Free in Christ

Do you ever despair at the sin in your life? If you've been born again in Jesus Christ take courage, because you've been made new and are no longer enslaved by sin.

We no longer need to fear God's wrath since Jesus has completely fulfilled the righteous requirements of the law. Now the Holy Spirit who knows our hearts, as well as all of our mixed motives and competing desires, perfectly intercedes for us in the midst of our weaknesses. He is constantly in the process of working everything in our lives according to His good purposes.

Even though we may feel unlovely, God loves us because of His Son and nothing will separate us from His love - no circumstance, no person and not even our own feeble failings. It is precisely because of the freedom that we now have in Christ and the great love that He has poured out on us that we can take courage knowing that He is for us and we are more than conquerors through Him. (read all of Romans 8 to get the full story)

Free in Christ

So often in my life
I’m tempted to despair
I see the sin in my heart
And the wickedness in there

I can feel like I’m unworthy
Unfit to bear His name
Like I am not His child
Weighed down by all my shame

But then I remember
That the source of my faith
Does not lie within me
But in His amazing grace

Jesus saved me from myself
And all my wickedness
He rescued me from God’s wrath
And gave me His righteousness

Now I am forgiven
I No longer stand condemned
I’ve been cleansed in His blood
Washed clean and free from my sin

So now I am worthy
Because I bear His name
I am His chosen child
He has taken all my blame

Now I’m free in Christ
My hope in Him secure
I’m free to live for Him
My inheritance is sure

Copyright Matthew Rawlings, March 27, 2009

I’m a Hypocrite (But the Gospel is for Sinners Like Me)

That’s right, I’m a hypocrite. I really don’t like to admit it and I’m not proud of it. In fact, I’m ashamed about it at times, although not nearly as often as I should be. My awareness of my hypocrisy often fluctuates, based on my awareness of my sin and failures or at times based on the raw truth of potential consequences for my hypocrisy. At times, viewing my hypocrisy makes me feel worthless and in the extreme, I respond in hopelessness. Sometimes I feel as if there is no way out, as if there is no way of escaping my own hypocrisy.

But this is a lie. The way out is to confess my hypocrisy, to confess my many sins and all of my failures - to see that God intended for me to come to Him weak, broken, humbled and contrite. Jesus came to save sinners, of which I am chief among sinners. And to see that no-one, not even I myself can deliver me from this body of sin and death that hangs about me. You see, I need to stop trusting in myself and looking to myself to change on my own. I cannot bring about God’s forgiveness through some work, or even deep sorrow, of my own. And I cannot either merit or take away from the work of forgiveness that only Jesus can give to me.

On my own, there is no way out and on my own things would indeed be hopeless. But, I must forsake myself and consider my old sin nature truly dead with the death of Christ. I must trust only in the hope that is in Jesus – that He alone earned my forgiveness, that He alone earned my right to stand before the Holy God as clean and deserving and that He alone has saved me from my sin and the wrath of God.

The Gospel – the Good News that Jesus came to save sinners, is truly for sinners like me. And the good news is that Jesus can make sinners like me saints in His sight. Does this mean I stop sinning? No. Does this mean that I now live a perfectly sinless and holy life every day? No. Does this mean I am no longer aware of my failures and that I no longer fall? No. But this does mean that all of my sins, my failures, my fallings, all of my hypocrisy were placed on Jesus as He hung on the Cross and my entire body of sin was crucified with Jesus – and I consider it as gone as a dead man, who dies only once.

The good news is that all of my hypocrisy deserved punishment and Someone else took it and paid for my hypocrisy by bleeding and suffering for me - by His own death. The good news is that God now looks on me as if I had never sinned, even though He knows the reality, and now He has credited me with all of the right and holy living that Jesus lived. This is good news and this is why a hypocrite like me can stand forgiven and free from the weight of hypocrisy. And this is why a hypocrite like me no longer wants to live like a hypocrite.

Now, by God’s grace I can enter into His presence, where I know I will find mercy and grace to help me in my time of need. Now, I no longer stand before God as a hypocrite – I stand as His child, because I have been made a new creation and I possess in reality the righteousness that I could never earn. Now, I can live in hope and confidence that God loves me and that He will give me His favor to enable me to live a life that is pleasing to Him. Thank God the gospel is for sinners like me.

Weeding the Garden

We used to have an ornamental tree at the front of our yard, surrounded by a flowerbed “moat” of sorts. We always had a difficult time getting things to grow around the tree because the soil was not particularly good. Parts of the “moat” were very shady at different times of the day and I never really gave it the attention that was needed.
After a couple of years of being mildly annoyed with the spectacle, I finally decided to do something about it. We purchased some good soil, leveled the bed out and planted bulbs for the spring-time, then added good ground-cover and flowers for the summertime and fall. I started to pay attention to it – watering it nightly and weeding it for a few moments every day after work. The “moat” around the tree started to look nice and I was proud of the results. Now, instead of being embarrassed, I felt a sense of accomplishment and I was encouraged to renovate the flower beds in front of our house and plant a garden out back.
It is amazing how seeing fruit in the “moat” began to effect how I viewed our yard and the potential for change that I now saw. Our yard was slowly and subtly transformed- it wasn’t the jewel of the neighborhood, but it was pleasant now instead of being an eye-sore.
Unfortunately, the transformation only lasted about a year. The next year, with another baby on the way, a new job, longer hours at work and less time in the yard, the inattention began to show. Weeds cropped up and began to choke out the flowers. The flower bed out front began to die without proper fertilizing and care. The garden out back only produced a mild crop. By the second year, the results of the neglect were more obvious and by the third year, it looked bleak.
One day, when my wife was out of town, I began to weed the flower beds. As I was pulling weeds, I marveled at how bad things looked and how subtle the changes had seemed at the time. As I was pulling the weeds, I began to realize that my own life was very similar to the gardens I was now working on - again.
You see, sometimes we can tend to ignore an area of our lives that needs attention but if it doesn’t seem major to us we do nothing about it until we begin to really hate our sin. This is a good kind of hatred – a hatred that causes us to respond to the prompting of the Holy Spirit and as we respond, we start to see just how ugly our sin is. To begin to change, God graciously has given us seeds (His Word) as well as many tools (means of grace) that we will need to plant and cultivate our garden. If we plant His Word in our lives and take advantage of the means of grace He has given us, we will begin to experience the mystery of change... Read Entire Article