23 Jan 2021
As believers, we know we are saved by grace through faith and we are accepted in the beloved (Jesus Christ). We are acceptable to God in Christ not only when we believe but this holds true even after we have believed and it continues to be true throughout our lives. Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God the Father through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in behaviour may be.
Many Christians love Jesus and the gospel but just do not know how HIs cross, resurrection, ascension and reign ought to impact us in the “real world”. The truths in the gospel continue to apply to us as believers throughout our pilgrimage on earth; indeed everything we need is found in Jesus Christ, in some aspect of grace or beauty or suffering or glory that He demonstrates to us. Unfortunately, our tendency to disregard the familiar in God’s revelation and teaching in Scripture can be so detrimental to our faith. Often, we quickly gloss over some passages in Scripture without stopping to consider why they are there or what they meant to tell us. What actually gets relegated to this position of irrelevance is nothing less than the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, nothing less than Jesus’ accomplishments through His incarnation, sinless life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Because we are so familiar with the gospel message, it gets shoved to the periphery of our spiritual consciousness and becomes nothing more than words to be remembered at Christmas and Easter.
When we lose these truths, what takes centre stage in our awareness? We do, of course. When we lose the centrality of the cross, Christianity becomes a religion of self-improvement and becomes about us, our accomplishments, and about getting our act together. If we forget Christ’s work on our behalf, it will distort the way we think of Him, the way we think of ourselves, and the way we think of others.
The way we think of Him
When we forget that God is overwhelmingly gracious, merciful and loving to forgive us in His Son Jesus, we will think of Him as a hard taskmaster or One who does not seem to care for us in our ‘struggles’ with sins, failures and fears, and our perplexity with why ‘bad’ things are happening to us when we try so hard to do the ‘right’ things.
Like Job, for instance, we may be wondering why God ‘targets’ us with so many ‘disasters’ in life and like the psalmist of old, we may cry out in frustration as to why God does not answer us and He is ‘so far away’ and uncaring when things are getting from bad to worse, with one ‘terror’ coming after another in a ‘torrential’ manner.
We forget that God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places; He has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world; He predestined us for adoption as His children through Jesus Christ; in Jesus we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trepasses; in Jesus, we have obtained an inheritance that is imperishable and eternal, awaiting us in the new heaven and new earth, a hope that is sure and secure in Him and we were sealed with the Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of this inheritance until we acquire possession of it (Ephesians 1). Perhaps we have read these passages and glossed over them without pausing and meditating on the deep and profound meaning of what is communicated. If the Spirit illuminated this truth and meaning to us, it would tremendously help us recognise our great privileges in Christ, particularly when we do not deserve them and we in fact deserve judgement and God’s wrath.
When we look at the cross, and what the Father has done through Jesus in the Holy Spirit in His love and sacrifice for us to bring us back to His ‘fold’, can we and should we ever doubt His wondrous love and grace towards us? When we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8); when we were enslaved by the evil one in our bondage to sin and when we were heading to hell and perdition, God took steps sacrificially to free us, to redeem us and to give us a place in His family with the privilege to share His glory and to reign with Him at the consummation of His eternal purpose. Like Joseph who encountered one ‘misfortune’ after another, shall we not respond in like manner as he did, to be conscious of God and to be faithful to Him even in our perplexity, and to be assured that despite the ‘negative’ and prolonged circumstances, we do not lose sight of Him and we do not doubt His character, love, goodness and perfection. The gospel remains relevant and ‘fresh’ to us long after we first believed and the truths in the gospel continue to apply in our lives irrespective of the circumstances and our feelings; we may feel perplexed but we do not doubt Him, we may feel ‘crushed’ but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). We know that He who raised Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Him and bring us into His presence; we do not lose heart though our outer nature is wasting away, knowing that our inner nature is being renewed day by day, for God is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
Are all these truths of the gospel pushed to the periphery in our minds and understanding that we lose sight of the richness and profoundity of them all? The gospel must continue to refresh us regarding who God is and what He has done for us and what He will continue to do for us. Let us not be like the Israelites who doubted God and continually grumbled and complained against Him and His servant Moses before, during and after the ‘Exodus’. They quickly forgot God’s deliverance from Egypt, His provisions in the wilderness and His sustenance of them until they reach the promised land. Our ‘promised land’ is ahead of us – let us not doubt God and His loving intentions for us even as we encountered difficult circumstances and opposition from our enemy, for we know that our God is faithful, loving, merciful, gracious and perfect in all His ways.
The way we think of ourselves
If we forget that we are forgiven by God because of His Son’s sacrifice, we will set ourselves as those who need to earn God’s goodwill and make up for our past failures in order to be forgiven. We will live in fear and anxiety because we know we are bound to fail when we try to be right with God with our own efforts. We will be afraid to persevere because we know that we are doomed from the start and so we are resigned to conclude, “why bother trying, it’s no use?” We will fail again and again – how then can we expect God’s patience not to run out? So we become indifferent and conclude that ‘that is about the best that we can expect in Christian outworking’ and so we are resigned to be ‘mediocre’ in our spiritual lives. The enemy made sure that we remain in this state .
Conversely, we may find it unsettling to be utterly dependent on someone else to do what we cannot do for ourselves. We forget that when we first heard the gospel, we realised that we were utterly helpless and hopeless to ‘save ourselves’! We do not remember that in our helplessness and hopelessness, we cried out to God to save us and it is only by grace through faith that we were saved and continue to be saved. We totally depended on God for our salvation and we need to continue to depend upon Him to continue our walk in Him. Instead we depend on our spiritual ‘performance’ to earn God’s love and approval. God’s love for us and His acceptance of us are based solely on the performance of His Son.
Most of us tend to forget that Christianity is not a self-help religion meant to enable moral people to become more moral. We do not need a self-help book; we do not need to soak ourselves in ‘positive thinking’, foolishly thinking that by just thinking positive thoughts, we can be transformed in our lives. We need a Saviour; we need the life-transforming truths of the gospel empowered by the Holy Spirit to see us through difficult crises and spiritual struggles in the real world. And we do not need them just once, at the beginning of our Christianlife; we need them every moment of every day – we need Him – the triune God – God the Father ministering to us through His Son in the Holy Spirit.
We need to remember and to realise that we are beloved children of God. God’s disposition toward us is entirely different because we are beloved. He is not simply tolerating us, regretting that He opened the door to the likes of us. No, we are beloved. This is the same word that the Father employed to describe His disposition to His Son; He referred to Him (Jesus) as his Beloved (Matt. 3:17; 17:5: Eph. 1:6) and because of Christ’s work on our behalf, so are we. Jesus Himself said that His Father loves His people as He loves His Son (John 17:23). This is the astounding truth in the gospel – if we are in Christ, God calls us His beloved – not only are we beloved, we are also beloved children. All the riches of grace and blessings of relationship with Him are ours now; all that He has is ours by inheritance. We can rest securely that He would not ever abandon us. He is a good and faithful Father. He is devoted to our soul’s safety and complete sanctification. Because He has adopted us and made us His children, He is determined that we will be like Him. He is shaping us into His image (Rom. 8:29; Eph. 4:24). In the light of these blessed declarations, we can boldly pursue godliness. Because of the Son’s ongoing incarnation (the Son has been made like us) and the indwelling of His Spirit, we are being made like Him. Jesus is the firstborn among many brethren – we are family!
The way we think of others
When we forget about God’s lavish forgiveness, we tend to be less than gracious and generous toward our brethren. Forgetting that we are already forgiven will rob us of those Christlike qualities of kindness, generosity, gentleness and longsuffering. It will also rob us of the only acceptable motive for obedience: love.
The Apostle Peter calls all believers to earnest love for and cheerful hospitality toward one another, summoning us to use our gifts, whether they involve speaking or serving, “as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pet. 4: 8-11). Likewise, Apostle Paul affirms, “Grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift,” and he goes on to portray members of the body as joints through which life flows from Christ, the head, to other members, so that the body grows in love “when each part is working properly” (Eph. 4:7, 15-16).
The gospel of Jesus Christ – that we are all more sinful and flawed than we ever dared believe but more loved and welcomed than we ever dared hope – is meant to be lived out in relationship: first and foremost in our relationship with the triune God and then in our relationship with one another: each of us assuring, reminding, confronting, counseling, and listening to one another, praying for one another, and bearing one another’s burden. It is here, within gospel-centred relationships, that the Spirit will reveal the Son to us and the Spirit will bring us into the intimate relationship within the Trinity through the Son in the Spirit. Such a privileged fellowship and relationship within the Trinity would cause us to identify with the declaration of the psalmist: “You made known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). Surely, this would impact our lives and outworking in the ‘real world’, for we are citizens of heaven, dwelling as pilgrims in this fallen world – heaven has begun in our lives – we no longer look at things from man’s point of view but we behold all things from God’s point of view! (2 Corin. 5:16).