Welcome to Word of Life Study Series- Our glorious inheritance! It is God’s will that we know what Jesus has accomplished for us in His death, burial, resurrection and seating at the right hand of the Father; where He ever lives to make intercession for us. Words fail to describe the unimaginable riches of this glorious redemption that Jesus paid for on our behalf with His precious blood. This season is dedicated to “His glorious inheritance in the saints” that we may know and enter into the provision and plan of God for our lives here on this earth. Revelation knowledge from God’s Word is the key that unlocks Heaven’s bounty in our lives today; that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven- Matthew 6:10.
1. Spiritual Death
To fully appreciate what we are and have now in Christ through the new birth, we must come to the understanding of our former position when we were without hope and without God in the world- Ephesians 2:12. Do you remember what life was like for you before you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? Certainly, from a natural perspective, life was empty and meaningless. The kind of life we had experienced was a result of our spiritual condition. The root problem was not physical things such as money, health, popularity, education etc. it was our spiritual affiliation- Ephesians 2:1-2.
2. The Power of the Cross
It was at the cross that God the Father nailed not only our sin, but our former sinful spiritual nature. When Christ died on the cross so did we; in the mind of God, we were identified with Christ. As a result, we are as dead to sin today as Jesus is. Sin has as much power and dominion over our lives as it does Jesus, which is none! What does it mean to be dead to sin? Simply read Romans 6:1-11.
3. A Spiritual New Birth
The greatest of all God’s miracles is the transformation, re-creation and metamorphosis of the human spirit from Satan’s nature to God’s nature; from Death to Life, from Darkness to Light. Another translation for “New Creation” is a “New Species,” something totally brand new, something that never existed before, a brand new start, a new beginning, starting all over again- with no past charged against us! With a new creation there is no spiritual past of wrong doing. Hence the phrase Jesus used, “Born Again” in John 3:3.
4. The Fruit of the Human Spirit
We need to understand that the love nature in our spirit must be fed a daily diet of the Word and prayer, and be exercised in our daily encounters with others, in order to be developed. The Bible calls the characteristics of our love nature “Fruit,” because fruit grows. It is not the fruit of the Holy Spirit either, but the fruit of our re-created human spirit with the life and love nature of God. Certainly, the Holy Spirit abides in our spirit through the new birth. Notice that love is the first fruit in Galatians 5:22-23.
5. Reconciliation
Oh such love, while we were shaking our fists at God in defiance, He still loved us and sent His own Son to die for our sins as our substitute. God could have very well have written off the human race and started over, but thank God He didn’t. He would have rather died on the cross than to live without us, so He provided a plan of redemption whereby He would reconcile estranged mankind back to Himself through Jesus Christ. Faith in Jesus alone is the only way back to the Father God- John 14:6.