If you’re young enough to remember this game, or even own one, you recall what fun you had playing “doctor” trying to carefully avoid the “ehhngggg!” That sound meant you messed up. Skillful, steady hands were necessary to do well. We as believers more often than not, try to “operate” our own lives, only to find our best efforts are futile. Thank God for his grace! The grace that saved us through faith in Jesus Christ always causes us to triumph! But this happens spiritually before it ever manifests naturally. The manifestation is directly tied to our belief system.
Colossians 2:11-12 King James Version (KJV)
11 In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ:
12 Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.
God uses circumcision in His chosen people, the Children of Israel to illustrate what He would accomplish through Christ in the spirit for every New Testament believer. Circumcision involved the cutting away of the foreskin of the male reproductive organ (flesh). Once cut, the old flesh was discarded. It was a sign of the covenant God had with His people. Once the flesh was discarded, no one went to try to sew it back on. It was thrown away. So it is in the spirit when we accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. The person we used to be was cut away and discarded, and now God only sees us “in Christ”. It is the revelation of how God sees us and bringing our thoughts in line with how He sees us that causes or actions to change. Our job is to trust the “operation of God”, the master surgeon that has removed everything unlike Him from within us by His Spirit. We must trust the finished work of Christ in spite of what our five physical senses reveal. Every time we mess up, sin, miss the mark, etc., we keep trying to reattach that fleshly part of us that has been cut away. Not only has it been cut away, but according to the scripture it (our old self) was buried with Christ in baptism and we are risen with Him though our faith in the operation of God. Our only job, though a difficult one, is to believe what God says about us in spite of what we or others see.
If we can trust natural doctors and take their word that the surgery performed was successful, how much more should we believe the finished work of Christ in us, the hope of glory!
