FOR I want you to know how great is my solicitude for you—how severe an inward struggle I am engaged in for you and for those believers at Laodicea, and for all who, like yourselves have never seen my face and known me personally.

For my concern is, that their hearts may be braced (comforted, cheered, and encouraged) as they are knit together in love, that they may come to have all the abounding wealth and blessings of assured conviction of understanding, and that they may become progressively more intimately acquainted with and may know more definitely and accurately and thoroughly that mystic secret of the Almighty, which is Messiah (the Anointed One).

In Him all the treasures of sacred wisdom or comprehensive insight into the ways and purposes of the Almighty and all the riches of spiritual knowledge and enlightenment are stored up and lie hidden.

I say this in order that no one may mislead and delude you by plausible and persuasive and attractive arguments and beguiling speech.

For though I am away from you in body, yet I am with you in spirit, delighted at the sight of your [standing shoulder to shoulder in such] orderly array and the firmness and the solid front and steadfastness of your faith in Messiah, that leaning of the entire human personality on Him in absolute trust and confidence in His power, wisdom, and goodness.

As you have therefore received the Messiah, evenYahushua, the Master, so, walk (regulate your lives and conduct yourselves) in union with and conformity to Him.

Have the roots of your being firmly and deeply planted in Him, fixed and founded in Him, being continually built up in Him, becoming increasingly more confirmed and established in the faith, just as you were taught, and abounding and overflowing in it with thanksgiving.

See to it that no one carries you off as spoil or makes you yourselves captive by his so-called philosophy and intellectualism and vain deceit (idle fancies and plain nonsense), following human tradition (men’s ideas of the material rather than the spiritual world), just crude notions following the rudimentary and elemental teachings of the universe and disregarding the teachings of Yahushua (the Messiah).

• For in Him the whole fullness of Deity (the Almighty’s Head) continues to dwell in bodily form [giving complete expression of the divine nature].
• And you are in Him, made full and having come to fullness of life in Messiah you too are filled with the Almightyhead–Father, Son and Holy Spirit–and reach full spiritual stature. And He is the Head of all rule and authority of every angelic principality and power.
• In Him also you were circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, but in a [spiritual] circumcision [performed by] Messiah by stripping off the body of the flesh (the whole corrupt, carnal nature with its passions and lusts).
• Thus, you were circumcised when you were buried with Him in [your] baptism, in which you were also raised with Him to a new life through [your] faith in the working of the Almighty as displayed when He raised Him up from the dead.
• And you who were dead in trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh (your sensuality, your sinful carnal nature), the Almighty brought to life together with Messiah, having [freely] forgiven us all our transgressions.
• Having cancelled and blotted out and wiped away the handwriting of the note (bond) with its legal decrees and demands which was in force and stood against us (hostile to us). This [note with its regulations, decrees, and demands] He set aside and cleared completely out of our way by nailing it to His
• The Almighty disarmed the principalities and powers that were ranged against us and made a bold display and public example of them, in triumphing over them in Him and in it [the cross].
• Therefore let no one sit in judgment on you in matters of food and drink, or with regard to a feast day or a New Moon or a Sabbath.
• Such things are only the shadow of things that are to come, and they have only a symbolic value. But the reality (the substance, the solid fact of what is foreshadowed, the body of it) belongs to Messiah.
• Let no one defraud you by acting as an umpire and declaring you unworthy and disqualifying you for the prize, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions [he claims] he has seen, vainly puffed up by his sensuous notions and inflated by his unspiritual thoughts and fleshly conceit,
• And not holding fast to the Head, from Whom the entire body, supplied and knit together by means of its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from the Almighty.
• If then you have died with Messiah to material ways of looking at things and have escaped from the world’s crude and elemental notions and teachings of externalism, why do you live as if you still belong to the world?
• Why do you submit to rules and regulations?–such as ‘Do not handle [this], Do not taste [that], Do not even touch [them], referring to things all of which perish with being used. To do this is to follow human precepts and doctrines.
• Such practices have indeed the outward appearance that popularly passes for wisdom, in promoting self-imposed rigor of devotion and delight in self-humiliation and severity of discipline of the body, but they are of no value in checking the indulgence of the flesh (the lower nature). Instead, they do not honor the Almighty but serve only to indulge the flesh.

The Precious Nature versus The Vile One. The war between two natures is the core of the Mental Insanity

Monday, March 27, 2017 at 8:10 am