The Principle of God's Remnant

By Rev. Ernest O'Neill

Christianity is a life lived. We have a revival of religion, a revival of interest in worship, and a revival of interest in certain beliefs and certain life patterns and habits but we don't really have a revival of Christianity. Yet do you see what is happening -- the principle of the remnant? Out of that scraped amorphous mass of people who are all for church and for Christianity, out of this great amorphous mass, God is cutting out another remnant of people who really are God's children.

What is the distinguishing mark of that remnant? Oh, what it has always been. What it has always been: action, not belief -- obedience, not a whole lot of talk. What it has always been: the difference between the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. The distinguishing mark of the remnant is always that they live it. They live it. They don't talk about it, they don't make a whole song about their beliefs, they live it. They live like God's children.

In other words, there are thousands of us, millions of us, actually, here in the States who say we believe that Jesus died for us and they'll even say we believe that our people-dependent, thing-dependent, circumstance-dependent old selves were crucified with Him so that we might live dependent on Him alone.

There are millions of us who say we believe that and there are millions of us who when somebody does something to us that we feel they ought not to have done or when somebody fails to do something or to treat us the way we feel we ought to have been treated, there are millions of us who say, "Well I know that because Jesus died, God will forgive me my resentment against them and I believe that He will give me a love for them." There are millions of us who respond that way.

In other words, there are millions of us who believe Jesus died to cover up the resentment that we feel. And there are some of us, maybe just a few, but there are some of us who when somebody treats us in a way that we feel we ought not to have been treated, or somebody does something that we feel they ought not to have done to us, we immediately accept our position with Jesus on the Cross. Instead of saying Jesus has died for me, we say we died with Jesus and we deserve nothing from anyone as he deserved nothing from anyone and we have no rights to be treated in any special way by anybody and we have only the right to be treated as God allows us to be treated. We accept our position with Jesus in regard to them and, at that moment, the Spirit of God's love fills our hearts for them.

That is the mark of the remnant. Not people who are always believing in Jesus' death to cover up their resentment, but people who are accepting their place with Jesus in dying to the way they think they ought to be treated by other people so that they themselves are filled by God's Spirit, not with resentment but with the inimitable mark of the children of God with perfect love. That's it loved ones, really.