Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Guilty but Still Loved

I wanted to write a small piece about understanding God's love of each one of us as individuals and try to clarify for some out there what was once a major misunderstanding and of great concern I had at one time and it was a very major sticking point in my relationship with God and one that caused great turmoil and slowed my progress in my relationship with God down to a crawl, a wall that almost stopped my progress as a believer completely.  It is a simple and apparently common error on the part of those just coming into a relationship with the Lord.
 
I am talking about His love truly having no bounds, the boundary that we have made in our understanding is ultimately a major road block. God's love is truly exceptional from a human point of view and one that is very hard to conceive of at all.
 
Starting with the fact that if you or I were in a position to save the lives of our neighbors I believe most of us would do so if we saw that no imminent to ourselves or family would be implied by doing so but if there were the chance of danger coming to our family by doing so most probably we would not take the chance and if the chance were 100% that some grievous danger would befall our family then I say almost none would act to save our neighbor. There lies the difference in our understanding of love for one another and the love that God displays by willingly giving His Son to die brutally as He watched knowing He could immediately put an end to the terrible pain, suffering and humiliation Yeshua, in Greek called Jesus, endured but He did not save His only Son because He knew it was the only way to save us from ourselves, and keep the promise He made to us. How much love is that? Immeasurable by human understanding. If that were your son hanging on a cross and left to die in agony and you had the power to stop it all would you have been able to allow it? 
 
Now try to imagine that when we, sinners in every sense, want to have a relationship with God we
think we understand when Yeshua tells us we are forgiven our sins when we accept that He is the promised Christ and believe in Him. We understand that we will be changed from the inside when we accept that Yeshua died and covered us with His blood and will be seen from that time forward as clean of our sins from that point onward but some of us still don't understand that as we continue our slow transformation into the child that wants only to please our Father we sometimes continue to sin, say something like a smoking, drinking, sexual desires, lying etc. and we fall into the trap of saying "How can I be forgiven my sins if I still sin?". God's love and forgiveness is still extended to us and Christ's blood still covers us during this process as long as we know that we are a work in progress and continually pray for the strength to overcome our sinful nature. When we succumb to the notion that we cannot be forgiven because have sinned many times since our acceptance of Yeshua as our Savior and Redeemer we are falling into a trap laid by Satan, a trap of doubt. Simply accept what Yeshua has said and believe Him when He says that you are saved but join the battle with all your heart and all your ability to reclaim your soul by praying and trying every moment of everyday to overcome those sins of addiction and sins of evil thought. For some of us it is a long and hard struggle to fight for our souls and some others it is easier but like chipping the accumulated rust from the surface of a metal implement it takes time and effort but we know that underneath that corroded surface is the child of God we want to be and will be, sometimes it just takes more time than we first thought but holding fast will produce fruit with the help of the transformative power Yeshua promised us, namely the Holy Spirit, we will be changed. God still loves us even when we sin.
 
God's love for you is powerful and unfathomable in our human eyes and sometimes very hard to understand and grasp but Faith in what He says and believing he means it is all that is required to change from the inside out. He loves the sinner but hates the sin, remember this and fight the sin and never presume to put human limits on God's limitless love.

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