Sight Beyond the Surface

Dear God,

Your faithfulness floors me.

My soul felt filthy.  The conscious submerged in sin. 

Dreams dowsed in dirt.  Apathy.  Apostacy.   Abhorrent attitudes: 

Fear, pride, hypocrisy.

I harbor them.  You hate them.

My relationships seemed like shallow pools in the reflection of soft spirituality.  I couldn’t handle the hard stuff.  The letting go.  My soul stuck to the world, its natural sustenance, and my daily routine, offering the illusion of control. 

Your Word instructs: love not the world or the things of the world; those who love you will obey your commandments;  die to self, take up your cross and follow You. 

I fail miserably and have grieved Your Holy Spirit; yet when I close my eyes You are present. 

You give me life today.  You hold me together.

 You want to be with me!?WHY?

Because of Jesus.

May the things of this world grow strangely dim.  I open my heart to You LORD God. 

The darkness exposed.  My King sees my shame.  All the turbulence and trash.

Job 34:21 “For His eyes are upon the ways of a man,

And He sees all his steps.

Pr 5:21 For the ways of a man are before the eyes of the Lord,

And He watches all his paths.

Hopeless… But then, the Gospel. 

Truly too good to be true news.

However, it is true.

Rom 5:8-11 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ⁹ Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. ¹⁰ For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. ¹¹ And not only that, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.

Rom 5:19-21 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so also by one Man’s obedience many will be made righteous.

²⁰ Moreover the law entered that the offense might abound. But where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, ²¹ so that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

God wrote us a Book.  Scripture has many facets that reveal some magnitude of God’s love for us: through Jesus Christ.

So then it has been made clear to me that God has reconciled us to Himself by our faith in His perfect Son, the tangible, exact representation of His Personhood.

The question now becomes, “Who is this Holy God who would sacrifice Himself by way of unspeakable brutality at the hands of His creatures—for me… for you… for us.  Yes, all of us.

He came.  He died.  He was resurrected.

Isaiah 9:6

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;

And the government will rest on His shoulders;

And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

Acts 2:23 this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death.

2 Cor 5:15 and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.

Rom 6:9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him.

1 Tim 3:16

 By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:

He who was revealed in the flesh,

Was vindicated in the Spirit,

Seen by angels,

Proclaimed among the nations,

Believed on in the world,

Taken up in glory.

Heb 1:2-3 in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world. And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,

The kind of love presented in the Bible is no less than fascinating.  It makes zero sense to the unrenewed mind of man.  Yet it is the intention of God Almighty for us to embrace that which is unfathomable apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ, who was and is, and is to come.

Rev 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Ps 90:12 So teach us to number our days,
That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

For those of us who know…

May we continually seek our Savior and devote our lives to the One who paid our deathly debt. 

His grace is unending.  His favor is affluent.  His nearness unshakable.

 His power is prevalent.  His love is limitless and to Him alone we owe allegiance.

Eph 1:2-12 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, ⁴ just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, ⁵ having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, ⁶ to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.

⁷ In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace ⁸ which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, ⁹ having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, ¹⁰ that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him. ¹¹ In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, ¹² that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.