GLCB | Men's Bible Study | Biblical Manhood: Lies Men Believe | Week 3 recap
Good morning, Men!
I trust you’ve had some time to think and pray about the source of your identity. Have we allowed ourselves to be defined by our family history, or our career path, or our life-experiences?
Or do we reject the world’s definition of manhood, for men in general and for ourselves, and appeal to the Bible and the God of the Bible to find our identity?
If we have been born again, our identity is in Christ, hallelujah! We are sons of the King, and we need to be about the business of learning from scripture how sons of the King should exist in this world.
“Our Father” …
(speak those words several times—slowly, reverently, with silences in between)
The presence of the Holy Spirit in us reminds us of our relationship to God. This is a wonderful thing [Romans 8:15].... The presence of the Holy Spirit within us reminds us of our sonship, yes, our adult sonship. We are not infants.
We are sons in the fullest sense and in the possession of all our faculties. The clear realization of this gets rid of the spirit of bondage again to fear. It does not do away with ‘reverence and godly fear’, but it does away with the fear that the spirit of bondage brings…it enables us to see that our object in living the Christian life is not simply to attain a certain standard, but is rather to please God because He is our Father—‘the spirit of adoption whereby we cry, Abba, Father’. The slave was not allowed to say ‘Abba’ and that slave spirit does not regard God as Father. He has not realized that He is Father, he regards Him still as a Judge who condemns. But that is wrong. As Christian people we must learn to appropriate by faith the fact that God is our Father.
Christ taught us to pray ‘Our Father’. This eternal everlasting God has become our Father and the moment we realize that, everything tends to change. He is our Father and He is always caring for us, He loves us with an everlasting love, He so loved us that He sent His only begotten Son into the world and to the Cross to die for our sins. That is our relationship to God and the moment we realize it, it transforms everything. Henceforth my desire is not to keep the law but to please my Father. We know something about that by nature. Filial love, filial reverence, filial fear is so different from that old servile fear.... Our Christian living is not a matter of rules and regulations any longer, but rather our desire to show Him our gratitude for all He has ever done for us.
~ Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression, page 172
Amen! And thank you, Dr. Lloyd-Jones.
As Pastor Chris mentioned this past Sunday, this coming Sunday we as a church will celebrate our “First Sunday Fellowship,” and therefore will not have our weekly meeting. Enjoy the fellowship with the body, and look ahead to the following week when we will resume our study on Biblical Manhood, “Lies Men Believe.”
Look for the “preview’ email sometime next week.
In the meantime:
“Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.’
~ 1 Corinthians 16:13 (ESV, emphasis mine)
Until the nets are full,
Tommy Alderman