The Love Inspired Grace of God

I have recently been thinking much about the love of God and the grace of God. And it seems to me that God wants to prove His love for us by demonstrating His grace toward us. Throughout Scripture it is as if He is saying, "You know that I love you when you see that I have shown you grace."
That truth is seen in Romans 5:8 where the Apsotle Paul writes, "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." There are many ways that God could have inspired Paul to write that verse. He could have simply said, "God demonstrates His love for us in that Christ died for us." If that would have been how Romans 5:8 was written then it would have still been amazingly true and would have been infinitely worthy of our praising God for all eternity.
But Paul adds a phrase that magnifies God’s grace. He says that God shows His love toward us in that "while we were still sinners" Jesus died for us. That phrase magnifies God's grace toward us in that it shows us love inspired grace. Jesus did not just die, He died while we were rebels, while we did not love God, while we had nothing good in us, while we were deserving of nothing but hell and punishment, while we were going our own way, while we could care less about God, while we were committing sin after sin against the God of the universe, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Jesus did the dying and the saving while we still did not deserve it.
That is grace. And that is how you know that God loves you: you know that God loves you when He shows you grace like that. It is one thing to see love; it is a more amazing thing to see grace-filled love!

A Friend of Sinners

What kind of difference are you making in your workplace and in your neighborhood and in those places that God has providentially placed you in order for you to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16)? What kind of relationships are you building so that you can love those around you that do not know Jesus as Lord and Savior? How are you involved in people’s lives for the sake of the Kingdom and for the sake of their eternity?
Jesus was called a “friend of sinners” by the religious establishment of His day. They saw that He spent time in the company of those of questionable backgrounds and practices and believed that to be scandalous. But I pray that we would be bold enough to live in such a way that the same might be said of us.
While Christians are to clearly look different from the world (John 17:16; 1 John 2:15) we must live in a way that demonstrates to the people of the world that we love them. This is what Jesus did as He interacted with those around Him. The religious people of Jesus’ day looked down upon sinners; Jesus looked for sinners because He came to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke 19:10).
When Jesus hung out with sinners He did not condone what they were doing and their sinful lifestyles, He simply affirmed that these people and their lifestyles can be transformed. And He was able to hang out with sinners without becoming a sinner Himself.
So as we seek to live in the world but not look like the world we need to avoid two extremes. One extreme is to retreat. This is where the only people that we know and hang out with are those like us: they believe like us, live like us, think like us, have the same morals that we do, and have the same worldview that we do. This is retreat and this is defeat.
The other extreme is to relax. This is where we begin to look more like our unbelieving friends then we do like Jesus. We relax our morals and relax our values and the sinners and the culture begin to affect us more than we affect them. This is just as dangerous as retreat for while retreat causes there to never be a Christian witness, relaxing causes the Christian witness to tainted and therefore ineffective.
Thankfully Jesus did neither of these. He did not retreat and He surely did not relax. Jesus redeemed. And that is what He has called us to do as well. Jesus has called us to be salt and to be light, but in order to do that I must get out of the salt shaker and into a world that needs some salt and that needs the light of the Gospel.
So I ask again: What kind of difference are you making in your workplace and in your neighborhood and in those places that God has providentially placed you in order for you to be salt and light? What kind of relationships are you building so that you can love those around you that do not know Jesus as Lord and Savior? How are you involved in people’s lives for the sake of the Kingdom and for the sake of their eternity? Let us go and be known as friends of sinners so that Jesus might use us to bring redemption to those around us!

Marriage for the Glory of God

Marriage, just like all of life, is meant to glorify God. It is meant to picture the loving relationship between Jesus and His church (Ephesians 5:32). God created marriage upon the pattern of Jesus and His relationship to His bride the church, so the goal is to live and love in such a way that God is glorified and the relationship between Jesus and the church are portrayed.
We all know that a strong, God-glorifying, Christ-centered marriage takes a lot of hard work and a lot of determination. It takes following the instructions of God, the One who created marriage in the first place. This kind of marriage does not come about by looking at the pattern of the world, but by looking at the pattern of the Word; the Word of God.
The building of a strong and lasting marriage is much like building a strong and lasting house. When you build a house you want to use materials that will make it last a lifetime. You want to work hard so that it will be built into something that will stand up to the test of time. And building a strong, God-glorifying marriage is no different. Psalm 127:1 says, “Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” Likewise we can say that unless the Lord builds the marriage, those who try to build it labor in vain.
The building of a marriage, just like the building of a house, must start with a strong foundation. And the foundation that is needed in marriage is Jesus Christ. There is simply no other foundation with which to build a marriage upon. Jesus said, "Anyone who listens to my teaching and obeys Me is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won't collapse, because it is built on rock.” (Matthew 7:24-25). The only foundation that will stand when the storms of life blow hard is the foundation of the Lord Jesus Christ. A commitment to Him as individuals and a commitment to Him as a couple is the only lasting, solid foundation that can support a marriage. He alone must be the rock.
But a house also needs walls: something that builds upon the foundation and adds structure and support. And in a marriage what adds that support is love. The Bible says, “Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8). And the love that a husband and a wife should show one another should reflect the love that God has shown them in His Son, Jesus Christ. A sacrificial love that seeks the other’s good above one’s own. It must be a love that is predominantly centered not in each other, but in Jesus Christ where you love one another out of the overflow of your love for Him.
Not only does a house need a foundation and walls, but a house also needs a roof; something to protect the house from rain and acts as a shelter in the storm. And in the building of a marriage grace and forgiveness serve as that roof. The Bible says, “Be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32). The grace and forgiveness that the husband and wife show to one another should reflect the grace and forgiveness that God has made available through His Son, Jesus Christ. That is free grace that is not deserved or earned, but is freely and lavishly given. Grace that is not dependant upon each other’s performance or worth, but grace that reflects the blessings that we have been shown in Christ. Free and unearned grace must permeate your marriage so that it protects and shelters from struggles within and problems without.
When these things are done, a marriage will be made that will be strong and that will last a lifetime. But above all else, it will be a marriage that will bring glory to God.

Walking By Faith

We know from Scripture and from personal experience that God leads and directs His people. The main way that He does so is by His Spirit working through His Word the Bible. God’s will is mainly revealed in His Word as we embrace it, know it, internalize it, and come to know more about the mind and the heart of God through it as we conform our lives to what it says. Any means of seeking the will of God that does not involve the rigorous, regular, and systematic study of the Word of God is flawed and is a potential recipe for disaster.
God also leads His people through the godly counsel of others who are studying and loving and embracing and living God’s Word. There is wisdom in a multitude of counselors provided that the multitude know the Word of God.
It is also true that God sometimes leads through circumstances that we seek to interpret through the lens of the Word of God. God sometimes does close doors and open doors and these are indeed factors (not sole factors, but factors) in determining His leadership for our lives.
God uses these and other means to lead and guide His people; the list could certainly go on. To think that God does not lead His people would be unbiblical and contrary to the experience of most Christians. But as God leads His people He rarely (if ever) leads them in a way that does not call for faith. And while the way that God leads His people is important, it is not nearly as important as how God’s people trust their God.
Hebrews 11:1 says, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This faith does not find its anchor in what is known and understood and what can be checked out and mapped or planned. The anchor for this faith and this trust is the person and the promises of God: Who He is and what He has said He will accomplish. This kind of faith enables the Christian to press on steadfastly even when he does not know what the future holds for him. And he presses on not because he understands or trusts the future, but because he understands and trusts God who firmly holds the future. Faith knows that God can be relied upon and trusted.
Faith clings to God when you do not know how things are going to shake out and where exactly you are going. Let’s be honest: most of life from our perspective is absolutely uncertain. That is our perspective, but that is not God’s perspective. Our uncertainty concerning the future is only an apparent uncertainty; everything is certain to the God that we are called to trust.
But all of this is a matter of perspective. It all derives from how one sees things: do you see by merely sight or do you see by faith? Fear sees only the uncertainty and the unanswered questions and the range of options. Faith sees only God. The Apostle Paul called this “walking by faith and not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). Walking by sight does not require a lot of faith. When you walk by sight you have things seemingly figured out and there is a fail-proof plan that you have come up with and there are safety nets galore around you to catch you if you have made a miscalculation somewhere. When we walk by sight we have a tendency to trust ourselves and others and not to lean heavily and desperately upon God.
When you walk by faith you do not walk by sight. You cannot do both: to walk by faith is not to walk by sight. Most things that we do in life we structure to ensure that we do not have to walk by faith. But God expects His people to walk and live and think and make decisions that is a living out of their trust in Him and not a denial of it. And walking by faith is what is pleasing to the Lord because it is a demonstration of a person’s trust in the Lord. Two verses later in 2 Corinthians Paul writes, “Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him” (2 Corinthians 5:9). Trusting God pleases God.
As a matter of fact, it is the only way to please God. Hebrews 11:6 says, “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” If I am not walking by faith I am either trusting in myself or I am walking in unbelief and neither is pleasing to God. Walking by faith realizes that the goal of the Christian life is not to know the plan of God, but to know God Himself and to be one who “diligently seeks Him.”
So what do you do when you come to a crossroads and are not sure where to go? You trust God and you walk by faith. And you realize that the plan of God is not about a plan, it is about a Person and knowing Him (2 Peter 3:18).