What a Savior

Again, God hit me with a pretty awesome lesson today from a few verses I know I have read at least 100 times before, and that's no exaggeration because they are from one of my favorite chapters in all of the Bible.
Paul is frustrated. He wants to do so much good for the Lord, but instead he is doing so much evil for himself. He knows God's commands. And he wants to keep them. But his sinful nature looks at the commands and makes him want to do just the opposite. God's commands are good; but they can't save Paul because he can't keep up with them.
And then Romans 8 floods in with the answer to this frustration problem so many of us face.
"Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit."
Let's not rush over this too quickly. There is therefore no more condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus! Wow! That is Good News! And we know that the "therefore" is because, as Paul was frustrated about in Romans 7, we just couldn't keep the commands. Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. But do we take the time to look at the how of our "no condemnation"?
We have no more condemnation because we have someone who could keep God's commands and law, the only man that ever did. Jesus Christ lived a perfect, sinless life. He was the only one who ever deserved a relationship with God, who deserved heaven, who deserved no condemnation. The Law was in place to bring us to God, but we just couldn't make it. But Jesus could. He came to earth in the image of sinful man, the image of the people living in sin apart from the law. But He broke all the rules. Though in a sinful body, though tempted, He never committed sin.
Now get this.
He sacrificed Himself so that His righteousness could be transferred to us. The only man that could stand up and proclaim Himself as "holy, blameless, and perfect" laid all of those down and took up the titles of "blasphemer, demonic, and forsaken" instead. He laid down His righteousness for us, and took up our iniquities. He fulfilled the Law, something no one else could ever do, and yet He gave His perfectness up by taking on all of our sins. We have no condemnation, but it sure came at a price for Jesus.
What a Savior...
So I rejoice in God's grace towards me. I rejoice that He forgave me all my debts and holds not one of them against me. I rejoice that all of my future mistakes already have mercy waiting to be poured out on them. I am now free. But I'm going to try to live a better life, a life for Jesus, because He lived His life to save me. A story of such powerful love compels me to give my life to God.

Wide-Eyed Belief

I have picked up, once more, the plan to wake up a little earlier in the morning, get out of bed, and go find a place to pray to and praise God and read His word. And it's been my plan to not have any set material for right now, but to instead just open my heart and listen for whatever God hits me with. Yesterday morning, He hit me with a passage in John 12. I read before it and after it, but it was just one verse that really caught my attention in a special way.
"Jesus said... 'I have come into the world as light, that whoever believes in Me may not remain in darkness.'"
It has always been an ordinary verse to me normally, but isn't it amazing how some days God uses the simplest, most over-read portions of His word to teach us lessons like brand new?
Jesus is light! He has come! And where there is light, there is no darkness, because light cannot help but to scatter the darkness. If you take a light into a place, there will not be darkness there anymore. And yet Jesus says that there are some who may apparently be remaining in darkness. How can that be?
The only way to remain in darkness when there is light around is to close your eyes and turn away from the light. I think the same is true for Jesus. The fact that He is the light means that He, in and of Himself, can free us from darkness and sin. Only He can scatter the darkness in our lives. But we have to believe in Him, He says, for it to happen. We have to open our eyes and turn to the source so that we can live in the light of life.
And so after meditating on that verse, the song that came to mind was this:
"Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. Open the eyes of my heart. I want to see You. I want to see You. To see You high and lifted up, shining in the light of Your glory. Pour out Your power and love, as I sing, 'Holy, Holy, Holy...'"

Draw Me Deeper, Lord

I've had three memory verses for myself this past week, and the main one has been James 4:7-8. I always focused on the first part of those verses. "Resist the devil and he will flee from you." But I was starting to think that that idea was ridiculous. Satan is everywhere we turn in this world. At school, at work, in the community, he is very active. And "bad company corrupts good morals," so all of the sin around me was weighing me down. I found all of these horrible thoughts just sticking in my mind. And I resisted, and I resisted, and I resisted, and satan didn't seem to be running for the hills. What is the problem with this picture?
Well, if you continue on past "and he will flee from you," you get to what I think James meant by "resist." It's not just to "avoid" it, "fight" it, or "get away" from it. Alongside resisting, James says to "Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you." Do you see the contrast?
I'm sick of what is going on in the world today! I'm sick of its influence on my own mind and on my own life! And I don't want to be any part of it! But if something is going to be done about it, and if my life is going to be changed, then I don't just need to resist what is bad; I need to seek what is good.
I took a drive the other day. Just drove. Didn't care where. I eventually made it to the middle of nowhere and stopped, one hundred miles or so from where I started. And I found God there. There have been times when I have gone out into the woods, and found God there. Sometimes I paint images of Jesus, and I find Him there. But what aggrivates me is that when I come back, where is He then? When I go somewhere, I find Him; when I come back, when "the music fades," God seems far from me once again.
I think I know why now. It's not the going to a special place. It's not doing some special activity. It's not doing something or going somewhere out of the ordinary that I find God. It's the fact that I'm trying to draw near to Him in those moments, and He responds by drawing near to me. So I don't have to take long drives or paint pictures (though they still are refreshing); I just have to open up my heart to God and seek Him with all of it, and there I will find Him.
"And I pour out my soul deep within me. From deep within me, I pour out my soul. Draw me deeper, Lord, deeper, Lord, in You. Draw me deeper, Lord, deeper, Lord, in You."

I Just Don't Understand It...

God's love and grace and mercy is such an enigma to me. Not only does He know every sin I've ever committed; not only does He remember every time I came to Him on my knees and then turned around and messed up again; He knows every sin that I'm going to commit, for the rest of my life! He knows my mind, my heart, my speech, my deeds; He knows it all. And yet the Bible says that He has no condemnation for me? And yet His word says that nothing can separate me from His love?
It doesn't make sense! Why? Because I don't know that I could love someone who had wronged me like that. If I knew every mistake a person would make against me: the treason, the treachery, the offenses, I don't know if I could bare to be around them. And when I wrong someone else, I expect them to be angry, upset, and unforgiving. So if that is how humans deal with one another in love, I don't understand why God wouldn't, right?
Well, think of it like this: are we trying to understand God as from a human point of view? Are we trying to make God in our image, instead of the other way around?
God is not human. He is not finite. He has no start and has no end. He is eternal. And that enables His love to be unlimited.
It absolutely doesn't make sense to me. I mess up and I feel like God should want nothing to do with me. That's what seems natural. But the reality is, if His Word is true, that He still wants to love me, forgive me, and use me.
Whoa...
As Paul put it in Ephesians 3, it's good to try and wrap our minds around how much Christ loved us, but we can never fully get it because He loved us beyond understanding.

"For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God."

The Point of the Cross

At different times, I've had people come to me and talk about how depressed and hopeless they feel in their faith. Their inability to "get it right" sometimes saddens them. They feel unclean, unworthy, like they're letting God down. And the phrase I hear a lot is, "I don't even feel like a Christian anymore."
I'm not being judgmental. I've been there, I've felt that, and said all those same things. Most of my life was spent in misery because I was reaching for perfection, and failing daily.
But as I've been thinking about it more recently, those thoughts and feelings shouldn't come into the mind of the Christian.
A friend of mine was feeling this way, and I just had to tell her, "Look, we aren't under the Law anymore." Wow! I need to practice what I preach on that one. But how much truth there is in that statement.
We are not under the Law anymore. The Law was in effect so that people could strive to sanctify and purify themselves before God. And what does Scripture say? No one could keep it. And God knew that. That's why He sent Jesus. We can't keep the Law, but God wanted us with Him, so He sent His Son to bring us home.
Don't make Christianity just a different or updated set of rules and regulations from the Old Testament. We will never be able to save ourselves. Never. "With man it is impossible." Absolutely impossible. Will not ever happen.
If the New Testament is just The Law 2.0, and we still have to sanctify ourselves, let me ask you this then: what was the point of the cross? Did Jesus die in vain? No one would dare say that. We know that our salvation was fulfilled at Calvary. So live it. Believe it. Put your faith in it. We're under grace, not law. Mercy, not self-sufficiency.
Once we grasp how sweet it is that our forgiveness is taken care of despite our deeds (though we still must accept the gift of grace), then we can start living for God as a response, a thanksgiving. Amen!

"I Need a Song..."

"I need a song..." Those were the words that I thought as I walked to my car only 40 minutes ago. After a long day, those were the words I could think to say to God. It was a good day. But there are still just things that confuse me, that I want to talk about with God. There are emotions about His forgiveness, there are pleas about His assitance, and I wanted a song to sing to Him to let Him know how I felt.
I rifled through the songs I knew quickly, but none could adequately describe all of how I felt. Then I realized that I don't need a song at all. God already knows.
His Spirit intercedes for me, forming the words I couldn't think of. My sighs turn into perfect clarity when the Spirit takes them to the Father. God already knew how I felt. He knew better than I even did.
About His forgiveness: it is. It is. It's there. I believe that He knows my heart, that He knows how sorry I am for sin, and how badly I want to change. I can't express that at times, but I know He knows. And I know He has grace to match every one of my sins. I know that He holds not one of them against me. Just this morning I was thinking about my inability to get things right. And I looked to God and wanted to cry out, "Why help me? You know my past; I'm never going to make it." And how amazing is it that God knows my past, sure, but He doesn't hold it against me. He keeps no record of wrongs. He doesn't condemn me.
Wow...
About His assistance: He will. He will. He will help me. I'm so weak; I feel like I'm messing up all the time. But His Spirit will always give me strength if I'll just look to Him. And when I fall, I trust that my Father is there to catch me. He wants me to strive towards perfection, though we both know I'll never reach it. He forgives my faults, but empowers me to move onward, to move upward.
What a Father! That I don't have to be afraid of my sin, or of my inabilities to "get it right" sometimes. Because He hasn't given me a spirit of fear, but one by which I can now cry Abba, Father.
And so, I don't have the words, but He puts them together for me. And so, I cry, "Abba. Father."

Worthiness

It's been another long day and I had way too much time to think this over, so get ready, because I'm about to preach.
Worthiness. Unworthiness. These are words I've been pretty familiar with in my personal life and in my spiritual life. I have always felt a little unworthy of being a boyfriend, a friend, a brother, a son, in different situations of my life. But I have ALWAYS felt unworthy of being a Christian, a child of God, a servant of the Master. And I have always vocalized that to my Father time and time again. I sin, and I feel unworthy to come before Him; unworthy to serve; unworthy to live for; unworthy to proclaim; unworthy to praise; unworthy; unworthy; unworthy.
But you know what I'm realizing now? Unworthiness is one of the stupidest things we can worry about when it comes to our relationship with God. Are we actually unworthy of Him? Of course! But you know what I believe He says about our feeling "unworthy"? I think He'd say, "I don't care."
People have told me that they feel unworthy of knowing me. What?! That's a ridiculous idea. I'm a sinner, a mess-up, an imperfect. I'm unworthy of them! But when someone close to me told me that, yes, I tried to explain that who am I to be high and mighty above anyone else, but the main thing that angered me was that they shouldn't feel unworthy of me because, regardless of mistakes or imperfections, I love them. And I am a firm believer that our relationships in this life teach us about our relationship with God, so I learned a lot from them telling me they were "unworthy."
I don't believe God cares about worthiness. He doesn't want me to gripe about unworthiness anymore. Because I'm unworthy, and I think He knows that, but He loves me! He forgives me! He keeps no record of wrongs! I am unworthy of having a relationship with Him, but He wants me to have one with me despite my flaws because He loves me, and His love is perfect.
I read once a chapter in a book discussing Jesus' analogy of Himself to a shepherd. And the author drew the lines that sheep don't worry about unworthiness. They don't worry about being presentable and "worthy" of being in the shepherd's flock, they just accept that he is their master, and they allow him to care for them. Jesus is our Shepherd. He wants us to accept Him as master and allow Him to care for us too.
No more talk about this "unworthiness," stop griping and making excuses! We are all unworthy. We are all sinners. But Christ took our sin and transferred His righteousness to us. If we are redeemed, God looks at us and sees Jesus' clean record, because Jesus took our dirty one. No more talk about this "unworthiness." Lift up your eyes to the Lord and praise His name. He loves you, and He desires to forgive you and dwell within your heart.
Take that, you idea of "unworthiness"!