Some of us live as if God has a big performance chart with our name on it, and at the end of each day He grades us to determine if He will love us more, or less, or at all. You say, ‘If I were God, some days I wouldn’t love me.’ Then be glad you’re not God, and we’ll all be twice as glad - or we’d all be sunk! God does not save us by grace and then base how He feels about us on our spiritual performance. The Bible says, ‘God…out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved’ (vv. 4-5 NRSV).
The wonder of grace is that you are chosen, you are wanted, and God desires you for His family. By grace you have been made alive to God. You have strength to endure, power to serve, a reason to hope, and death has no hold over you. God took your indebtedness and guilt and nailed it to the cross. He erased the bill; He destroyed the I.O.U. and set you free. Unburdened. Cleansed. Today you can live with a heart as light as a feather - no matter what you did yesterday. The truth is that no one in heaven will ever boast, ‘Look what Jesus and I did.’ No, when Jesus cried from the cross, ‘It is finished’ (see John 19:30), God wrote ‘Paid in full’ over every sin you would commit - all the way from the cradle to the grave. This is the wonder of grace.
1 Sam 7-9, John 10:1-21
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