All tagged grace

I was reading Lamentations 3 today, and there was one verse, Lamentations 3:22, that captured me; it reads: "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail." This verse made me take pause, and to think about God’s great love for each of us and how, despite our unworthiness, He found it worthwhile to send His Son Jesus to die for us. I thought of all the sinners I pass each day and how their worthiness of forgiveness, prayer, and salvation is no different than mine was when I too was lost in sin, and walked each day in their shoes.

This morning I have been studying John 14 and reading a devotional that was based on John 14:14. I have always loved this verse and that Jesus says he will do anything for us... After all, who wouldn’t love a verse that promises us everything? And, all we have to do is keep his commandments… Whoops, wait a minute! How can we, with all our human frailty, be expected to do that? Is He asking the impossible of us? At first blush it appears that He is, but as Paul Harvey used to say… "Now for the rest of the story."

As I read a devotional one morning, and I contemplated its theme... “God Rewards”. It caused me to take pause, and think about the ways that statement was true, and to compare it to the many ways that this broad statement was not. On this particular morning E.M. Bounds had written the words "Faith believes that God rewards.", and although that is true, it is not unconditionally true. Some tie this way of thinking to a religion of prosperity, but this is a deadly trap.

Godlike Sympathies; I was touched this morning by how incredibly merciful, loving, and sympathetic God truly is. I thought of Jesus nailed to the cross and my eyes filled with tears; not so much for the suffering He endured (which always brings me to tears) but for the love, mercy, and sympathy that He and His Father have for mankind, and the grace that they continue to pour out on us. We saw it on Calvary, and we continue to see it every day in our own lives. Does it make us want to be like them?

Do we worry about what tomorrow brings? Do we fret over whether we will have enough to eat, or the other necessities of life we might require to survive? Well if we look closely at what Jesus taught us to pray for in the Lord’s Prayer, we will see that there is no mention of the physical things we will need for tomorrow; He only teaches us to pray for what we need right now. As a matter of fact Jesus tells us to pray specifically for today’s needs. Do we pray as He has taught us?

We don’t enter into heaven to live an eternal life because we deserve it. That kind of thinking is based upon our own vanity and arrogance. Our salvation and everlasting life is sealed by covenant, and that covenant comes by God’s acceptance of the death of Jesus Christ as our blood sacrifice. Only through Him can we be redeemed, perfected, and sanctified. Only through Him can we claim the covenant of grace.

Jesus didn’t come to earth to redeem us because He felt sympathetic love for us, He came at His Father’s request to do a job, and that job was to defeat sin, overcome death, and to glorify God Himself. His task was to mend the rift that had occurred in the Garden of Eden between God the creator, Eve the woman, and Adam the man, whom He had created. He would do this by the only way possible... offering the blood sacrifice of His only begotten Son, Jesus.