Welcome to Christian Forums, a Christian Forum that recognizes that all Christians are a work in progress.
You will need to register to be able to join in fellowship with Christians all over the world.
We hope to see you as a part of our community soon and God Bless!
What will the forgiveness of sins mean, it’s not just an exchange between God and your average Israelite, it will by definition be like a dual relationship, you can’t claim to be forgiven by God and then be holding out forgiveness, not releasing other people of what they’ve done to you, but then somehow thinking that you’re really grateful that God released you for how you wronged him. The forgiveness of sins becomes a shorthand for the restoration of a community that is forgiven and that people mirror and imitate that Divine forgiveness by reshaping how they relate to each other. If you don’t forgive, then what you are demonstrating is that you are actually incapable of really experiencing what you say you have experienced, which is God’s forgiveness, it doesn’t work that way Jesus says. Within the Hebrew Bible storyline, forgiveness is not merely something between Israelites individually or between individual Israelites and God, it has social and communal and a covenantal storyline attached to it.
Your existence today isn’t the result of all your planning, because even your planning itself and the ability to plan and to have a stable enough life and environment to make your plans is all a gift that you didn’t create for yourself. Jesus isn’t saying don’t make plans beyond today’s bread, it’s a request to God, give me what I need for today and it’s training your mind to see that every day’s existence comes as a gift, even if I planned for today’s meal a month ago, ultimately, it’s a gift from God in this moment.
Religious practices are meant to align ourselves with the heart of God and in doing so, make all of our relationships better, but Jesus saw that religious practices of his day were sometimes doing the opposite, that people were doing religion in order to promote themselves to seek honor and status. A pursuit of doing right by God and others can actually end up being this distorted self-congratulating type of practice that is very common in religious communities, he calls this the way of hypocrisy. Hypocrite is a Greek word spelled with English letters, “hypocrites” is the Greek word, but we say hypocrite. What Jesus means by hypocrite, is not what the English word has come to mean, the do as I say, not as I do mentality.
There is an instruction in Ephesians 5:1 that seems impossible at first reading, imitate God, not admire him from a distance, not just obey him out of obligation, but imitate him, reproduce in daily life something of the character of the one who created the universe. This instruction only makes sense within a relationship, Paul is not inviting anyone to try to copy divine attributes by their own effort, he is speaking to children, people who having received the life of God, carry within them the ability to reflect something of the father. Just as a child naturally reproduces gestures, expressions and values of the parents they live with. The believer who dwells in the presence of God, begins to reflect what they contemplate.
As you asked, this is the meaning, and it's not twisted like you are trying to do. Jesus did not tell Nicodemus, “Go master Torah symbolism.” He did not tell him, “Go back into a covenant-mother system.” He did not send him chasing hidden meanings through scattered texts. The Lord put the knife right on the root and said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” ~John 3:3. That is not foggy. That is not mystical. That is plain.
The order observed in the liturgy of now, finds its ultimate grounding in the physical and metaphysical reality of the resurrection, the event that anchors all Christian hope in the solidity of transformed matter. 1 Corinthians chapter 15 indicates that Christian hope does not reside in a platonic escape from matter, but in its radical and definitive transformation. Paul confronts the heresy of a purely intellectual or ethereal spirituality, asserting that if Christ did not redeem biology from corruption, faith is an empty semantic construct and man remains trapped in the nihilism of death. Resurrection is not a myth of the immortality of the soul, but an ontological revolution that claims every atom of creation.
Galatians 5:24, Paul then tells you what has happened to your old nature, it is something that has already happened, when you put your faith in Jesus Christ, your old self died with him on the cross. The power of sin over was broken, crucifixion is a brutal image, it is a slow, painful death, Paul uses this word to show you that you must be ruthless with your sin. You do not coddle your sinful desires, you do not play with them, you kill them, you recognize that they are enemies of your soul. Although the flesh was defeated at the cross, you have to live out that reality every day. You have to look at your jealousy and say, you are dead, you have no authority over me. You have to look at your lust and say, I am dead to you, it is an active calming of the victory Jesus Christ already won.
Ephesians 4:15, truth without love becomes a weapon, love without truth becomes sentimentality, the new man balances these two dimensions, believers speak the truth, because they love people enough not to let them live in deception. The new man speaks with compassion, recognizing the believers own fragility, Proverbs 27:6, sometimes speaking the truth hurts, but it is a love that chooses to hurt temporarily, rather than allow someone to continue on a destructive path. The practice of truth also involves honesty with oneself, many believers lie to themselves about the real state of their hearts, they rationalize sin, justify wrong attitudes, deny areas of disobedience. But the new man lives in the light, believers confessing their shortcomings and seeking continuous transformation through the grace of God.
Titus 1:2, when the new man speaks the truth, the believer is reflecting the nature of the one who created you. Paul is not only prohibiting explicit lies, he is calling for a culture of transparency and integrity in the body of Christ, to speak the truth with one’s neighbor has a deep relational dimension, the neighbor here is not just anyone, but especially the members of the body of Christ, because we are members of one another. When you lie to another believer, you are harming the very body of which you are a part, it is like a hand deceiving the foot about the location of an obstacle. Lying destroys trust and without trust, there is no genuine fellowship.
Ephesians 4:24, presents the positive side of the command, to put on the new man, to shed the old, is an act of death, to put on the new, is an act of resurrection. Paul is not asking Christians to create a new version of themselves through moral effort, he is saying, that there is already a new man created according to God in true righteousness and holiness. Created, this is the same word used for the original creation of the world, this means that the new man is not a reform of the old, but a completely new creation, it is something that God has done, not something you produce, your responsibility is to put on this new identity, to live according to who you have already become in Christ.
I did not omit the point. I answered the point you were making with those passages.
Between the shedding of the old and the putting on of the new, Paul inserts an essential element in Ephesians 4:23, to be renewed in the spirit of your mind. This phrase is the central axis of transformation, the mind is the battlefield where change occurs or fails. The renewed mind suggests a continuous renewal, not a one-time event, it’s a process of replacing old thought patterns with new ones, of substituting lies with truth, of dismantling mental strongholds that supported the old way of living. The renewed mind is not an empty mind, but a reoriented mind, realigned with the truth of God, this is where many Christians fail, they try to change behavior without renewing the mind and the result is a frustrating struggle between what they know they should do and what they continue to think and feel.
