Classic Christianity – A Closer Look at Faith, Hope & Love P17 (05-26-20)
Synopsis
In this study on Faith, Hope and Love, we have looked into what faith is, what faith is not, and that there is misplaced faith, and then there is faith placed properly on what is true, and on the one who is the way, the truth and the life. This faith in Christ Jesus, who is God in the flesh, is the faith we are talking about. Now this truth is what men cannot grasp on their own. This truth must be revealed by the Spirit of God to the hearts of men.
Now, many times, people relegate faith to just this aspect of getting saved, but then so many people do not really understand what saved means. If you grew up never hearing the word “saved” then you might respond by saying, “What are you talking about? Saved from what?” Other people might have grown up in a denomination where the word “saved” was often heard. You might have heard someone say, “Come forward to get your sins forgiven?” So you come to think being saved is getting your sins forgiven, as if that is where you get righteousness. But then, faith, if even taught properly, really is not talked about any more, and certainly not lived out.
Depending on your upbringing, you are instructed to participate in sacraments to receive more grace from God, to go to church every Sunday, to get your quiet time every morning, to go to visitation, and all this doing you are supposed to do. And the implication or even teaching is that by doing such things you are becoming more righteous. Well, all of this is in conflict with the faith that God has spoken concerning this new life in Christ Jesus. There should be none of this straining to make yourself righteous or acceptable or pleasing to God but of true relaxing in what God has already done and letting Him produce what He wants to produce in you and through you.
A believer should be experiencing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control, and not by something He has to do but by abiding in Christ. So if a believer is not experiencing these things, then something is wrong. Either he is not a believer in the first place, having not understood what salvation is to begin with, or there is error somewhere else in his thinking. So many are misled by the persuasions of men, by denominational teaching, and have not allowed their mind to be renewed by the Spirit who lives in you. They have not looked closely at God’s word with the attitude of, “Lord, if you do not teach me what this means, I will not know what it means.”
When you are saved, you are saved from the consequence of death, which is sin, by the gift of God, which is the resurrected life of Christ Jesus, living in you. Eternal life is knowing God and His Son Jesus Christ, and by knowing Him, you were recreated to experience that life with God both now and forever. It is more than waiting until that day God will raise you up out of a grave, while floundering around down here on how to live. God wants you to experience true living, with a new life, with the same kind of attitude of dependency or faith that Christ Jesus demonstrated when He walked on this earth. That does not mean we will be raising the dead or going to die on a cross. That is what God the Father told Jesus to do, and what only Jesus could do for us. But this trust in God to do that which the Father told Him to do and to say what His Father told Him to say and how to say it is the faith that we imitate. There is this loving relationship between Jesus and God, where Jesus is described as the second Adam, that we are to come to understand and walk in that same manner of faith.
Yet people fail to understand what sin and righteousness and judgment is, which Jesus said He came to prove men wrong about those things. People tend to categorize sin into categories, as if labeling certain sins as worthy of death if you do them, but some other ones as if they are venial and not so bad. The problem is that anything that does not come from faith is sin, the wages of sin is death, and if you broke just one commandment of the law then you are guilty of breaking all of it.
That is the condition of the world. So when Jesus took away the sins of the world that did not make people righteous. It made them forgiven. If I owed you a 100,000 dollars and I could not pay it and I went bankrupt and you wrote that check off your accounts payable, would that make me righteous? Hardly. All it would do is alleviate a debt I owed and it was paid for you and I did know it. That is all that means. Is that a big deal? You better believe it is! Sin is what caused death. What sin caused is the problem of man, death, spiritual death, and death is the absence of life.
So people get the idea that if I could just get my sins forgiven, I would be okay. Again that would be like saying, “if you eliminate my debt, take it off my accounts receivable, I would be okay”. No, I still have a problem. Christ is the person who alleviated and took away that thing that caused spiritual death, called sin. He took away the sins of the whole world, not only ours, but the sins of the whole world.
The problem with man is that he is dead to God. He is totally unrighteous, hopeless and helpless without someone to save him from his condition of death. So God sent Jesus, knowing our dead condition, to take away the cause of our death, which is sin. He did this in order to take us out from under this law of sin and death that we are enslaved to, with no way of escape otherwise. He did this so the very life of God can be placed back into man. This life of God left Adam due to sin, and as a consequence we too were born empty of, that is, without the Spirit of God living in us. This is the very life of God, the Spirit of God in Jesus, that is to be placed back into man after Jesus rose from the dead. So now, through Jesus Christ, God offers His very life to be placed into man, eternal life, so that man may live. The appeal of salvation is to come to Christ for life. That life is received by faith, trusting in God to do something for you that you can never do.
Now, once saved, you continue to walk in that same faith that saved you. You took God at His word and believed what He said. You believed the testimony God said concerning His Son, that in Him there is eternal life and He is your righteousness. You never had any righteousness of your own. The righteousness you do have is not yours, but the righteousness from God, a gift from God. So why are you striving to get righteousness by what you do, when you could never do anything to get it in the first place? Furthermore, do you really think you can get any righteousness than what God has given you in Christ Jesus? You are not God nor can you make yourself God. There is no righteousness apart from Christ Jesus. Live in dependency on Christ Jesus, who lives in you, as He gave such a good illustration of in the vine and the branches in John 15.
So have this attitude in you so truth may be revealed to you. Have a heart that wants to know God, to know who this Creator is who created all things. Step out of the cave and into the light. It is not because the Father is holding truth back from you. You cannot reveal truth to the heart of a person closed to revelation. If your heart is closed to revelation then revelation cannot get through. It is like the sun saying, “I cannot shine on you in a cave. You must come out of the cave to get sunshine on you. As long as you refuse to come outside, even though you know there is something called the sun out there, you will never experience the warmth of it or the light of it when you are living in a cave. It is the identical same thing when it comes to truth revealed by the Father. God cannot reveal truth to a closed heart.
So then, God left us His word, the scriptures, that we may read and inquire of the Lord, as to the meaning of the things written therein. Many an intellectual person has studied the bible but have not understood because their heart was not right. Read to receive a change of heart and then from that point on continue in Him for the renewing of your mind. They sought a righteousness of their own, a righteousness they thought they could obtain by way of the law, boasting in their knowledge of the scriptures, but they failed to come to Christ for life. Study to know God, asking Him to explain to you what it all means. Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.
Transcript
We are talking about faith, hope and love. In 1 Corinthian 13, after talking about the different aspects, of having the ability to speak in tongues, of men and angels, but if you have not love then you are a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If you do not have love, you are meaningless. Then it goes on to say that three things remain, but the greatest of these things is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
As I was writing these things, you cannot just write about love because it is a triplicate that goes together. So, the past several weeks we were looking at faith, as to what it is. We had a lesson of faith defined, and what it is. Then we finished on the last couple of weeks on the object of our faith. It is not faith that saves a person but the object of your faith that saves you. In other words, you can have faith in things that can help you, and you can have faith in things that will absolutely destroy you. So it is the object of your faith that is the issue.
Faith is what enables you to access either truth or error, one of those two things. You have faith in a chair, that it will hold you, or you would be ridiculous sitting in it. That is faith. On the other other hand, I could build a chair that looks like it would hold you, but it is one of those things you use in comedy routines, and you could sit down and end up on the floor. The object of faith was not worthy of your faith.
What we related with over the last couple of weeks is the object of the Christian’s faith is Christ Jesus and His word. When you are dealing with this whole issue of faith, it is faith in Jesus, and God said this is my testimony about my Son.
1 John 5:9-12
9 We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. 10 Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. 11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.
Jesus said the same thing. This is what He said to the Jews who said that their faith is in Moses.
John 5:36-47
36 “I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the works that the Father has given me to finish – the very works that I am doing – testify that the Father has sent me. 37 And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, 38 nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. 39 You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, 40 yet you refuse to come to me to have life.41 “I do not accept glory from human beings, 42 but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. 43 I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. 44 How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?
45 “But do not think I will accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. 46 If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. 47 But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?”
When saying that, I want to be very clear in what we are talking about. When talking about the Jews in the bible, you are not talking about all Jews in the bible. The designation of Jews is the Jewish leaders because they were the ones who controlled the thinking and actions of the remainder of the Jewish people. In the bible, when talking about the Jews, many times Jesus was talking about the Jews as it related to their leadership. In those days, Jesus dealt with these issues.
Here were the Pharisees and Sadducees and all those religious leaders who had knowledge of what the bible said, but had not a clue what it meant. They were saying we believe in Moses. Jesus said to them, “No, you don’t.” Here are these people as intellectual as you can get. They could have quoted many scriptures by Moses. Jesus said to them, “If you believed in him you would believe in me for Moses wrote about me. Even though you say you believe in Moses, and Moses wrote about me, you refuse to come to me to have life.” In essence, Jesus was saying, “when you are doubting me, you are doubting the one you say you have faith in, which is Moses who wrote about me.”
Jesus knew how to get to the root of the problem. He put the Pharisees and Sadducees right where they belong. It is like a person saying, “I believe in Jesus but I do not believe in eternal life.” Sorry, but there is no way to believe in Jesus unless you believe in eternal life because he is eternal life.
John 17:3
Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
1 John 5:20
20 We know also that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, so that we may know him who is true. And we are in him who is true by being in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.
Someone says, “I believe the bible is true but I do not believe in Jesus”. How can you believe the bible is true when the bible writes about Jesus? All of those are contradictions of terms. They are putting people into forcing them to see that you do not believe what you say you believe. That is not an unusual thing is it? We get stopped constantly by people, and by the word of God that shows me, that someone is talking out of one side of his mouth, and so is not really believing it, otherwise he would not be talking out of the other side of his mouth.
Mark 1:14-15
14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
That is what the word says in regards to true repentance. When talking about repentance in scripture, not talking about “I used to smoke and now I do not”. True biblical repentance is a total change of mind. I cannot say I am a believer today and tomorrow say, “No, I am not a believer in Jesus”. You say that but it amounts to that one of those is wrong. If you say you are no longer a believer in Jesus, then you are saying you never believed in Jesus in the first place. That is you never exercised faith, the faith that enables the Spirit of God, who alone can reveal truth to you, to reveal truth to you about Jesus.
Exodus 6:3
3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself fully known to them.
John 1:18
18 No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
Recall the conversation Jesus had with his disciples and asked them this question, “Who do you say that I am?”
Matthew 16:13-20
13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.
So Jesus asked His disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter replied, “You are the Son of the living God”. But then Jesus said something to Peter that caught my attention because I never thought of it that way. Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven.” The issue is to me that that was the first person the Spirit of God revealed the true identity of Christ to. Even though Peter, as well as all of the apostles and all of the disciples followed him around, looked at him and saw the miracles he did, and still, as scripture says, they were seeing but seeing, hearing but not hearing, and their human minds were not apprehending, until the Spirit revealed truth to them.
1 Corinthians 2:9-10
9 However, as it is written:“What no eye has seen,
what no ear has heard,
and what no human mind has conceived”[Isaiah 64:4] –
the things God has prepared for those who love him –10 these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.
The most intellectual person, the most studious person of the bible, could be as dead as Peter was, and the apostles were prior to the invasion of the Holy Spirit upon their lives because until the Holy Spirit reveals the meaning of something, you do not know what it means. These people Jesus is talking to, whom Jesus said, “you believe in Moses, but Moses wrote about me”, that was not revealed by the Father.
The reason it was not revealed is not because the Father was holding back these things. You cannot reveal to the heart of a person closed to revelation. If your heart is closed to revelation then revelation cannot get through. It is like sun saying, “I cannot shine on you in a cave. You must come out of the cave to get sunshine on you. As long as you refuse to come outside, even though you know there is something called the sun out there, you will never experience the warmth of it or the light of it when you are living in a cave. It is the identical same thing when it comes to truth revealed by the Father. God cannot reveal truth to a closed heart.
Opportunities are something that when you do not take advantage of them, they go by you. I can think of many opportunities in my life, and all of us have, but we just let it go by. Financial and all kinds of things we can think of where that took place. The same thing in regard to the hearing and the study of truth. As long as these studies are being done and are being offered and made available, it is remiss to not take advantage of them. It is more than just following along when you hear an audio on this, but when you read the scriptures on this yourself, that is when you really learn from the Holy Spirit.
Romans 10:17
17 Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.
The key verse we use are examples of faith. That is what we are going to talk about in the next couple of weeks. In Romans 1:17, we are told this.
Romans 1:17
17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed – a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”[Habbakuk 2:4]
Now folks, when you are talking about faith and righteousness, you have to realize they go together because there is no such thing as righteousness apart from faith in the righteous one. What does religion do? Set yourself out to be righteous. As we shared so many times, people will come to Christ as my Savior by faith and then get involved in a super active congregation and immediately you are told what you need to be doing, and that is what makes you righteous. You need to read the bible every day, and get up at 5 a.m. in the morning to have a quiet time, and if your neighbor gets up at 4:30 a.m., then you better get up at 4:00 a.m. so you can be better than them, and you need to witness to everyone who walks and a few people who do not walk, and you need to pray every day and turn your cheek whenever someone hits you in the face, you need to visit the poor, take care of widows, go to church three times on Sunday, and go to prayer meetings on Wednesday visitation on Monday, and then be a good father, and a dedicated husband, and you look at that and say, “you have got to be kidding me”. That is a Christian phantom and yet we are told that is what makes you righteous. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What happens is we ruin people and run them away from who Christ is. You are not running from Christ but you are running from religion. And you ought to be running from religion. I would tell people who come into my office, “before you come into my office, I want to tell you that I hate religion”. They say the same thing and then they are sure they are in the wrong place (laughter). We are not here to talk about religion. We are hear to talk about a relationship with the living Christ. You have a problem when you are not in Christ. You are not complete. God made you to be indwelt by Him. When you are not indwelt by Him, that is your problem, Your problem is not what you are doing or not doing but your problem is you are empty of what you are suppose to be full of, and that is Christ, to have a relationship with God who created you. All this religion stuff gets you very subtly on your mind on what you ought to be doing instead of what God has done.
You have people who go to church for 20 or 30 years who have no clue, outside of being hung on a cross, as to what Jesus did. They do not even know the meaning of the resurrection. They do not have a clue as to what God has done and completed in your life. All they know is here is what you ought to be doing and they know they are not doing. So you become a hypocrite, pretending you are or hoping that no one finds out you are not. That is the way your so-called Christian life is, in total hypocrisy, hiding what you are not doing, and hoping no one is finding out, but knowing full well you cannot do those things.
So we burn out people in religion. That is how people burn out and then they rebel from that. So many people have said, “I guess I walked away from God”. If you are born again, you cannot walk away from God. You walked away from religion. There are those good examples of walking away from religion. Jesus and Paul walked away from religion. We must understand the difference between the two. Religion is what you have to be doing in order for God to do something. Christianity is what God did and now respond to it.
Philippians 3:7-9
7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ – the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.
So when you are talking about this gospel of righteousness from God, and keep your eyes on that, for that is where righteousness comes from. It is not righteousness from you, but it is a righteousness from God. It has to be revealed not earned. Righteousness has to be revealed by the Spirit. Now, there are people who think this, that if I come to Christ and get all my sins forgiven then I am righteous. Is that true? No. That is not true. That means you got your sins forgiven.
1 John 2:2
2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
The whole world“s sins have been forgiven by Christ at the cross. Is the whole world righteous? Hardly so. But we get this wrong idea, saying “I am okay except for my sins. If I could just get rid of my sins, I would be so holy I would not be able to stand myself.” Nothing is further from the truth. Sins are there because we are a mess. We are in a fallen state.
Romans 3:10
10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:
Romans 6:23
23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
That is the condition of the world. So when Jesus took away the sins of the world that did not make people righteous. It made them forgiven. If I owed you a 100,000 dollars and I could not pay it and I went bankrupt and you wrote that check off your accounts payable, would that make me righteous? Hardly. All it would do is alleviate a debt I owed and it was paid for you and I did know it. That is all that means. Is that a big deal? You better believe it is! Sin is what caused death. What sin caused is the problem of man, death, spiritual death, and death is the absence of life.
So people get the idea that if I could just get my sins forgiven, I would be okay. Again that would be like saying, “if you eliminate my debt, take it off my accounts receivable, I would be okay”. No, I still have a problem. Christ is the person who alleviated and took away that thing that caused spiritual death, called sin. He took away the sins of the whole world, not only ours, but the sins of the whole world.
2 Corinthians 5:19
19 that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.
That is why no man will ever go to hell because of his sins. All men’s sins have been placed on the back of God never to see them again.The only sin attributable to man is the sin of unbelief in the provision that God made for you and me in the person of Jesus Christ. Sins were taken away in order to give you life. When a person refuses life, he remains dead. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out nor a rocket scientist to figure out that if I am dead then to not be in or stay in that state, you need life. You have to have something wrong with your head if you believe you are dead and if life is offered to you and to refuse that life that is being offered.
I went 36 years knowing I was spiritually dead. I would bounce prayers off the ceiling. I knew a lot about me and nothing about Him. But then that was revealed to me and I responded by faith, and so I was born anew. I have new life living in me. I have the life of Christ living in me. So that life that came to live in me, it is His life that brought His righteousness. So the only righteousness that you and I have is the righteous of Christ. We do not have any of our own. It is His righteousness living in me. It is Christ in me that is my hope of glory.
Colossians 1:27
27 To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
So, righteousness is found only in Him. That is where righteousness is received. Forgiveness is received through His cross. Righteousness is received through His life.
1 Corinthians 1:30
30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God – that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.
So Christ is our righteousness. If that is true, then what right do we have to walk around acting self righteous. As if I have a righteousness that I earned and my righteousness is because of what I do or saying, or even thinking, “I go to church on Sunday, and therefore, I am righteous”. No, that does not make you righteous at all. Not at all. You may go to church because you have been made righteous by Christ but you are not going to be made righteous by going to church. All of these things are taught and they keep you away from the central truth of what it is to walk by faith. The scriptures says in the gospels that a righteousness from God is revealed. Not from you but from Him.
Romans 1:17
17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed – a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
You become righteous by faith and you live by faith in the same righteous one who made you righteous and that is Christ Jesus, the object of our faith. In scripture, we are told that the righteous will live by faith. The righteous are those who have put their trust in Jesus Christ, and therefore, are the recipient of His righteousness and not ours.
Romans 4:23-25
23 The words “it was credited to him” were written not for him alone, 24 but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness – for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25 He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.
Colossians 2:6-7
6 So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7 rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.
The bible chronicles the lives of many of these believers and how they lived their lives. So we will take a closer look at some examples of what true faith is. As we look into Romans 4:19-24, once again, the apostle Paul is going to be talking about Abraham. To put this in chronological order, Abraham came before Moses and the law. How were people saved prior to the law? They are saved the same way as Abraham was saved, and that is by faith.
Romans 4:18-19
18 Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”[Genesis 15:5] 19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead –
Here again, God had told him that he and Sarah were not only going to bear a son, but that he will be the father of many nations. That is hard to comprehend in your 90s. Faith, believing a fact of something, is a vital thing for us to do. It is like the prodigal son, which you can read the account in Luke 15:11-32. He came to his senses. He faced the fact of something. He faced the fact that his father’s servants were living better than he was living with the hogs. He faced the truth of something. He faced the fact his body was as good as dead.
Romans 4:19
since he was about a hundred years old – and that Sarah’s womb was also dead.
He did not come up with some hair-brained idea that I am going to perform. He recognizes the fact that this is an impossibility. When Jesus says to you and me, apart from me you can do nothing. What do you suppose he wants us to conclude from that? I think it is facing the fact that apart from Him I can do nothing. As far as I am concerned my ability to do anything in my own strength to please God is dead. There is nothing I can do to do that. We need to come to that conclusion.
Hebrews 1:6
6 And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
Galatians 5:6
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
The only thing that pleases God is faith. Apart from faith it is impossible to please God. We are trying to please God by actions instead of by our faith, which is the only thing that pleases God. Now, when Jesus walked by faith, He said everything I do is because the Father told me to do it. His actions were a result of faith in His Father. It is not that actions are not going to occur but they occur from faith or they can occur from flesh. Now then if you are not walking in dependency, or by faith in the Lord to be the initiator of actions, then you have flesh works. They are all over the place. That is what I have said so many times. You can fake it in the flesh. You can fake the gifts of the Spirit.
Romans 8:7-9
7 The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. 8 Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.9 You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.
There is not a gift of the Spirit that cannot be faked. Because of our lack of discernment, you cannot tell the difference. You can teach or encourage in the flesh. If I encourage because I might get something back, then I am operating in the flesh. I can have manifestations in the flesh. I can do all those things without knowing the Lord. I can hide or imitate those things.
It is just like a magician that can make an elephant disappear. I can tell you that the elephant has not disappeared but the illusion can be there. There can be an illusion that something is true but you know it is not true if you know anything. So looking at this whole issue of those things, you realize the gifts can be faked. But the fruit of the Spirit, how can you fake that one? How can you fake love? Now, we can try, but it is obvious. Love has to come from God. How do we fake joy? We substitute happiness for it. That is the best Satan can do is to make you happy. Happiness is predicated on what is happening. That is why there is a word “unhappy” but no word “unjoy”. When talking about love, joy, and peace, you can have substitutes. You can have earthly peace. It is all temporary. It depends on what mountain you are on or stream you are by but it is temporary. You can walk into it and can walk out of it. But true peace that surpasses understanding cannot be faked. That has to come from God. When talking about those things, I can only come by faith in the one who can produce those things. Only Christ Jesus can produce those things.
Galatians 5:22-23
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Philippians 4:6-7
6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
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