GRACE PAYED THE BILL

I want to thank Anonymous for asking the question last week, "Is there enough Grace for me?" It is a good question, and one all of us have asked at times. It has made me think and reflect on just what Jesus has done for us at Calvary, and the power of His resurrection.

This will be my last comment about this, but I wanted to think about who we are really are in Christ. The Bible talks about followers of Jesus being crucified with Christ, dead to sin, raised with Christ, being a new Creation. That is crucifixion/resurrection talk--not about Christ, but us. We are crucified and raised with Christ. And when God looks at us, He doesn't see us, He sees Christ.

He doesn't see the sin we once had. All of that was placed on the cross and has been forgiven and redeemed!!! PRAISE GOD!!!! What he sees is the blood of Christ that has covered us, cleansed us and made us a new person.

He doesn't see our bad habits, the drugs, alcohol, eating disorders. He doesn't see the soiled and shamed body. He doesn't see the filthy mouth, the lying tongue, the lustful eyes. He doesn't see the hidden sins that all of us have. When He looks at us, He sees the pure, unblemished Lamb of God who has taken our sin away. And God is daily remaking all of us to be the person He originally intended us to be. It is His strength, not ours; His power, not ours that is daily transforming us.

Now the question is this, Do we really believe it, and are we living our lives in this truth???

I am going to quote Rob Bell from his book, VELVET ELVIS.
"God is retelling each of our stories in Jesus. All of the bad parts and the ugly parts and the parts we want to pretend never happened are redeemed. They seemed pointless and they were painful at the time, but God retells our story and they become the moments when God's grace is most on display. We find ourselves asking, am I really forgiven of that? The fact that we are loved and accepted and forgiven in spite of everything we have done is simply too good to be true. Our choice becomes this: We can trust His retelling of the story, or we can trust our telling of our story. It is a choice we make every day about the reality we are going to live in.

When we choose God's vision of who we are, we are living as God made us to live. All we have to do is trust. Trust that God is already putting us back together.

Trust that through dying to the old, the new can give birth.

Trust that Jesus can repair the scarred and broken image.

It is trusting that we are loved, always have been, always will be.

Trust that we don't owe anything.

Trust that GRACE PAYS THE BILL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

We have been in this series, "This is My Story" the past few weeks. Well, folks, this is our story, and God is doing the telling. AMEN!! -jl