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Challenging conventional assumptions - Finding reality! |
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He has freed us… It is past tense - It is finished - Done!!! Nothing can be added and nothing taken away. Everything we are and have is in Him! Change your view of God and of yourself and live in the reality of who you are. Nothing less is worthy of His great sacrifice and His grace in giving everything He is to us! |
Message Summary... |
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God Is Not Mad! |
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1 Peter 3:18
Galatians 2:21
One of the more common responses to an invitation to attend a church service is, “Oh I can’t. The roof would fall in,” or “If I went in the building, God would strike me dead!” The clear implications are that we are unworthy of being in the presence of God and that the consequences would be serious indeed. Well, there is a great deal of historical evidence that to come into the presence of the eternal God without being prepared and worthy could be fatal. The Old Testament priests went into the Most Holy Place of the temple with a rope tied around their waist so that if they were struck dead, their body could be retrieved. To touch the Ark of the Covenant without being a priest so authorized would automatically result in instant death. The entire sense of an awesome and fearsome God is carried over to this day, but those concepts are without understanding of what happened at Calvary.
God is not mad at you, even though he is quite aware of your behavior. You see, God is eternal and we are temporal, bound to the limits of this earthly reality. We are time bound. We live in the now and interpret our world in the now. We see our failure as something that was, in the past or is now in the present, or might yet be in the future. We assume that if we confess and deal with our past behavior, we will be forgiven, but it does not apply to my behavior in the now and has no bearing on my status before God for anything I might do in the future. But God is not so bound and He sees us, past, present and future all at once. He is, after all, eternal and that which God provides is also in the dimension of eternity.
So Peter, understanding this difference between our sense of time bound present tense awareness and God’s unlimited eternal presence addresses this faltering and imperfect human view of reality by telling us that Christ died, once for sin for all. The entire scope of human history was wrapped up in one moment and the breadth of human failure from Adam until the conclusion of time for humanity on this planet was taken care of. Christ died once! That is all it took and that is all that was needed. ONCE! He will not do it again. He does not have to die for you each time you sin. To live in fear of a God who is angry with you for your behavior creates a sense of distance that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. He took care of it once and that is the end of the story. The rest of the story is found in how we appropriate that victory into our experience. Yet, if we do not understand the scope of Calvary, we will tend to live at a distance as though each human act of imperfection creates separation and distance |
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that God cannot bridge and which we seemingly cannot control.
The dilemma is that we are tied to a world view of human failure that should pass from us when we accept the sacrifice of Calvary. But it often, way too often does not. We are all too often given to trying to atone for our sin, regain God’s love and acceptance and recover from the rebellion that we play out in the now. So we set aside the grace of God as not being great enough to cover us and the effect is to expect another crucifixion and atonement for our failure. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. If it could, then Christ died for nothing. If that is the way it works, then Christ’s death only worked for those who were in the past at the time of His sacrifice. Paul tells us that we cannot set aside the grace of God. Righteousness cannot be achieved by our obedience to the law. Self justification will not work. It is not only unnecessary, we are simply incapable of it.
We all sin and thus the law breaks us and condemns us. There is nothing uglier than a self crucified person.
The fact is, Christ died once and that is the end of the matter. The wrath of God was visited on Him for us and no, the building will not fall in for God, looking down through time to today, knew us, chose us and provided a sacrifice for us. One passage called Jesus the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. God’s plan was complete in His mind in all eternity. He is incapable of reserving His grace and exacting His anger on you. He already did so at Calvary.
Now, what does all this mean to us:
2. It means that my behavior does not need to be a random course of unconnected events, but the purposeful portrayal of a son or daughter of God.
3. It means that I can alter my thinking and emotions about myself and learn how to live out what I already am.
4. It means that I can lay hold of the concepts of eternity and walk as a child of God and move into the dimension of spiritual reality.
5. It means a total shift of self concept, God concept and of appreciation for what Christ has provided for us.
This is radical thinking, but eternity thinking. Here is the power of the cross, that we can transcend the limitations of our behavior, rise above the perceived distance from God and embrace the wonders of His grace. The grace that is greater than our feelings, our thinking and our behavior. Christ has done it! It is finished. Live in it!
Pastor Dave |