that they must do we even we can't do?
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You forget the "does-them" part. The Pharisees would be the first to raise their hands if asked, "Who does God's commands and teaches others to do them?" They assumed that they did.
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Unless you keep everything perfectly, then you are disobeying God. Think of it as a glass of fresh, perfect spring water. You are about to drink it when a bird dropping falls into the glass. Only a tiny sparrow flying by deposited it in your glass of spring water. The offending matter only comprises less than 1 percent of the cup's contents. Is the water now acceptable to you?
One drop of sin in us, no matter how tiny, is unacceptable to God and would kill us if we came into His presence with it in us. We need to teach something a lot more powerful than just "obeying God." We need to have that answer for ourselves first before we can help get the speck out of our brother's eye.
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Teaching scriptures and to be obedience to God's commandments is not judging someone. Showing scripture is a lot different than judging, sorry if you do not see the difference.
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But did they keep God's commandments? It's not what Jesus taught they did. You might consider reading Mark 7 and Mathew 15.
Anyway, I shared a lot of scriptures by love on what Christ says about His Sabbath. Even if you thought everyone who keeps the Sabbath is doing it for the wrong reasons, that would not negate our responsibility to obey God. God does not judge us on a sliding scale, He saved 8 people during the flood. All the stories in the bible are told in love through Christ useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.
Jesus came to save us from our sins Mat 1:21 we need a conversion in Christ, its the only way anyone will be saved. That conversion- which gives us love, faith and obedience to Him is what will reconcile us Rev 22:14
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The verses I shared were never acknowledged. The point is that we need to focus on Christ and not the law. That law cannot save us, but Christ can. The law cannot enable us to keep it, but Christ can. Since neither you nor I keep the law perfectly, we'd best not depend upon it for our righteousness. Depending upon Christ; then all other efforts will not be in vain.
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Do you keep the law you teach others that they should keep? When I say keep, I mean never breaking a jot or title out of them. If you aren't then you need a righteousness apart from the law.
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Brother, the common belief that the Holy Spirit speaks directly to individuals is wrong when Israel asked God not to speak directly to us so that we would not die. We are told the Holy Spirit has nothing to say to us Himself and everything He hears to tell us He does through the Prophets, so that we don't die as Israel asked of God under Moses. The reason Jesus puts the law in our hearts is because Jesus is our model Spirit for how to obey the law as a greater revelation than what was inscribed in stone. We are told by Paul in the book of Hebrews that if we do not obey the Sabbath we will "fall" like those that died in the desert. God punished those that died in the desert for their disobedience by not allowing them to enter His Sabbath for 40 years, with Manna in the desert being half a day too late to enter the Sabbath near Jerusalem. In the book of Hebrews, the Sabbath kept as the seventh day of the week is corrected from human tradition by telling us that, during the 40 years they kept the Sabbath with Manna, they kept the wrong Sabbath, which does not enter God's rest by being late by half a day when the Sabbath is earlier in Jerusalem than the seventh day of the week. Joshua did not get the Sabbath wrong in Jerusalem, that Jesus kept as our model "Spirit" to do the same as Jesus. Joshua got the days of the week wrong, which makes their human tradition of the Sabbath wrong everywhere beside Jerusalem.
God’s promise of entering his rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it. For this good news—that God has prepared this rest—has been announced to us just as it was to them. But it did them no good because they didn’t share the faith of those who listened to God. For only we who believe can enter his rest. As for the others, God said, “In my anger I took an oath: ‘They will never enter my place of rest,’” even though this rest has been ready since he made the world. We know it is ready because of the place in the Scriptures where it mentions the seventh day: “On the seventh day God rested from all his work.” But in the other passage God said, “They will never enter my place of rest.” So God’s rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted: “Today when you hear his voice, don’t harden your hearts.” Now if Joshua had succeeded in giving them this rest, God would not have spoken about another day of rest still to come. So there is a special rest still waiting for the people of God. For all who have entered into God’s rest have rested from their labors, just as God did after creating the world. So let us do our best to enter that rest. But if we disobey God, as the people of Israel did, we will fall. (Hebrews 4:1-11 NLT)
The days of the week during the 40 years in the desert were from morning to morning, as revealed in the following passage where they are given two portions of Manna on the previous day because there will be no Manna tomorrow. Importantly, the bad news that there will be no quail tomorrow if the next day begins in the "evening" is not mentioned, because they will eat quail in the "evening" before Manna is the first thing they will not have the next day. The quail not mentioned clearly shows the days of the week beginning in the morning.
On the sixth day, they gathered twice as much as usual—four quarts for each person instead of two. Then all the leaders of the community came and asked Moses for an explanation. He told them, “This is what the LORD commanded: Tomorrow will be a day of complete rest, a holy Sabbath day set apart for the LORD. So bake or boil as much as you want today, and set aside what is left for tomorrow.” So they put some aside until morning, just as Moses had commanded. And in the morning the leftover food was wholesome and good, without maggots or odor. Moses said, “Eat this food today, for today is a Sabbath day dedicated to the LORD. There will be no food on the ground today. (Exodus 16:22-25 NLT)
United in our hope for the soon return of Jesus, Jorge
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Our obedience to God is something that is between us and God alone. No one will be judged based on what others do or don't do, we each have to stand before Christ based on our own doings. So my obedience to God has no bearing on your salvation. And likewise.
I am a sinner in need of a Savior just like everyone else. But when we fall, do we get back up and keep going in the same direction, or do we ask Jesus to help change us and when He heals, He says go and sin no more.
Our salvation is from sin. Mat 1:21 if it wasn't possible to overcome, He would not ask. Through Him all things are possible Phil 4:13 and we must confess and forsake our sins to receive His mercy grace and sanctification 1 John 1:9 Pro 28:13
I believe God has more power to keep us from sin, than the devil does to keep us in sin. It's a matter of who we yield ourselves to obey Rom 6:16
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Christ is in the center of His law. His law leads us to Christ Gal 3:24 Psa 19:7 and Christ leads us to obey His law Mat 14:15-18. God's law is a reflection of character Holy Rom 7:12 righteous Psa 119:172 Perfect Psa 19:7 and everlasting Mat 5:19. Why would someone not want to focus on becoming like Christ or want to do what God wrote in our hearts Heb 8:10 Psa 40:8 through love and faith. We have free will, but it seems like a bad idea. If we don't keep God's commandment- we are told we don't know Him and are a liar. Not my words. 1 John 2:3-4
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The bible tells us the the Holy spirit communicates with us. uch praise to God for sending Him to us.
John 16:12-15
“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
There is no passage in Hebrews that mentions "obeying the sabbath.
When did God take such an oath and for what specific reason. It was not the weekly sabbath that was the rest they refused to enter.
This passage is likening the promised land of Canaan to our rest in Christ's grace. It also is includes the Sabbath in that metaphore. Just as God rested from His works we are to rest in Christ's grace from our works.
The Sabbath is a symbol of the perfect rest in Christ. But the bible tels us that we are not and cannot be saved by keeping the law. In fact, it says we have a righteousness apart from thelaw in Christ.
If God were to come back today, do you know that you would be saved? What is your testimony on this?
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