Chapter 5: Practice From The Heart

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Study God’s Word and you will find that He has loved murderers, adulterers and thieves. Name your sin here and you will find that God has

loved all the sinners. Some of these people turned out to be great saints of the Bible. However, once they encountered God, they stopped the sinful behavior and entered into the practice of fellowshipping with the Father. You won’t find God in fellowship with sin, wickedness, lawlessness and

evil. Those Christians who think they can dwell in any of these areas are only deceiving themselves. They are certainly people Jesus is talking about in Matthew 7:21-23.

So we can observe throughout the Bible that our own perfection has

never been a criterion of the Father. If it were, not a single soul would be saved. That leaves us only with the issue of practice. By now you might think I was way off base when I made the statement earlier that: “You reasoned correctly that God would not hold this particular lie against you.”

I have used the illustration of lies for a couple of reasons. For one, lying comes quite easy to all of us. Often, our lying takes the form of not telling the whole truth of a matter. By withholding certain facts, we try to

color the truth to get our own way. We rationalize that this is okay because official statistics tells us everyone lies an average of 25 times a day. Yes, I actually heard that bunk on a national network television show recently.

Let me ask you this question. Have you ever known someone who did not lie? If you are honest, you should have answered yes. If you couldn’t answer yes, I suggest you find another church to attend and some new friends to associate with. Lying is not built within us as a default type

of behavior; and, Apostle Paul is not an isolated case in history of someone who doesn’t lie. It is not natural for anyone to lie his or her way through life. While it may come easy out of the mouth, lying takes a lot of effort to be clever enough to not get caught. Telling the truth is much easier and

requires no memory bank or catalogue dedicated to deceit. People who practice lying have to work at it to be successful in this evil endeavor.

With God, a lie is a lie and there is no big or little lie. However, with

God there are also those who “are lovers and practitioners of lies.” These are clearly people who love to lie and think that they are very clever about it.