So ya, I haven’t written in about 3 weeks, give or take, and I left off by saying I felt like a hypocrite writing, so I decided to take a break from it for a while. This post is not about how my life has had this dramatic turn around in the last 3 weeks and that I have been able to run from sin and stop sinning and stop feeling the weight of the guilt that comes along with it. If we could, and it were that easy, I don’t think there would be a need for God. In these past 3 weeks I have come to realize that there is no such thing as working our way to please God. There is not enough good, sinless, “perfect” behavior we can produce to please Him and change His view of us. I have come to realize that living my life has been focused on me. I realized that when I say things like, “I make sacrifices for God” or “I have been able to beat that struggle” is all crap, because it is all focused on glorifying myself. God doesn’t call us to live a life of working to earn a better spot in Heaven. I believe and have begun to feel that falling in love with Him is the most important aspect of life and that everything is rooted in that. After studying some more of Francis Chan’s book, “Crazy Love” I have began to realize that loving Jesus produces the good fruit, not that me producing good fruit will get me in tighter with Jesus. He used the analogy that we would have to stop loving in order to sin just like trying to go running while eating a box of twinkies. It’s very counter productive. We would literally have to stop running in order to eat the twinkies. So not only do we have to stop “running toward Jesus” to sin, we have to make a conscious decision to pick some earthly, temporary, fleeting desire over Jesus, which tears us down, much like a twinkie would do to our pretty little 6-pack, or in my case wanna be good looking abs. So the reason my life has felt crappy lately is not because of all of the sin in my life and struggles I deal with, but my love for God being on low. I have started to fall in love with things of this world instead of God Himself, who has created me in His image and to love Him. The same God that sent His one and only son to die in my place so that I would not have to face the penalty myself, and so that I can spend eternity with Him. Friends, I hope this encourages you wherever you are at in life right now. If we are living our short lives for us, or to “work our way up to Heaven”, or to try to please God or earn His approval, we are wasting it. Jesus made this point quite clear on the cross when he spoke the word “tetelestai”. This means “it is finished”. Our wages were all anti’ed up that day on the cross, so why do we live in fear and guilt trying to make up for that?
“IT IS FINISHED”, what magical, graceful, loving, pure, amazing, wonderful words those are, spoken to us, and still changing our hearts as we continue to fall more and more in love with Jesus.
Cheers,
-Brandon
