Victorious living is living by Grace. We can only enter God’s presence by the finished work of the Cross.

Matthew 16:25 (New International Version, © 2011)

25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

God asks us to surrender our lives to Him. We were created for His good pleasure, and He knows that apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:1-5).

When we come to the end of ourselves, when we give God all of our strengths as well as all of our weaknesses, everything that we are, that we have and everything that we do and have done, He will transform it supernaturally. Just like at the feeding of the 5000, a little boy gave up his lunch box, everything he had in his possession, 5 loaves and 2 fish (Matthew 14:13-20) to Jesus, and Jesus miraculously transformed it into food that would feed 5000 men plus all their women and children, and still have much left over at the end.

So God wants us to give Him all that we are and all that we have so He can transform us and we can know it is impossible that we did this in our own strength, we could only have done this in His strength, and that is when we give Him all the glory and all the praise that He deserves. It is when our outer man is broken (our will and our ways) that the Spirit is released.

It is finished! Jesus is our justification. It is what Jesus (God) did on the Cross, for us in our place. We have been made righteous in our Spirit through the Blood of Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is sanctifying us. It is what God is doing in us by the Power of the Holy Spirit, transforming our souls, our hearts and our minds to come in line with His will for us. It is His power renewing our thoughts, our motives, our attitudes, it is His hunger for Holiness in us that compels us to Holiness.

The only work we are to do is to believe in Jesus, to believe that the work of our salvation has been done and that the work for our sanctification belongs to God, so He gets all the glory!

When we passionately seek God’s Kingdom first and we begin to understand the love God has for us through the finished work of the Cross, we fall in love with Jesus because He first loved us. Then we will no longer do things out of our own strength or because ‘we have to’, we will do things because He empowers us ‘to want to’ do it for Him, and it will be His work in us.

If we are born of the Spirit and we still follow sin instead of the leading of the Holy Spirit, it is purely because we have not fallen deeply in love with Jesus yet, and we do not know who we are in Christ.

Who has ever fallen in love with someone and not tried to please that person in the process?

When we really come to know Jesus, and we will really fall in love with Him, we will live holier accidentally than we could ever live holy on purpose. We will hate sin the way God hates sin. You see, it is His Spirit who keeps on pointing us back to Jesus, and Jesus is pointing us to the Father. He is the One calling us, and He is the One drawing us into His presence.

James 4:8 (New International Version, © 2011)

8 Come near to God and he will come near to you.

God will not force us to come into intimacy and communion with Him, we have been given free will. We have a choice to make.

I pray that we will so fall in love with Jesus and be so filled with His Holy Spirit that we will shine for Jesus everywhere we go, and that we will have too much love and too much joy to keep it to ourselves, that the abundance of Jesus’ living waters will overflow abundantly from the depths of our beings into the people around us, our families and our Church family, our friends, our neighbours, our colleagues, and that we will become really contagious with the Holy Spirit everywhere we go.

I pray that we would know who we are in Christ, and also that we would always have our spiritual eyes and ears opened to the truth when trials come that the One who is living in us (and has already defeated the enemy for us) is greater than the one who is in this world, our only enemy, the Devil and that we may always remember that the Devil uses people as victims to get to us. We can do all things through Christ because He is our strength.

  1. What is the starting point for victorious living?
  2. What is the purpose of God for our lives?
  3. What happens to us when we passionately seek the Kingdom of God first? What effect will this have on our lives here and now?