Human Nature At Work

You were born into a world which has developed a certain type of civilization. The instant you were born you knew NOTHING! But your eyes opened, you looked around, and knowledge of what you saw began registering in your memory, you began putting knowledge into your mind. Your ears heard sounds, and thus additional knowledge entered through the sense of hearing. Very elementary at first, but gradually, each bit of new knowledge, entering your mind through your senses of taste, smell, feel, sight and hearing was added to what had previously been stored there.

Gradually you came to know, and take up with, the customs, ways, generally accepted ideas and beliefs of this world. You accepted them, took them for granted without question. Some of them were good, but many of them were bad. But you took them for granted without realizing they were bad.

You were born with a NATURE. We call it human nature. Few people realize what it is. Human nature has a spiritual side, and a physical side. On its spiritual side, it is pure VANITY. Vanity loves and tends to exalt the SELF. It is self-centered. It is selfish and greedy. It is this way naturally. On its physical side, there are the five senses, and the PULL of these senses to sensations of pleasure. Some of these sensual pleasures are healthy, uplifting and good. But many are injurious, harmful and BAD. Yet the bad ones cry out for gratification as much and probably far more than the good. Thus human nature exerts an automatic, impulsive pull toward selfishness, greed, vanity, jealousy, envy, hatred, and toward the lusts (wrong desires) of the flesh.

Human nature makes it come NATURAL to resent and resist authority over oneself. A child tends to resist the authority of his parents. We grow up with a natural attitude of hostility toward any authority, all the way up to God.

Human nature wants to be good. It just doesn’t want to do good because good is the WAY of God’s invisible, inexorable, spiritual LAW. That law is, simply, LOVE. It is love toward God in the form of trusting and willing obedience to God’s every command and direction, knowing it is for our highest good. It is love toward God in the form of being God-centered, having the mind continually (consciously or sub-consciously) in contact with God, relying on God, seeking guidance from God, worshipful in the sense of gratitude, obedience, faith in complete trust. It is love toward fellow man, in the sense of outgoing concern, equal to love and concern for self.

Please understand, no man exercises THAT KIND of love naturally. You simply were not born with that kind of love. You don’t have it! That is, not unless you have received it from God through His GIFT of His Holy Spirit.

That love travels a certain road. It is the road that leads to peace, to happiness, to confident assurance, security, well-being, enjoyment without kickbacks, prosperity, every good thing the heart desires.

Doesn’t everyone want that result? That is to say, everyone wants to be good. But no one, it seems, naturally wants to go that way, to do good. That is the WAY of God’s law.

Now this world is not full of happiness, peace, joy, and universal prosperity. It is pretty well filled with strife-- in the home, in business, in politics, in war between nations. It is pretty well filled with unhappiness, frustration, insecurity. It is pretty well filled with crime and violence, with broken homes and unhappy quarreling families, with sickness and disease, with frustration, failures, and tragedies.

God is NOT the author of all these troubles in the world. God has, for a great purpose, made humans free moral agents, and allotted six thousand years for mankind to make a choice, whether to accept God’s government over him, to be ruled by God’s Law of Love, or whether to set up his own ideas of man-made government, following what comes naturally-- human nature.

That six thousand years is about up. In a very few more years, God Almighty is going to intervene supernaturally and with divine POWER in the governments and ways of society, and bring peace and happiness to humanity! Just how can that be done?

IT’S SIMPLE!

There is A WAY of personal, group, and organized living that will automatically produce that utopia. And there is A WAY that HAS, for six thousand years, produced curses, war, strife, violence, frustration, and failure—The WAY of this World. God is simply going to enforce, with divine power, HIS WAY. He is going to take over all governments, in a super WORLD GOVERNMENT, ruled by the very CREATOR. It will rule by God’s Laws, the WAY of LOVE!

Why do some people, even college professors and some who are intellectually inclined become atheists or communists? Because they see many things wrong in this world, things they want to be right, they grasp this as a last straw and only hope, under the delusion that they can have a part in making this a better world! They want to be right, but they don’t do right. So they grasp the straw that makes the lying and false promises of producing the solution. But this system is only another idea of man based on human nature. It is a theoretical way that would destroy what little good there might be in this world’s society. It is the most false of false hopes.

But you can have a part in actually bringing PEACE, happiness, joy and abundance to humanity. God Almighty is going to do it, whether or not you have a part in it! But He is not going to do it alone. He is going to take certain human beings, born in the very LIKENESS of God, who REPENT of their carnal human nature, who cry out to God to CHANGE that nature, and give them the matchless supreme GIFT of His divine LOVE that will travel the way toward peace, happiness and joy.

These are they, who through real repentance of what they are, as well as what they have done, through faith in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as well as in His resurrected LIFE and POWER, are forgiven their guilty past. They are given contact with God, they are changed, converted, receiving His Holy Spirit, being begotten as His children, receiving the DIVINE nature.

In other words, they repent of human nature, they repent of hostility to authority, of resentment against God’s Law. They surrender unconditionally to God, and wholeheartedly want Him to rule in their lives. They change (through God’s power given by His grace) from rebellion to submission, from self-centeredness to being God-centered. They let Jesus Christ (in spirit) come into their lives and actually live their lives for them (Gal.2:20).

They change from THE WAY that has brought all the curses upon this unhappy world, to THE WAY that will bring a brilliant, joyous UTOPIA to this earth in a very few years when God sends the LIVING Jesus Christ in all power and glory to rule all nations and bring the happy, peaceful WORLD TOMORROW! This change is conversion. This is what it means to become a Christian. A Christian is not merely one who professes Christ. God’s own instruction to us, the Bible, says that if one has not received God’s Holy Spirit, he is NONE of His. He or she is not a Christian (Romans 8: 9). God gives His Holy Spirit ONLY to them that obey Him (Acts 5:32). This implants within the mind the DIVINE NATURE, it means a changed mind!

But it does not remove the HUMAN nature. The mind governs whether the converted Christian now follows the pulls, the impulses, the desires of human nature, or whether he or she resists them and is led by the newly received divine nature. “As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” ( Romans 8:14 ). But one’s human nature cries out to be satisfied, does not like to be repressed.

Just receiving God’s Spirit is not enough. One must BE LED by God’s Spirit. His Spirit opens the mind to understanding of spiritual truth, and the knowledge of God’s Law. It opens the mind to THE WAY one should follow. God’s Spirit also is the Love of God, God’s own divine love flooding into the human heart, and flowing out in love to God and love to neighbor. One must therefore GROW in spiritual knowledge and in God’s grace ( II Peter 3:18). He or she must become a DOER of God’s Law, actually living in the way of peace and happiness and joy. This means he or she must OVERCOME their own carnal nature, their old habits, the temptations of the world. They must change! They must develop perfect spiritual and righteous CHARACTER. The real Christian is undergoing a life of training to become a RULER in God’s Kingdom, in the happy and peaceful WORLD TOMORROW.

One cannot learn everything in a minute, a day, or a year. One does not become perfect at one jump. It is a continuous process. No Christian becomes perfect at the very beginning. They do not overcome or root out all the sins, the wrongs habits, all at once. They must do it little by little. But, “He that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end,” says Jesus Christ, “to him will I give power over the nations: and he shall rule them…” (Rev. 2:26-27).

Why do the nations of this world need to be ruled by Jesus Christ and those trained under a Christian life? Because all the unhappiness, everything wrong with this world has come from living THE WAY of human nature, the way of hostility to God’s Law and God’s Government. Because the only way this world can have peace, prosperity, happiness, is to be forced to build a society based on the THE WAY that produces these desired blessings.

If you have started on THAT RIGHT WAY, don’t get discouraged because you have slipped and fallen down along the road a few times. Get up and keep going. Even if you have sinned and are truly sorry, you can repent and Christ as your High Priest will forgive. Read and study I John I: 7-10 and 2: 1-2. This is written to converted CHRISTIANS.

At the time of Christ’s coming, the dead in Christ will be resurrected and rise to meet the descending Christ in the air. At that instant those living who have been begotten by God’s Spirit, will be changed in composition, from mortal to immortal, from matter to spirit, from human to divine.

They are then to rule with and under the all-powerful living Christ, until all nations beat their swords into plowshares, and peace shines forth on this war-weary earth!

Jesus Christ taught His followers to PRAY: “THY KINGDOM COME, THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH…” How about it? Shall we pray that prayer?

 

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