My experience with most Christians throughout the years is that they are not at peace with themselves and therefore, they're not at peace in their relationship with the Father. Guilt and condemnation seem to be constantly part of our lives and as a result, we're always expecting "the other shoe to fall." We're always awaiting God's punishment (of some sort) for some mistake we've made.
It seems so difficult to walk in God's perfect grace. We have always known that we're imperfect and yet, we've tried to walk upright before God. We were always conscious of our imperfections and that is the problem. A perfect God rendered a perfect grace. And, this perfect grace was always greater than our imperfections.
Grace provided the perfection of our sacrifice and not for our own righteousness. We were made righteous with His righteousness and not our own. Grace provided such a great righteousness that it would cover our mistakes. No one could do this on their own. It had to be Jesus' right standing and not our own.
We must walk in this peace with God and we must put faith in His grace. We must stop depending on our own works. We still should perform good works, but not in order to obtain our right standing with God. Our own works could never keep us in righteousness or right standing with God.
Peace can never be a constant part of our relationship with a Holy God if we don't put faith in His grace. God hasn't changed His stance on righteousness, but He did change us into righteousness through Jesus. Now, we can stand upright before Him like nothing ever happened in our lives or in the Garden of Eden. Jesus did that for us on the cross and His raising from the dead.
Through Jesus, grace has provided everything needed to make us and keep us in right standing with the Father. We, though, have been more conscious of our failures rather than in His success. 2Peter 1:2 (Amplified) says, "May grace (God's favor) and peace (which is perfect well-being, all necessary good, all spiritual prosperity, and freedom from fears and agitating passion and moral conflicts) be multiplied to you in (the full, personal, precise, and correct) knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord."
The "knowledge of God and Jesus" is something every believer must seek out for themselves. The more you learn from Him, the more your faith will receive the "peace" between you and the Father. With inspiration from the Holy Spirit, 2Peter 1:2 (Amplified) tells us, "For His divine power has bestowed upon us all things that (are requisite and suited) to life and godliness, through the (full, personal) knowledge of Him Who called us by and to His Own glory and excellence (virtue)." It is "By and to His Own glory and excellence (virtue) and not by our own works. It's not by our obedience, perfection or striving, but by His Own divine power."
We walk with our Father like we're "walking on eggshells." We're so careful, believing that every small mistake will remove years of our relationship with Him. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that we should do our best to walk as best we can, but we shouldn't depend on our own walk to determine His grace. It seems like we're always walking in one ditch or the other. We act like grace doesn't cover our mistakes and then on the other hand we act like we can do as we please (sin and walk in all unrighteousness) and grace will not see it. Both are wrong.
As we learn and grow in the things of God, grace covers every mistake we make and as we mature in the things of God, grace will keep us from committing our precious mistakes. I still make mistakes and blunders in my walk with the Father, but they are thing in which I'm learning to walk in. I've outgrown the dumb things I used to walk in. If we continued walking around with our favorite blankies like we did as babies, then others would believe there's something wrong with us.
We've outgrown our need for blankies, but now we depend on something else in it's place. We do the same in our Christian walk as well. When we first were saved, we still did things of the world like we'd always done. As we grow in our faith, we learn to walk above the flesh in many areas, but do so gradually. There are areas of our life that we still haven't turned loose of and we're haunted by past failures. This is mostly because we don't understand His grace.
The same grace that fostered the first part of our Christian will continue to take us through the last part too. The song "Amazing Grace" says that, "It was grace that brought me this far and grace will lead me home." We will never arrive at a point in our Christian walk where we won't need His "Amazing Grace."
We must learn to put faith in His grace and not in ourselves. Only God's grace can cover our feeble attempts to walk totally upright in His presence. We must learn to walk in His righteousness and stop depending on our own.
No comments:
Post a Comment