“We live as if doing for Jesus is more important than being with Jesus. We work as though everything depends on us rather than everything depending on God.” James Lawrence
God loves you.
No really, God loves you.
Not the you, you want to be. Not the you, you pretend that you are. God loves the real you.
The flawed, messed up version. The you that sometimes gets things really right & sometimes completely wrong.
God loves you.
There is no more fundamental truth. And from personal & pastoral experience I suggest that there is no truth less easily believed or so easily forgotten.
God loves you.
When we lose sight of this we begin to work for God’s love, rather than from God’s love.
You are a child of the living God... not because you are worthy or have earned His favour anymore than you earned the right to be born. You are adopted into His family because of the love of God the Father, Christ’s generous self-giving & the work of God’s Spirit.
Your identity is not rooted in what you do, but in relationship with Him. You are significant because you are made by God, because you are loved by God & because God has great plans for your life.
Chew over the following passage & savour its goodness deep within.
“It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat.
It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.
Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It's God's gift from start to finish! We don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.” Ephesians 2v1-10
Stuck... Unstuck. Polluted... Cleaned up. Sin-dead... Alive in Christ. Deeply loved... Deeply loved.
God loves you!
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