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[Thinker]

A genuine conversion is a marvelous miracle! It changes us in a number of ways. II Corinthians 5:17 speaks of this: "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." One of those new things is a new nature. As God says in Ezekiel 36:26, "A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh." We receive a new nature, God's Own nature! We now crave righteousness. We begin a new behavior pattern. After Paul, in I corinthians 6:9-10, warned about the unrighteous and their behavior, he adds in Verse 11, "And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." These experiences and the gradual development of holy conduct are internal and external evidences of authentic belief in Jesus as Savior and Lord. Paul told the Galatians, in 5:22-23, that, "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." He said to the Romans, in Chapter 8, verse 9, "....Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." The Holy Spirit will do His work in the lives of God's children. In some lives it will be slow and often difficult; in other lives, it will be faster and less complicated but His work will be done in all who have been born from above. Selah! A new nature has been worked into us; we are to work it out! "....work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure." (From Philippians 2:12-13). Ron Pinkham