Sometimes we forget who should be in control of our life. We get so wrapped up in trying to control our life that we wind up taking the “center” out of who we are, and often that’s because we are “working” so hard to keep the “center” in place! So, putting this in perspective we need to go back to the beginning.
Acts 13:48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life believed.
Luke reminds us what we so easily forget, that the ability to hear and appreciate our freedom (our center) through faith in our justification is by the Lord’s election. The key is for us to remember that we are ordained to eternal life because we believed, and that is the work of the Holy Spirit; our center. We need to remember that “we were chosen” and given the gift of faith to accept the grace that God has offered us in His Son. We reached out and accepted the gift of life because He already had a firm grasp on us. It’s all His work from beginning to end.
So, if He chose us and gave us the faith to accept His gift of justification, which had absolutely nothing to do with us, then why do we then take our life into our hands, thinking that we know how to live it better than He does? Maybe we need to ask ourselves to what extent has the assurance of our justification by faith become the basis of our security in the Lord. Ponder these questions:
- Do we live as people who know that we’ve been acquitted, forgiven, and reconciled once and for all by Jesus’ sacrifice?
- Have we forgotten to recognize the awesome power of God that He exercised on our behalf in Jesus’ death and resurrection?
- And more to the point here, do we forget that we are free from guilt and having to make ourselves right with God, as does every other religion in the world?
If we have to honestly assent to any of these questions we need to consider how we are living our life. Are we living free of feeling guilty and trying to make ourselves right with God by our own efforts? If we don’t constantly remind ourselves that Jesus paid for our freedom we will most certainly find ourselves trying to win His approval… and that flows over into trying to win man’s approval. God called us, chose us, and forgave us just as we are, not for what we have been, done, or will do. His grace is not conditioned upon our performance… Rembrandt understood that.
If you look at his famous painting (The Crucifixion of Jesus), he inserted himself into the crowd that was crucifying Jesus. He understood that Jesus’ sacrifice was the only thing that could forgive a sinner; forgive him. That’s a picture of each one of us, we too were in the crowd at His crucifixion. The problem, however, is that we forget that there is life (eternal life here and now) beyond the Cross. We allow ourselves to forget that our life in Christ is new every morning, we have a new beginning every day for the rest of our lives. And in the process of allowing “works” into our life, we forget that we are loved just as we are and we expend too many hours of the 24 that He has given us trying to prove that we are worthy of His love.
We need to remind ourselves (let our center remind us) every day that we are not to focus on what we can do for Jesus, we need to focus on what Jesus has done for us. If we’ll do, then all the rest will fall in place as He can then give us the desires of our heart; give us the desires that are perfectly aligned with His Will for our life.
Just remember… I am loved as I am and therefore I don’t have to remain as I was!