God has given us a new beginning in a New Year. May we seek to use it for His glory. To use it for His glory we must listen to Him with a renewed determination to live as He instructs through the pages of His Holy writing in the Bible. That includes doing our very best to keep from doing anything He has said we are not to do, to seek to do our very best to do the things we are instructed to do, and heaven forbid, not act without His authority. As we see in the Bible, doing any of those three things are the ways in which we may sin and so dishonor God.

We see this in the examples given in the case of Eve and Adam, where they ate of the fruit of the tree that God had said they were not to; in the case of Cain when he failed to worship as God had instructed; and in the case of many who acted without the authority of God in what they did, including King Saul, King David, and others.

God has in every age given to mankind instructions in what they were to do, what they were not to do and warnings concerning acting presumptuously or without His authority. God has always expected mankind to understand what was said, and do just exactly what they were told to do. It’s called obeying. That’s obedience. God has never blessed anyone simply because of their belief, but has always blessed those who believed and obeyed His word.

The writer of Hebrews shows how Jesus in obeying the will of the Father obtained eternal salvation for those who obey Him (5:8, 9). Colossians 3:17 tells us that whatever we do must be done in the name of, that is, by the authority of Christ. Christ’s authority is expressed on the pages of the New Testament.

As we have written concerning Satan, Sin and the Church, we have seen how the Holy Spirit was sent to the apostles to instruct the newly formed kingdom of God on earth, the church, in the things they were to be taught, how they were to live, and how the church was to worship and seek the salvation of others. We have also seen how sin came into the church and how those who sin were disciplined by God (See Acts 5).

In Chapter 11 we saw how some tried to hinder the spread of the gospel through their misunderstanding concerning the Gentiles. Satan, the master deceiver uses every trick he has to defeat Christ’s church. He enticed some into moral sin, some into religious error and some to oppose the spread of the church through the power of their positions, governmental and religious. May this year be the year when we, through following the word of God, overcome Satan and sin in our lives and in the church more and more.