The sheer relief of the Gospel

Lately, God has been teaching me again about sanctification; that is the process by which He is making me Holy (perfect).  It’s such a complicated subject to grasp in theory and in practise, so the learning is slow and sometimes frustrating.  My sticking point of late has been obedience:  Jesus did it all on the cross for me, but He still asks for my obedience.  How does this fit in with Grace?

I can relate to what Paul says in Romans 7:15: “I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.”

It’s a lifelong lesson, but lately am beginning to comprehend on a deeper level what Grace means for my obedience and behaviour:  my sanctification, like my salvation, is Jesus’ job, and without Him doing it in me I can never even hope to try.  But thanks to Jesu I get to try because He has done the important bit, the bit I can never hope to do: He saved me.  He gives me His Holy Spirit to give me strength to be Holy.  He says that He will carry on the work He began in me until it is finished. (Philippians 1:6)

I know that I am now identified with Christ, through His death, a Saint who sometimes sins.  And yet, how quickly we can forget!  I know He wants my obedience and devotion, He wants my best!  In my desire to please, I slide from accepting the work Jesus has done and is doing, to trying really hard in my own strength.  I don’t even realise it, but I start to measure my salvation based on what I do and don’t do.

The way of works is an exhausting one, and one we were never meant to walk. Satan, in his determination to kill and destroy, loves to take advantage of our forgetfulness and whisper half truths: “You are rubbish at this Holiness thing, see?  What’s the point in even trying to please God?  You can’t even begin to…”

This video expresses that feeling so well. Stick with it til the end!

Let that sink in.  Watch it again if it helps.  I watched it a good six times because it’s just so poweful!  God reminds us as many times as we need to hear it:  Jesus saves.  Thank you Jesus!

After watching it for the sixth time I listened again to Romans 8;

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,  because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.  For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.  And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
Romans 8:1-4.

{As an aside may I thoroughly recommend using biblegateway.com’s wonderful ‘listen’ feature, particularly the NIVUK translation which features the dulcet tones of David Suchet!}

Read it again, listen again.  Jesus swapped places on the cross with us so that when God looks at us, He sees the perfection of Jesus.  We were guilty.  And He more than forgives us, He says we are not guilty, because Jesus became all our sin, and was punished instead of us on the cross… We are no longer sinners saved by Grace, we are Saints.

Moments later I read a passage from Oswald Chambers’ ‘My Utmost for His Highest’, and (as the Holy Spirit has a habit of doing) it was completely tied in to all I’d listened to and seen so far this evening… the natural progression from all that gospel truth… answering the question “So what does this mean for us?”

When I first read this quote I mis-read the final word ‘belief’ as ‘relief’… but isn’t that also true?  “Our lives should be an absolute hymn of praise resulting from perfect, irrepressible, triumphant relief that He has done it all!”  We are acquitted.  Jesus presents us to God “faultless, inexpressibly pure, absolutely righteous and profoundly justified.” We were guilty, but He looks at us in the dock and pronounces us not guilty.  Not just at the moment of our salvation, but every day.  Our behaviour and obedience come from belief in all that He has done for us, and also from this perfect, irrepressible, triumphant relief that no matter what we do or don’t do, He has done it all already, we are free to love Him in absolute abandon with no guilt, shame or striving.

When you hear that old snake whisper the lies in your ear again that you are rubbish, that you can’t please God, that there’s no point even trying to be Holy because you fail over and over, just remember:  JESUS SAVES.  It’s not your job.  Pick yourself up, dust yourself down, and go on trying, go on fighting.  It’s worth it, and you cannot fail, because He has won on your behalf.

If you are a visual learner, here’s a handy comic to sum up my conclusion: ::CLICK::

If you want people to open up to you, open up first

“He will come to us like rain” {Hosea 6:3}

Have you ever been loved so fiercely that the person who loved you never asked you to love them back?  Have you ever been in a relationship where your lover actually asked nothing from you, expected nothing of you, went on loving you when you rejected and neglected and even if you cheated on them?

Yes, you have.  You are in a relationship like that.  That’s what our relationship with Jesus is like.

When we meet Him for the first time we can’t believe the weight of relief, of gratitude, of delight, of amazement that this awesome wonderful King would love us enough to die for us while we were still in the middle of our sin.  While we were still in the middle of rejecting Him.  We cannot fathom such grace that would go to the cross in our place, that would look at our sin and love us still, unrelentingly, passionately, eternally.

And then life happens. We carry on in our walk with Jesus, and very soon we begin to see a shift in our thinking.  We start to put the burdens of ‘works’ on ourselves, even when we try so hard not to.  We all of a sudden forget that He who saved us from our sin is still saving us from our sin, every single day.  We think we have to ‘toe the line’. We think we have to ‘be good’. We think if we don’t love Him enough He will stop loving us.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  He is still the same Jesus that went to hell and back for us, and He will not give up on us.  He says nothing can separate us from His love, and that is true; nothing can.  And if we think for one minute that now we have been saved it’s just a case of ‘being good’, we are so wrong. Have you tried it? Are you worn out yet?  I know it takes me less than an hour and I am an exhausted mess on the floor.

So where does that leave us?  At His feet.  Where do we go from there?  If you’re like me you so desperately want to please Him, so desperately want to love Him the way He deserves, to obey Him whole-heartedly and live for Him every day.  Why can’t we get our hearts to agree with our heads?  We know all this stuff, but then in the practical every day, we fall into sin again and again and again.  Old familiar sins, new sins, habitual sins.

Jesus has been teaching me, and it’s a lifelong lesson, that the same power that saved me in the beginning is working in my life every single moment, whether I sense it or not, whether I work with Him or not.  But I want to say, but Jesus, what can I do?

And what does He say to me?

“Let me love you.”

He says, “Be drenched in the deluge of my grace and love for you. Enjoy my love, and open your heart in honesty and vulnerability to me.  You need me.  You can’t do life without me. That’s OK.  That’s more than OK.  You were never meant to.”  I need Jesus every day, every hour, every moment. I’m not well. My malaise is spiritual— trapped in a body still so predisposed to sin, trapped in a flesh that rejects Jesus, despite the fact that my spirit tells me I should adore Him.  “Let me love you.  Surrender your heart to me, stop striving. Realise that there is nothing you can do to make me love you more, nothing you can do to make me love you less.  Only one thing is needed:  sit at my feet, and let me love you.”

Jesus came that we may have life, and have it to the full.  So what on earth does that look like? Letting Him love us.  Surrendering and yielding to His saving work in our lives.  By simply beholding His face, and letting Him love us, we allow Him to transform us from the inside out.  We learn who we are in Him:  His.  The fact that we are His is the truest thing about us.

I had asked myself in the past why God is a jealous God.  Isn’t that quite selfish of Him?  But this morning I felt a revelation on that front.  He is jealous because He knows that when I turn away from Him, and to the things that bind me, my sins, my ‘idols’ if you will, I become trapped, I become ensnared.  I get hurt.  And He is fierce against anything that would hurt me.  Because He loves me. He is jealous because He made me for relationship with Him and He knows that nothing else will satisfy, heal or love me like He can.  He knows that anything other than a life drenched in His love is a half-life, a restless life, a painful life.  Oh, that we would know His love.  Oh, that we would let Him love us.  Oh, that we would be drenched in His life-giving, life-transforming love.