December 23

 ‘But God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ – Galatians 6:14

                As was discussed yesterday, the impetus for action is found in will. To be exercise faith is to bend our will to belief in God. To act in accordance to God’s law is to bend our will away from ourselves and toward Him. To ignore God altogether is to exercise our will for our own purposes.

                I talked at some length yesterday about coming to believe in God and what faith means when translated in terms of will. However, willing ourselves to believe in the Gospel, taking that first step toward faith and away from logic, is merely the beginning. What do we do with our faith? Since we still control our will, for better or worse, what does it mean to apply it to a faith filled life?

                The next step in the Christian life is often a deal breaker for the insincere. The application of our will to the terms of the Atonement is a daily commitment in action. It is not suspense of logic. It is a series of conscious series of choices which change our behavior to reflect the newness of our creation.

Christ died on the Cross for our sins. His is the example that we follow. In this way, we to must die as part of our Atonement. Our old selves must pass away as exemplified in our giving up of the things that are not of God. We must will ourselves to give up the sinful behaviors we once held dear.      These behaviors, which I will not list here due to the highly individual nature of vice, serve primarily as distractions, drawing our focus away from God.  It is true that there are specific affronts to God’s law found in each incarnation of sin, but again, I argue that they are primarily distractions. Any worldly thing that gets in the way of our focus on God must pass away along with our old self, or the Atonement has resulted in a new creation only superficially.

Conversely, the exercise of will to give up the former things is an assertion to take up only Christ. To be reborn a new creation in Christ is to make the commitment to spoiled for all else but Christ. The result of the Christian who has accepted the Atonement and made good on the commitment to take up only Christ, allowing the old to pass away, is a Christian who is identified with Christ. The identification with Christ is the purpose for the Atonement. Christ did not die on the Cross for all of our sins just to open some allegorical gate in the clouds. Christ died for our sins so that Man, the fallible and unworthy creature the he is, could have a means to identify with Christ.