by Dr. J. Vernon McGee
I received a letter once from a lady who joined a small group shortly
after she had become a Christian, and they told her there were certain things
she couldn't do and certain things she could do. In the letter which she wrote
to me she said, “I have followed all these rules, and yet I am still
miserable.”
In the history of the church we can see times when people set up a system of
doing things and not doing things – systems that actually were good at first.
For example, the monasteries which began in the Roman Empire were actually a
protest against the licentiousness of their day. But before long it was worse
on the inside of the monastery than on the outside.
Remember that Christ said to the Pharisees, “Now do ye Pharisees make clean the
outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening
and wickedness” (Luke 11:39). In other words, “You make the outside of the cup
clean, but inside it’s dirty. It is just like whitewashing a tomb.” Today it is
“not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy
he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost”
(Titus 3:5). In order to live a life of holiness, we must first receive new life
from God – we must be born from above.
The Bible tells us that Daniel’s decision to refuse the Babylonian diet was
something he “purposed in his heart” (Daniel 1:8) … it all began in the heart
of Daniel. He was not a papier-mâché; he had a heart, and his convictions came
from his heart. That should be our experience also. We are captives in this
world in which we live; gravitation holds all of us by the seat of our pants,
and we cannot jump off this earth. The Lord Jesus said that we are in the world,
but not of the world. And He said, “Ye cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew
6:24). However, we cannot serve God by following a set of rules; we must have a
purpose in our hearts. Jesus said that it was out of the heart that the issues
of life proceed; the things which we put into our bodies are not the most
important. Daniel purposed in his heart that he would obey God’s law given to
God’s people Israel – this was to be his testimony.
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