Sunday, October 28, 2012

Dual Focus in The Duel of Life

UV 562/10,000 Dual focus in this Duel Psalms 45 v 7 You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore, God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy. In order to maintain our spiritual equilibrium, we need to not only have a model of righteousness before us that we should seek to emulate but we also need a model of wickedness or unrighteousness before our eyes that we must avoid. The model of righteousness is Jesus the “Christ” or the Anointed One of God. The model of unrighteousness is Satan or Lucifer. We need to constantly imitate the One and repulse and repudiate and abhor the other. When we love Jesus, the very embodiment of righteousness, we love righteousness. When we hate Satan, the very source and embodiment of wickedness, we hate wickedness. An archer or a marksman has to aim at only one target. But, we as humans need to aim at being like one and aim at avoiding the ways of the other. The anointing of victory and joy that was upon Jesus will be given to us, too. God will set us above our companions even as Daniel and his friends were set above the other trainees. His face will shine upon us. His favour and grace will surround our lives. The joy comes from the sense of victory over temptation. It is this sense of joy that filled and sustained Joseph in his difficult years in prison as he resisted temptation. He knew in his inner heart that the Lord will once again lift him above his companions. The anointing of the Holy Spirit will release a joy that cannot be explained by the circumstances one finds oneself in. It will in fact be the cause of breaking free from the situation- a breakthrough. To be passionate about righteousness and to hate evil is the very heart of God. So a man or a woman who loves righteousness and hates evil is moulded and shaped after the very heart of God. To hate evil implies that one should not just ignore the negatives that are happening around the world. It does not also mean we take up cudgels personally against every evil in this world. It means that we bring it to the attention of God in prayer. The anointing on us will imply that the Lord will release His power to defeat the specific force of darkness that is at work, however mighty or formidable that force is. In the current US Presidential election for instance, there is a call to every faithful believer to pray for the defeat of forces that support anti-God and anti-life issues like gay marriage and abortion. Prateep V Philip

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