How are we acceptable to God? You were declared forgiven by his grace (his kindness), because of Jesus’ death for you. You received his gift of forgiveness by believing that Jesus has paid for your sin, right? You didn’t earn your forgiveness. You simply believed God when he says he has forgiven you. “…when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy.”9 “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us…”10 Ok, now that you are a Christian, do the rules change? Does God now have a long list of expectations for you? No. Now you may think, “Wait a minute. The Bible is FULL of commands. You can’t read a paragraph without being told what to do.” That is true. But while God gives you commands, he also tells you that you can’t fully obey them. In fact, he tells you that the harder you concentrate on trying to obey them, the more that you will see your sin.11 Also, the harder you try, the more you might feel like a failure, deserving of God’s judgment and condemnation, and thus the more distant you will feel from God. The apostle Paul talks about this frustration that he also felt. He looked at God’s law and said, “The commandment is holy, righteous and good.” Yet as much as he tried to live according to it, he kept on sinning. He said, “I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out…the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”12 In complete frustration he says, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” His solution? “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!”13 The feelings of failure, sin, condemnation need to be faced with Scripture. “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”14 “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!15” So when you look at God’s commands, don’t attempt to obey them on your own effort…but instead ask God, who lives inside of you, to produce that in you. If God says to love each other, he doesn’t intend for you to march off with enthusiastic responsibility and show God how loving you can be. Instead he wants you to depend on him, “God, I ask you to live in my heart and cause me to see this person as you do, and put love in my heart for this person in the same way that you love them. I cannot love them on my own, but ask that your great love would be produced in my life for them.”
Posted on: Wed, 14 Aug 2013 23:13:25 +0000
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