Our Lord never “patches up” our natural virtues, that is, our natural traits, qualities, or characteristics. He completely remakes a person on the inside— “…put on the new man…” (Ephesians 4:24). In other words, see that your natural human life is putting on all that is in keeping with the new life. The life God places within us develops its own new virtues, not the virtues of the seed of Adam, but of Jesus Christ. Once God has begun the process of sanctification in your life, watch and see how God causes your confidence in your own natural virtues and power to wither away. He will continue until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus.

Thank God if you are going through this drying-up experience!The sign that God is at work in us is that He is destroying our confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but only a wasted reminder of what God created man to be. We want to cling to our natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us in contact with the life of Jesus Christ— a life that can never be described in terms of natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people who are trying to serve God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them. They are depending solely on what they have by virtue of heredity.

God does not take our natural virtues and transform them, because our natural virtues could never even come close to what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every part of our natural bodily life into harmony with the new life God has placed within us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that were characteristic of the Lord Jesus.And every virtue we possess  Is His alone.

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December 30 2015

Journal Entry for Today-JDV

Good morning Lord and thank you for this day and this devotional…and for the earlier journal entry I wrote that mysteriously disappeared as I was typing. I was almost finished writing the journal entry and was feeling quite smug about my wonderful spiritual insights, and then poof, it was gone. Boy that was a message. The real message was/is that my personal virtue, spiritual insights and writing hold no value except the transforming Holy Spirit value provided from surrendering my virtue, insights and writing to You. I looked all over my computer, and could not find the document anywhere. And then it occurred to me that all things work together for good and that my smug, self-satisfied and virtuous feelings were exactly what the devotional was about today. Thank you for that “real time” lesson.

And God says…”When you focus on Me, and not the tasks at hand, you will see the value in things that do not work, writing that is lost, money misplaced, and goals that are unreached. When you focus on Me and not the tasks at hand, I can show you the value of things that seem to hold no value. When you seek first the kingdom of God, which is Jesus, I can provide everything else you need, including “closure” where you thought there was none. Acknowledge Me in all your ways and do not rely on your own understanding of what is needed for your daily tasks and I will make your paths straight. Your true virtues are the virtues of Jesus and they come to life in you as you surrender yourself to me. When you give up your rights to yourself; your rights to look good, feel good, be right and to be in control, the virtues of Jesus become yours by the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.”