Part 1 – Desperate to Live Right

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If you are someone who has been a born-again Christian for some time and you find that it has become discouragingly difficult for you to live a godly Christian life, this booklet has been written for you. I, too, have been in that place spiritually. I clearly knew God’s requirements for living a godly Christian life; what’s more, I wasn’t fooled into thinking that I even came close to meeting those requirements. My heartache was that I desperately wanted to “live right,” as I called it, and be the kind of person, both inside and out, that I knew God required me to be. Nonetheless, no matter how hard I tried to do this, I missed the mark almost all of the time.

When I would read Romans seven where Paul says, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do,” I would think, “This is me. I am just like Paul. I, too, am a miserable failure. I am unable to do what I know is right, and I continually do what I know is wrong.” I could and did wholeheartedly say along with Paul that this was certainly a wretched way of life. In view of the fact that the great and beloved Paul had experienced the same failures that I was experiencing, I came to the conclusion that maybe this was it, and the best any of us could hope to be or do this side of heaven.

This belief gave me no peace, however. My conscience and the Bible convicted me that my failure to obey God’s commands and live up to His standards was sin, and in order to be a right person, I had to stop sinning and live a righteous life. But as I have already said, knowing this had me in a hopeless state because my best effort to “be an imitator of Christ” failed over and over. Along with all this dilemma and despair, I knew the Bible promised that God had a way of escape for all our temptations.

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way of escape, that ye may be able to bear it (1 Cor.10:13).

I came to see that Paul found the answer to his life that he described as being worse than death. At the end of Romans chapter seven and on into eight we see the light dawn for our brother Paul when he ecstatically bursts forth with the blessed truth that the Lord Jesus Christ is the answer to the bondage in which he (US, TOO) is held. In the great “glory” chapter eight, we are blessed to have recorded for us Paul’s discourse where he expounds how he and those who are in Christ have been set free not to walk in sinful fallen flesh, but instead to walk in the Spirit of the risen Christ. I had no problem agreeing with Paul that Christ was the answer for my wretched state. My problem lay in the fact that I didn’t know how to translate this truth into everyday living. In time I did find the answer I so desperately needed. Read on because I am writing this booklet in an effort to share with you the answer I had revealed to me. It came in the form of the message that I, along with many others (namely my mentor and teacher Norman Grubb, who first taught me these Bible-based truths) have come to know as the Total Truth.

The biblical foundation for this truth is that we humans are vessels or containers. The reason I say this is because the Bible calls us pots, branches, body members, slaves, and wives. The function of each of these examples is to contain or to be connected to something or someone. As such, we were created to contain a supernatural spirit as well as our own human spirit. It is the supernatural spirit (Satan, in those who are lost, and Christ, in those who are saved) that defines and rules us. With this understanding of our humanity, we comprehend that we do not have a nature of our own, but instead we express the nature of the one we contain. (Illustrations will come later to show the working out of this truth.)