284. Are We to Live by "Good Christian Morals"?

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Are we to live by "good Christian morals"? Are we to live by a certain standard of right vs. wrong or good vs. evil? Is there a code of ethics that Christians are to live by?

If the original problem was that Adam ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (or "right and wrong") instead of the Tree of Life (Jesus), isn't it the Tree of Life that we want to now live from, rather than the knowledge of good and evil?

Here's this week's GIG-Bite, a quick sample of this week's program.

283. Rededicate Ourselves to God?

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There is something that perhaps seems admirable about people dedicating themselves to God, and then rededicating themselves when they feel they've fallen short. But is this really something that God wants from us?  Is it up to us to be dedicated to God? Is it about our performance for Him?  Does God want our selves to dedicate and rededicate our selves to Him over and over again? Or is it our-selves who have made it about our-selves, and our performance for God, when really He has something entirely different in mind?

While it's great to be dedicated to God, this week we discuss some of these questions and try to shed a little bit of light on how the focus perhaps ought to be more on God's sufficient work in us, rather than our attempts at dedicating and rededicating ourselves to Him.

Here's this week's GIG-Bite, a quick sample of this week's program.

282. Does the Spirit Convict Us of Sin?

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Something that you will commonly hear people in the church say is that the Holy Spirit "convicted" them of a sin they committed, or that they felt convicted by the Holy Spirit because they weren't living up to some standard that they felt they should have been keeping. This week we ask the question, "Does the Holy Spirit convict Christians of sin?" Is that what He does? Does the Holy Spirit go around "convicting" Christians when they sin or fall short? As we talk about this, we think you'll find that we share some really good news that not only debunks this idea of the Holy Spirit convicting Christians of sin, but that shows how He actually works to "convict" (convince) Christians of something far more wonderful! Find out what that is on this week's edition of Growing in Grace.

Here's this week's GIG-Bite, a quick sample of this week's program.

281. Death to Life, Not Bad to Good

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So very often in the church, the focus is on sin, sin, sin. Many seem to think that the purpose of Jesus coming to the earth was to change "bad" people into "good" people. While the fruit of the life of Christ that is expressed through a person will appear on the outside as a change in behavior, the problem Jesus came to resolve wasn't an issue of behavior. It was an issue of life and death.

In our podcast this week, we intended to talk about the question we had asked at the end of last week's program. "Does the Holy Spirit convict people of sin?" We didn't actually get to that question until near the end of the podcast (and we'll continue on with it next week), because while we were leading up to it we ended up talking about this foundational issue of man's problem being that we were born dead in Adam and needed to be made alive. Man's behavior had nothing to do with it! Rather, through Adam, sin entered the world and therefore all died (see Romans 5:12). That was the problem that Jesus dealt with.

Here's this week's GIG-Bite, a quick sample of this week's program.