Deliver us from Plagiarism

Use Grammarly's plagiarism check because I don't want you beaten up like the sons of Sceva were beaten up for copying. (Acts 19:14-16)

Plagiarists see some thing good and immediately make it their own without thinking of the process it went through to get to that point. They are not mindful of the life behind it, they simply copy and paste. They are mindful of the profit therein and not the process.

Plagiarists are all over the Bible. No? Come, let me show you.

Of course there are the sons of Sceva. Act 19:13-16  And certain from the strolling Jews, exorcists, undertook to name the name of the Lord Jesus over those having evil spirits, saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preaches.  And there were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, who did so.  But answering the evil spirit said, Jesus I know, and I comprehend Paul, but who are you?   And the man in whom the evil spirit resided leaped on them, and overcoming them he was strong against them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded.

Then there are those seeking to be made whole by the law thinking it can do the same thing that only the Spirit of God can do. There are some found in the church in Galatia to whom Paul rebukes and asks - "Gal 3:1  O foolish Galatians, who bewitched you not to obey the truth, to whom before your eyes Jesus Christ was written among you crucified? 2  This only I would learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing of faith? 3  Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, do you now perfect yourself in the flesh?

There are so many, Cain, Hagar, Ishmael, Sinai, Esau. In a sense, their offering was not perfect because it was an attempt to be like the real thing - Abel, Sarah, Isaac, Zion, Jacob, the chosen thing.

The life of God is a life. It is not a system of practises, rather a life. That is what I feel I have missed for a long time. I have read the Bible, listened to sermons, seen beautiful sounding quotes and tried to have myself fit into that mould. I attempted to memorise them and apply them to myself. I thought I could apply the nature of God to myself like painting a house a new colour. I was wrong.

I was often told to "act like" before being told who I was. Long sermons were spent on getting me to be a certain type of man and few were telling me the kind of man I am. I was plagiarising God's nature and constantly ruining myself because no matter how much I tried to live up to it, I could never do it.

I was thrown into a story whose beginning I did not know but whose end I wanted. I thought it was about me and my efforts. Call me plagiarist 101. I did not know the heart of the Father from the start - that we may be one with Him. I thought I was being saved from destruction and that my life depended on keeping to the system I'd been given.

And then some one said "The greatness of God's gift to us is that one man is put away in Christ's death and another Man is offered in Christ's resurrection. First we are granted a death that we could not die. Then we are offered a life that we could not live. This is the grace of God and the great triumph of the cross."

What do we do? We receive it. By faith.

Plagiarists will oft walk by sight not by faith and to them what matters most is the things that are seen not the unseen, yet the things that are seen pass away but the unseen are eternal. In the artistic, it is a call to be true to yourself, what is in you. Bring it out, you do not need to copy someone else's thing. Let your process be. Do not hack/ short cut it.  In the spiritual, may we let Him mould us. And not be quickly moved by the perfect picture we see. May we let Him be that transforming.

2Co 3:18  But we all, with our face having been unveiled, having beheld the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are being changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Lord Spirit.

May we be delivered from plagiarism, in an artistic and spiritual sense.

Shalom.