God, Your Word says that if I judge another, it’s like I’m despising the fact that Your goodness is what You actually use to lead people to repentance.
If I take the Law into my own hand at all — no matter whether to apply it to someone else, or to myself — I am putting the wrong things in the wrong places, and I’m not truly obeying Your Gospel.
The Law is a very specific thing, and it is for a very specific purpose…Your people have always had a tendency to become wrongly related to it. Me being one of Your people now, it’s understandable then, I suppose, how I came to have a wrong relationship with it myself.
Jesus, some of Your apostles were surprised that the Holy Spirit fell on Gentile believers, who had never known the Law, and who had lived all their life with a pagan understanding of this world. When they heard about You, and what You had done, they got hit with the Spirit, and it was off to the races. You welcomed them into the adventure of being born again, and living life in freedom with You as their patron, their benefactor, their Father in the highest sense of the word…
You didn’t run them through a boot camp first. You invited them into absolute intimacy, right off the bat. Then they had power to live the kind of life that You designed us for, and that was that!
It was You giving Yourself freely and fully, and giving all that You have, and it was the revelation that You are the kind of Person who would want, more than anything else, to do something like this (give themselves away for free) and that is what actually wins people’s hearts, and activates that real Gospel kind of faith in their lives.
I know that, in my case, Jesus, I was very lost and confused, and I wasn’t perfect, and I made a lot of mistakes, and I was sitting in the middle of some pretty severe consequences to a lot of these mistakes when You invited me into this thing. That kind of blew my mind, but I believed at face value the idea that Jesus Christ, the God of the Universe, was reaching out to me, and all I had to do was say, “Okay.”
Once I believed it, that was it. You showed up in my life in just the right way, at just the right time. You met me where I was, and you said, “Okay, son, I’m going to help you now.”
I didn’t have to do anything to earn it, and You didn’t make it so that I had to do anything to keep it. I just had to keep remembering that it was true, and that was it.
I’m not sure how exactly it was that the Enemy was able to send his people in, and get my ear, and actually make me forget…but he did, that bozo. A while after we’d already been on this road together, I began to fall in with a crowd who convinced me that I needed to be afraid that You would leave me, and forsake me, and that I needed to have a certain behavioral quota met, in order to be fairly certain that You probably wouldn’t.
They told me that the Gospel was a little bit different than the way You’d told it to me through Your Jesus people, and that I’d do best to forget all that grace nonsense, because it was “false” grace, anyway, and that I needed to study Your Law. The Law, they said, contained the true key to holiness. They told me that any true Gospel experience had to be founded on the Law first, and then on Jesus after that (once the Law was understood properly.)
I was to be assured of my salvation only as it was a byproduct of my obedience, and the legitimacy of my obedience was basically for them to discern, and then treat me one way or the other about.
It was weird. The whole thing was so weird. And then I got lost again.
I wandered around for such a long time. I was so angry. You were with me the whole time, and I was acutely conscious of this, at times, but so much of the time, all I could hear were those old words of fear, and all I could see were those disappointed, accusing expressions…
I started to make some bad choices. This went on for some time, until I least expected Your grace. Then you hit me with a tidal wave of it, and here I am. Unreasonably blessed.
Biblical grace is bestowed on humble, believing sinners, and this is the only way their hearts are won, and they turn from their self-wrapped ways — not because they fear, but because they love.
We love You because You first loved us.
Jesus, help me to always remember this. Help me to never forget Your love.