No One Can Serve Two Masters

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The first incident is thankfully common to most of you who find interest in reading this. It is the greatest miracle of all—becoming a new creation in Christ by new birth in the Spirit.

I won’t spend much time on this, because hopefully it has been experienced by those who read this. It must be our starting point. There
was a consciousness of my sinful condition first at the age of 18, particularly of my compulsive self-centeredness. I did not, however, then recognize its full implications as Satan expressing his self-for-self (sin) nature in me (Eph. 2:1-3 and John 8:44).

My crisis came by the faithful challenge of a retired British army major asking me whether I “belonged to Christ.” While I could have said I belonged to the church, I could not honestly say I “belonged” to a Person of whose existence I had no inner certainty. So that conversation brought me to a sharp reminder of what my church and Bible teaching had stressed. If I could not say that Jesus was my Savior, I was on the way to hell.

In simple form, with the genuine fear of God on me, I asked for my sins to be forgiven. That first and greatest miracle happened to me: an inner
realization by the light of the Spirit on the Scriptures that, the shedding of the blood of Jesus meant His actual giving of Himself for me. I inwardly woke up to the meaning of His love for me; and a love response began in me that has never ceased.

But I mistakenly thought I was humanly capable of producing that love feeling. At that time I did not know that we humans are created with a love faculty, which through the Fall expresses the nature and quality of Satan’s self-for-self love. But when replaced by the self-for-others nature
of the Spirit of God, “the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us” (Rom. 5:5 and 2 Pet. 1:4). There was
never—before or alter belonging to Christ—an independently operating me, with a nature of my own.