My pastor has been speaking the past few weeks about something that is incredibly vital to Christians. He has been speaking of identity. One thing that he has said has jumped out at me and has really been illuminated by the Holy Spirit. "Birth, not behavior, is what determines your identity." Read that again. It's your birth, not how you act, that determines who you are.
You see, we in the church have preached so frequently on sin and on how bad everyone is, that we have become sin managers. We have become so focused on our sin issue, that we have missed the bigger picture. Does Jesus want us to continue to sin? Of course not! Does Jesus want us to strive for holiness and to go deeper with him? Of course He does! But, I feel like sometimes...scratch that...most of the time, we get so caught up in our "sin issue" that it completely takes over our lives. I personally believe that God is not so much concerned with our behavior as He is with our belief. The Galatians were called FOOLS because they were accepting a doctrine that spoke of working to earn grace.
Think about this for a second. How do you view yourself? Do you see yourself as an over-comer? Do you see yourself as being victorious in Christ Jesus? Do you see yourself as more than a conqueror? Or, do you see yourself as a sinner saved by grace? Do you see yourself as a failure? Do you see yourself as being always defeated by the enemy? You see, the way you view yourself is ultimately how you will live your life. You will not act consistently in a way that violates the way you believe.
Christ has not called us to a life of sin management. He has not called us to a place of working to earn His favor. He has already given you His favor. He has already given you His life. He has already given you His love. You don't have to earn it! You don't have to work for it! Christ did the work on our behalf, because He knew that we could not possibly fulfill what the law demanded. Here is what the law demanded: personal, perpetual, perfection. Perfection. Jesus did it. Jesus is the only person in human history who has ever done it. No one else has even come close! Do you really want to earn your way to Christ? Paul tells us that if we are going to start trying to keep any part of the law as a way to earn the acceptance of God, then we have to keep ALL of the law. If that's what you want to do, then I have two words for you. Have fun. I will not be joining you on your pursuit of perfection.
So let's get back to the root of all of our problems that we face as Christians. Identity. Who are you? Do you even know? Have you even tried to find out? Or, like most of us, do you believe what the enemy says about you? He is the accuser of the brethren. All He can do is tell you a lie. After years and years of struggle over sin, and in turn my lack of understanding of who I was, I am finally getting the understanding and the knowledge of who and what Christ has called me and made me to be. You see, 2 Corinthians 5:17 says it plain as day that, "Anyone who is in Christ, he is a NEW creation." This is one of my favorite verses in the bible. When I became a Christian, He literally made me into a new species. A spiritual species, that has a soul, that lives inside of a body. When I pass on, my body will deteriorate and turn back into dust. My soul, will end with my physical existence, and my SPIRIT will live on forever with Christ. That is extremely good news! I feel like we as believers, many times will try to take this old sinful nature and turn it into something good and pleasing to the Lord. Here's the only problem with that...the old you is a dead you. Galatians 2:20 says, "I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me, and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." I can say with 100% certainty that crucifixion only served one purpose; killing whoever it was that was crucified. When someone was crucified, it was not so that the person would be weakened or made lesser of who they are, it was only in order to kill the person who was hung on the cross. So if that verse holds true, then our old man is dead. D-E-D dead! So, when we try to make the old man better, we are trying to make a dead man live again, which will never happen. We are called to walk in the Spirit, and live in the Spirit. Jesus has made into a new creation, the old has passed away.
Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgement, because AS HE IS, SO ARE WE IN THIS WORLD.-1 John 4:17
Wait. What? As He is so are we in this world? What exactly does that mean? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that means that as Jesus is so are we in this world. We already look just like Him because we have His spiritual DNA. God sees us just like Him because that's the way He organized the whole thing. We have the same standing as He does, because when He was crucified and rose again, our old man was crucified and our new man rose up with Him. If you can ever let that verse get a hold of you, it could wreck your entire theological structure. If you continually focus on all the bad stuff that you do, and how terrible you are, you will never overcome the sins that you battle. If, though, you focus your thoughts and affections on the things above, and also recognize that God's judgement for you was poured out on His son, you will turn from the sinful desires of your flesh and will glorify God with every part of your life.
Please understand this. I am not "soft on sin". I believe that God hates sin with a deep passion. But I also believe that God loves us with an even deeper passion. This is why He offered us grace, through His son. Obviously we don't deserve it, but, if our being deserving of grace was part of the issue, then it would not be grace at all. We don't have to earn our way into a right standing with the father. He has already accepted us. I hate sin. I think that sin is terrible, and that the devil will use it to his advantage whenever he can, but I believe that God is more concerned with our understanding of His love and grace than He is with our behavior. Remember, "birth, not behavior, determines your identity." God knows that if we start believing right, we will start behaving right. If we focus on our sins and our shortcomings, then we will always be trapped in our sinful lifestyle. However, if we focus on Jesus and His life inside of us, then we will be able to overcome those things that have always tripped us up in the past! Please friends, focus your thoughts and affections on the things above, and realize, as a child of God, you are already accepted, and in God's eyes, you are just like Jesus. Be blessed!
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Focus
For most of my Christian life, I feel like I have doing one thing extremely backwards. I think that many of us are doing this same thing wrong. I hope that we can catch the idea and the vision that God has for this situation and follow what He has told us to do. For most of my life I have tried to battle and defeat my "sin issues", by focusing on them and saying, "I am not going to do this." I repeat it over and over into my head until eventually all I can think about is the thing that I don't want to do. Inevitably I find myself indulging in the sinful act that I did not want to engage in. Then I beat myself up, tell myself I'm not worth anything, call myself a lousy excuse for a Christian, and from this I find myself isolating myself from the One who can actually do something to alter the situation.
When I was in the 7th grade I played tackle football. I hated every single minute of it. Not because I didn't like football. I loved football, and still do love football. Not because I was terrible, although I was. Not even because our team wasn't very good, but, because I had a coach who's sole purpose in life it seemed was to let all of us on the team know exactly how terrible we were at what we did. Instead of encouraging us to get better, he continually told us how terrible we were and that we would never amount to anything on the grid iron. We wound up losing almost every game we played that year. We focused not on being better players, but on how bad we were. All we heard was how bad we were, so we always fulfilled expectations. We weren't expected to win, so it wasn't a shocker when we lost. I never played another year of organized football.
My pastor has been sharing over the past 2 weeks that our focus is the one thing that gets us so completely washed over by defeat and discouragement all the time. You may have thoughts like, "Well I want to experience God, but this problem just keeps coming up. I can't face God with the issues I am dealing with. I'll get it cleared up, then I'll go to Him." You know, to the natural mind, that doesn't sound bad. That's talking a good game. No one wants to go to their father with their dirtiest secrets and issues. We see God as being too holy to see us in our filthiness. Please friends, hear me out. I do NOT condone sinful behavior. I do NOT believe that God condones sinful behavior. I do NOT think that God likes seeing His children engage is sinful behavior. But, I think that we place so many barriers between us and God that God has not called us to place there. The only One who can change the circumstances that we find ourselves locked into is our heavenly Father and the lover of our lives. He is a good God. He is a loving God. He is a grace dispensing God.
Ultimately our view of God will determine how willing we are to come to Him with our issues and to seek His face and His grace in our lives. The reason it is so hard for us to come to the throne of grace is that we are continually told that we are dirty. We are continually told that God hates what we do. We are continually told that we are supposed to be better than we are. So we are heaped up and heaped up with this judgmental accusatory mindset that we aren't good enough to come to Christ for His help. Some of those statements are very true. He does hate sin. We are called to live higher. We are sometimes covered in our sinful mess. But, to let that depict whether we come to Christ or not is foolishness. He says that His grace is sufficient for us. If His grace is sufficient for us, then obviously it can't ever run out, right? If He intended for their to be a limit to His grace, then we would all be screwed. If His grace is sufficient, then we should always be able to come to the throne of grace and allow Him to love us out of the funk that we are in.
Wanna know the easiest way to be free and rid of the junk in your life? Change your focus. Instead of focusing on the situation at hand and focusing on the sin and what you don't want to do, start focusing your thoughts and affections on the things above. When you stop looking at the bad stuff and start seeing Christ and His love for you, everything else just fades away. It is really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, because we have a Father that is for us. We have an elder brother who paid our debt for us. Once for all. Never again will Jesus go to the cross, and never again will our debt be brought against us to the Father.
Where we focus is where we will go. Where our eyes are is ultimately where our feet will follow. Where we go we will go head first. Don't be like my junior high football coach, constantly telling yourself how bad that thing is that you are doing. Don't continue to focus on not doing that because eventually you will cave. If you continue to fill your mind with thoughts of the sin, whether or not it is about how much you hate it, eventually satan will take that as a foothold and do everything in his power to destroy you with it. Instead, as Paul tells us in Colossians 3:1&2-"If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth." So set your thoughts on the high things. Seek the things that are above. Focus on Christ and His love for you, and eventually you will see just how great His grace and His love are for you. Then you will be able to make it to the end of the tunnel that is sin and you will be able to truly experience the life God has called you to.
When I was in the 7th grade I played tackle football. I hated every single minute of it. Not because I didn't like football. I loved football, and still do love football. Not because I was terrible, although I was. Not even because our team wasn't very good, but, because I had a coach who's sole purpose in life it seemed was to let all of us on the team know exactly how terrible we were at what we did. Instead of encouraging us to get better, he continually told us how terrible we were and that we would never amount to anything on the grid iron. We wound up losing almost every game we played that year. We focused not on being better players, but on how bad we were. All we heard was how bad we were, so we always fulfilled expectations. We weren't expected to win, so it wasn't a shocker when we lost. I never played another year of organized football.
My pastor has been sharing over the past 2 weeks that our focus is the one thing that gets us so completely washed over by defeat and discouragement all the time. You may have thoughts like, "Well I want to experience God, but this problem just keeps coming up. I can't face God with the issues I am dealing with. I'll get it cleared up, then I'll go to Him." You know, to the natural mind, that doesn't sound bad. That's talking a good game. No one wants to go to their father with their dirtiest secrets and issues. We see God as being too holy to see us in our filthiness. Please friends, hear me out. I do NOT condone sinful behavior. I do NOT believe that God condones sinful behavior. I do NOT think that God likes seeing His children engage is sinful behavior. But, I think that we place so many barriers between us and God that God has not called us to place there. The only One who can change the circumstances that we find ourselves locked into is our heavenly Father and the lover of our lives. He is a good God. He is a loving God. He is a grace dispensing God.
Ultimately our view of God will determine how willing we are to come to Him with our issues and to seek His face and His grace in our lives. The reason it is so hard for us to come to the throne of grace is that we are continually told that we are dirty. We are continually told that God hates what we do. We are continually told that we are supposed to be better than we are. So we are heaped up and heaped up with this judgmental accusatory mindset that we aren't good enough to come to Christ for His help. Some of those statements are very true. He does hate sin. We are called to live higher. We are sometimes covered in our sinful mess. But, to let that depict whether we come to Christ or not is foolishness. He says that His grace is sufficient for us. If His grace is sufficient for us, then obviously it can't ever run out, right? If He intended for their to be a limit to His grace, then we would all be screwed. If His grace is sufficient, then we should always be able to come to the throne of grace and allow Him to love us out of the funk that we are in.
Wanna know the easiest way to be free and rid of the junk in your life? Change your focus. Instead of focusing on the situation at hand and focusing on the sin and what you don't want to do, start focusing your thoughts and affections on the things above. When you stop looking at the bad stuff and start seeing Christ and His love for you, everything else just fades away. It is really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, because we have a Father that is for us. We have an elder brother who paid our debt for us. Once for all. Never again will Jesus go to the cross, and never again will our debt be brought against us to the Father.
Where we focus is where we will go. Where our eyes are is ultimately where our feet will follow. Where we go we will go head first. Don't be like my junior high football coach, constantly telling yourself how bad that thing is that you are doing. Don't continue to focus on not doing that because eventually you will cave. If you continue to fill your mind with thoughts of the sin, whether or not it is about how much you hate it, eventually satan will take that as a foothold and do everything in his power to destroy you with it. Instead, as Paul tells us in Colossians 3:1&2-"If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth." So set your thoughts on the high things. Seek the things that are above. Focus on Christ and His love for you, and eventually you will see just how great His grace and His love are for you. Then you will be able to make it to the end of the tunnel that is sin and you will be able to truly experience the life God has called you to.
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