Lawless

I take joy in doing your will, my God, for your instructions are written on my heart.

Psalm 40:8

God’s laws for living, his instructions for life, are built in, encoded in our DNA. As soon as we allow Jesus into our lives, he brings the law inside us. No longer a set of rules and regulations that we hope to live up to, the law now lives in us, written on our hearts.

The law on the outside could command holiness, but it could not produce holiness. It could control behavior through fear of consequences, but it could not eradicate the inclination toward sinful behavior.

Jesus will do what the law was assigned to do but was inadequate to accomplish. “What the law was powerless to do . . . God did . . . in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us” (Romans 8:3-4, NIV). Look at the basic statement Paul made. “What the law was powerless to do”—make us holy, empower our behavior, change our hearts—“God did, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met.” Where are the righteous requirements of the law to be met? “In us.”

How did God accomplish in us what the law could not? “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33, NIV).

In the Kingdom of God, all Kingdom dwellers get heart transplants. The new hearts know God, and his law is their heartbeat. The law will not be outside of you, commanding you. The law will be inside you, empowering you.

What the law demands, grace provides. Under the rule of grace, everything that God demands of you, He provides for you. Under the rule of grace, the law that once condemned now empowers.

Jesus, live in me in all your fullness.

The heart in which God gets His way, and writes His law in power, lives only and wholly to carry that writing, and is unchangeably identified with it.

Andrew Murray(1828–1917), South African pastor and author