Chapter 1 A Consecrated Life - Far Eastern Bible College

We must maintain the desire in our hearts to study His Word, to train
our conscience and to walk in the Spirit daily.
This desire is the key that releases the effectiveness and power of
all that God has provided for transforming our lives. So ultimately, the
secret of success in having a transformed life is found in keeping the
desire, or the right attitude in our heart, for these things. Let us turn our
Bibles to Proverbs 4:23, “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it
are the issues of life.”
I trust that we will apply these four steps for good success in having
a transformed life. There is just one last point that needs to be
mentioned. This point concerns a question that may be on your mind
right now, and which has been debated by many for a long time. “Can a
believer ever attain to becoming sinlessly perfect in this life? If we were
to try our very best, can we actually succeed in becoming fully like our
Lord Jesus Christ in every way, including his sinlessness?”
Some say, “Yes, it must be possible because God would never want
us to pursue a goal or objective we could never reach.” And they say
that if we want to motivate believers to pursue the objective of a
transformed life, we can’t do it unless they can believe that they can
reach that goal. If you tell a person to strive after a prize and then tell
him that he can never get it, then he would probably not even try to get
it. He would say, “It is futile.” And so they teach the doctrine of an
attainable sinless perfection in order to get people moving towards it.
No matter how good their intentions may be, those who hold this
teaching are way off the mark. The Scriptures evidently show us that
though we are to strive to be sinlessly perfect, we can never reach or
attain full perfection in this life. As long as we live in this world, and no
matter how hard we try, we will always have to struggle with our flesh,
we will still need to contend with sin, and even the best of saints will
fall into sin in an unguarded moment.
Paul himself speaks in Romans 7 about his daily need to depend on
the Holy Spirit because of this struggle in his life. Let us read Romans
7:18–25,
A Transformed Life
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