Championship Pedigree

Have we caught a glimpse yet of just how monstrous our sins are and how monumental God's forgiveness is?  Perhaps a small bit of perspective is needed.  For one hundred years, Noah and his family worked on the ark that would protect them from the coming flood.  Apparently, no one thought much about the impending rain storm.  They were busy with cooking and hunting and farming and making a life for themselves.  But the most important thing, the approaching deluge was never pondered seriously by anyone except maybe Noah's family.  It was preposterous perhaps; insignificant certainly.  When the forty-two boys ridiculed Elisha and called him an "old baldhead", they were completely unprepared for what followed.  The two female bears that mauled them were the furthest things from their minds.  That is because they had no respect for the prophet of God and were oblivious to the power he possessed.  We can be thoroughly unaware of the immense iceberg before us because we are not scanning the horizon for danger.  The danger we face currently is the gross neglect of contemplation of Sin and its relationship to us.  We pass it off as a mistake or two, as an error in judgment and God declares it much worse than that.  Sin is the complete corruption and ruin of humanity and it is due to a mind saturated in rebellion against God.  When once we grab hold of the realization that Sin is far more horrific than we can conceive and that for God to overlook it is as idiotic as putting a loaded gun in the hands of a toddler, we will begin to hold to a rational view of life as it is.  Our Lord , by dying upon the Cross, evaluated the condition of humanity and determined that if He loved us, He must save us from our sins.  Save, we must use in the sense of pulling a drowning child out of the water or giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a heart attack victim.  God has saved you out of mercy, not pity, not necessity, not obligation but out of real kindness and love for you.  You are not a victim, God was the victim.  So now you are the victor and He the champion of the world.  Consider what was accomplished when our Savior poured out His blood upon the Cross.

Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha).         John 19:17 NIV

Living by the Moment

The danger for the Christian is not that he or she might fall into terrible sin.  It is that the comfort of one’s own goodness and intelligence is enough to get along.  Great sin creates a rush of horror and it wrecks the personal confidence one has.  It is then that the Shepherd is known intimately to be good.  Experientially the blood of Christ must work its way through and through until the love of God is certain.  Before then it seems a fantasy, this mercy of God, this dependence upon Christ for everything.  We have life worked out, we are pretty good, our job may not be perfect but it pays the bills, our loves aren’t always agreeable but they keep us warm and responsible.  Yet this is a sham; fool’s gold.  We are dead in our sins and hopeless without Christ.  It is not damaged goods but utter wreckage we have and that great need we faced when we were lost in our sin has not diminished a whit since we came to Christ and were born again.  We need Him just as much now as that spot of time we faced ourselves fully and saw the hatred and filth and hopelessness and cried out to God for a Savior.  God has not called us to succeed.  He has brought us into complete immersion in the life of Christ that we might fully live in Him.  Are we to pray by the day or the week?  It is moment by moment that we need our Lord and it is in those moments that we succeed at the point of His call.  Why do we become satisfied with the ebb and flow of Holy Spirit living when we can be living on the mighty Mississippi of filling?  Certainly we can act as if it doesn’t matter whether or not we are in union with Christ at any given moment of the day but it is sheer arrogance to think we have enough of God to function well.  What does it take to make us see our need?  A fierce burst of anger, a jealous rage, a wicked spell of depression, a broken heart, the flaring fear of loss, a dirty little mind that feeds off lust, a swelling loneliness that public places exacerbate; what makes us pause long enough seek out our Savior?  There is a gate that is wide as Kansas and it takes us into the far away country where everything is plastic and full of selfies.  But there also is a narrow way where we are never alone and we can live with the Glorious Christ who loves and nourishes our souls and who massages our troubled minds with tender hands.  Can you pause just long enough to gaze into the mind of your Savior?  Do you need to take time with Jesus?

To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.  Revelation 21:6 NIV