restored to grace

My friend Beth posted a fantastic entry on this passage, and as I read it, I couldn’t help but be struck by the inclusiveness of the language.

God pours out his blessings on everyone. No matter what.

All we have to do is ask him.

What’s sad is that we often assume that we have to live a certain way or do certain things before God is willing to share his love with us.

So we slave to earn God’s favor, and hope that he’s happy with the work we’re doing.

But Paul wrote a different story about God.

“If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us?”
~Romans 8.32

It’s interesting to see how much our lives change through a simple change in perspective. You can look at your life one way, believing God to be an angry judge waiting to see us screw up, seeing every difficult or painful situation as a way for him to find fault in what we’re doing. Or you can look at life another way, seeing God as a benevolent king who wants nothing more than to watch you grow and mature, embracing every trial as an opportunity to become stronger and wiser.

And God wants this for us. He’s longing to give us great things. He wants our lives to be fulfilled and joyful. The letter writer James put it this way:

“Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light cascading down from the Father of Light. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. He brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all his creatures.”
~James 1.17-18

We mean a lot to God. Isn’t there comfort in knowing this? Maybe a simple shift in perspective is all we need.

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I’m pissed off about the impotence of today’s Christian culture.

We’re a powerless lot, with no agenda beyond that of finding fault in everything our society is doing.

But we’ve been given so much more.

Uncle Ben said it best: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

We’ve been given an enormous amount of power with which we’ve been charged to change the world. Christ left us this promise:

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

But what exactly is this power?

Christ did all kinds of powerful things while he was on earth. He healed the sick, he raised the dead, he multiplied food. But all of these acts were but a reflection of the immensely powerful act he would perform at the end of his life.

He would put an end to death.

And that power resides within us.

And with that power comes a charge: to unite the world and reconcile everything back to God.

But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.
~Ephesians 2.13-16

It’s somewhat depressing to see that Christians don’t take this charge seriously. But what depresses me even more is seeing Christians who think they’re taking it seriously, but are doing more harm than good, and are actually doing everything they can to turn people away. If something isn’t working, get rid of it! It’s not bad to look at numbers; numbers can be a good way to judge whether your work is effective. If it’s not, try something new. This calling is too important to be wasted on clinging to tradition or what worked twenty years ago.

God calls us to something much bigger than ourselves. He wants to use us as vehicles for his message to the world.

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
2 Corinthians 5.17-20

Yes, it’s thrilling to think that “the same power that conquered the grave lives in me,” but if that power isn’t doing anything through us, maybe it’s time to take a long, hard look at ourselves and reevaluate what we’re doing with that power.

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Have you ever been alone with God?

It’s funny how for much of my life I talked a lot about how awesome God is, how amazing Jesus’ work was, blah blah blah.

But when I came face to face with my Creator today, all of that changed.

For two hours my entire world was wrapped up in every facet of his being.

Majesty.

Splendor.

Glory.

And I was left speechless, dumbfounded, and in awe. I fell to the ground, my knees jolting with the impact. The trees above me seemed to whisper as the wind whistled through their branches: “Hallelujah,” they hissed.

As I pulled myself from the ground and began walking again, images of those whom God had used in my life flashed through my mind. And he began to reveal more of himself to me.

Love.

Grace.

Excitement.

I thought of the deeper friendships that I’ve cultivated over the past few years. The men who mentored and discipled me. The friends I shared my love and companionship with. The children I taught and cared for. And once again, I was left humbled and confounded.

This God who spoke breath into my life, who raised up and destroyed nations, who whispered entire galaxies into existence. . . this God is my Daddy, and he loves me.

That’s what I found in my secret place.

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Last Friday I had the opportunity to listen to the new MUTEMATH album Armistice. Okay, so I’m a little partial here, but it’s one of the most amazing albums I’ve ever heard.

I won’t go into a whole ton of details, but suffice it to say that this is an album you don’t want to miss.

As Paul Meany was recounting how this latest album came to be, I couldn’t help but be more impressed by the care that went into putting this record together.

The band wrote 36 new songs while they were on the road touring for their debut album.

None of those appear on Armistice.

They scrapped them all and decided to create a completely new, cohesive sound for this new CD.

I hope you come to love it as much as I do. It releases August 18.

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