Learn Your Lessons Well

Salvation is a gift that God freely offers us through His beloved and powerful Son, Jesus Christ. We can’t do anything to earn it. He’s given this overwhelming gift to us because He loves us so much. Ephesians 2:8(NLT) says, “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God.” Jesus Christ gave his life on Calvary as a sacrifice for our sins. He died an agonizing death on the cross and after three days in the grave, Heavenly Father resurrected him from the dead. By this we can be sure that everything needed to secure our victory over sin and death, Jesus Christ has perfectly completed. He left no ‘i’ undotted and no ‘t’ uncrossed. The only thing left for you and me to do is to accept what our Master Jesus has accomplished for us and to believe and trust it in the depths of our hearts. It is our great privilege to do this, and it must be done to become born again and receive God’s salvation. Many of us that have accepted him as our Lord and Savior, and made him the head of our lives are not trusting in his love as we should. We are building our faith in our victory in Christ at a snail’s pace. Know this resolutely, it’s time to accelerate the pace.

Through Christ, God has redeemed us from the curse of the law. Once we become born-again, our lives are saved! We have the awesome opportunity to bring our hearts and minds in alignment with our new reality and new nature, and this requires us to renew our minds to God’s Word. All of us are born into a sinful world with sin in our bodies. Up until the point that we accept God’s love into our hearts, we were trained in part by the world and its systems. After becoming a new creature in Christ, our human spirits come alive to God, and we need to be trained spiritually. We must learn to walk in God’s Holy Spirit, and as we do this, our hearts and minds must be transformed. God tells us in Romans 12:2(NKJV), “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

We are spiritual beings having an earth experience. 1Thessalonians 5:23 tells us that we are three-part beings, spirit, soul, and body. The salvation that God freely offers us is a spiritual transformation, but He tells us in Philippians 2:12 that you and I must work out the salvation of our souls. This is because the soul is governed by us, whereas our human spirits are governed by the Holy Spirit once they are made brand new. So, it is very important that we understand the free-will agency God has given us, because He will not force us to change how we act, think, speak, and feel. Once the Father gives us a spiritual gift, Romans 11:29 affirms that He will never withdraw it. This means that He will not overstep our free-will. We are the ones to govern what we do, think, feel, and say. Our Heavenly Father knows that if we truly love and honor Him, we will line up our actions, thoughts, feelings, and confessions to mirror the example of Jesus Christ.

Our hearts and minds are a part of our souls and they are indeed the gateways into the soul; the heart and mind let information in and they let information out. The soul is the innermost part of our beings, and we interact with other people and situations based on what is in it. Both our emotions and thoughts come from the soul, and these get expressed through our actions. In other words, a person can know a lot about us by how we choose to express our emotions and thoughts outwardly. If we smile and do good deeds, people assume that goodness is on the inside of us. By the same token, if we’re angry all the time, and we speak and behave in a way that causes harm to ourselves or other people, they assume there’s evil in us. Jesus Christ put it best in Luke 6:45 by teaching us, “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart.”

A person can be saved by the blood of the Lamb, and still walk around with a bad treasury in their hearts and minds. No doubt you have come across many people like this. They profess to be Christians, but they do not have the heart of Christ. God wants them to be transformed, but they will not give Him permission, because they have refused to renew their minds and line up their thoughts and behaviors with those of Christ. Our Lord is soon to return. We cannot afford to assume we are spiritually prepared in the way God requires. We must be absolutely diligent in praying that He will show us the things that must be released. If we pray this without ceasing, we will show ourselves to be humble before Him, and willing to learn what He desires to teach us.

Surrender Victimhood

The thing we must understand is that we all come to God as we are, but He will not leave us the way we came. We must be transformed, and He has made it abundantly clear that renewing our minds to the mind of Christ is necessary for His process. To embrace the newness that Christ offers, we must recognize that there are lessons we need to learn, and our Heavenly Father is very willing to teach them to us.

Often these lessons are about habit patterns, routines, addictions, fears, and insecurities that must be released in order for us to go higher in Him. The reason it is so important to learn these spiritual lessons is because they will be on repeat continually in our lives if we fail to learn them. Another very important reason we must learn spiritual lessons about God’s Word and about His love is because we can’t spiritually grow in certain areas if we allow the weight of sin and wrong believing to continue weighing us down. They keep us from enjoying the blessings and the life we were meant to have.

Many of us have had our hearts broken through very traumatic situations, and our lives haven’t been the same since. We want those responsible for our pain to pay the price, but how, when, and what they pay will do nothing for the condition of our own souls. We do not have the luxury of wasting time by looking outside ourselves for solutions. The answers we all need are housed in us through the Spirit of Jesus Christ. His love for us is the most beautiful and intense love in all of eternity. So, we may think we need to see a person pay for how they’ve hurt us, but that isn’t what we need. We need to focus all our attention and intention on loving God through Jesus Christ.

For many of us, pain keeps us from embracing newness. To release this pain is to forgive, let go, and grow higher. Your pain, heartache, or disappointment is real. You’ve gone through something that left you wounded, or maybe you just don’t trust that life will be kind to you. Whatever the case, feeling bad, insecure, and doubtful is not a normal state. It isn’t our new nature. When we feel down about ourselves and our situations, we must draw a line in the sand that separates those feelings from the reality of what God says we are and what God says we can do. He is the authority, not us. Our lessons will almost always be about acknowledging our pain but surrendering our victimhood for victory. We can do this through Jesus Christ, and we will be transformed by every step we make to embrace the newness he offers.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

“Learn Your Lessons Well”, written for Christian Encouragement and Inspiration© 2023. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.