Living Grace

God knew the enchantment of sin would entice his chosen people away from his love for them. Just before they would cross the river Jordan to enter the Promised Land he warned them “Do not bring any detestable objects into your home, for then you will be destroyed, just like them.”

God knew that what you see every day, what you accept as normal, begins to cloud your heart and starts to make God seem distant.

For sins enchantment is that it make evil normal.

God is never distant from us, he never draws away from us, we draw away from him when foreign God’s of worldly wisdom, worldly diagnosis and worldly enlightenment creep into our thinking. But there is also a more subtle foreign God that of religion. When we start to make God fit our plans by our self effort and performance.

Love is not found in self effort it is found in intimacy.

Love bears all things, it is found in a heart of compassion and mercy.

Love is the oil that runs through your heart. It has been poured out into your New Creation life. You are a fountain of the very love of Christ in your Spirit. Don’t let the world seep into your thinking and into your heart and enchant you into believing the world’s diagnosis of your life.

The great patriarch of old a man called Abraham wasn’t wandering about looking for the one true God. God appeared to him, unexpectedly and offered him an amazing invitation. A choice to up sticks and go or stay in the land of Haran.

This choice for Abraham was one of emense proportions for at its heart it meant leaving behind all that had brought him life. He turned away from every familiar place, every thing that had bought him wealth, every thing that had bought him security and every thing that gave him love. To journey into the unknown and new life offered to him by God in a promise.

Abraham faced the same choice that we face everyday to turn our hearts away from all that would attach us and to turn our hearts towards the promise.

For if your heart is truly to be free it needs to detach itself from all influences and awaken its self to the promises of God.

For Abraham had no plan, no map, and no planned out itinerary. He just had the promise of God.

It is here in Abraham that we can see that life is not to be managed but lived. We can’t remove all dangers, we cannot forsee all the twists and turns, we cannot fear the future by managing our circumstances. But we can place our trust in the promise that God holds us and is faithful to his promises.

It is here in the heart that we know God offers us all things and that as we detach our hearts from all that would pull us back we find that God is there holding us.

It is perhaps our greatest tragedy when we fail to see things as they truly are.

Death, loss, damage, iloslation, separation all cloud the radiance of love. And the question that sometimes haunts us as we yearn for answers is does believing make any difference at all?

Here in the middle of tragedy we can dimly see the drama of God’s redemption.

It is often not just a longing that obscures our view but a focus on our circumstances instead of God’s answer.

And God’s answer is that you have new life in Christ. That you died with Christ and you were raised into his resurrected new life.

We sometimes feel that God is not coming without realising that he has already arrived.

Life in Christ is an awakening to the resurrected life now alive in you.

He shouts to us through the storms of life, he whispers to us through the desperation of every perplexing situation and he pleads with us in every moment of heart break. “Where are you?”

His love is so infinite and encompassing that with a heart of sadness he allows us to choose the life we desire. His freedom is so boundless he gives us the freedom to walk away and choose our own destination and our own God’s.

But all the time he shouts out to us, “Where are you? ”

For in Christ’s intimate love is the answer to our hearts longing, the connection our hearts desire.

The goodness of God reaches out to us and says that God is faithful and he loves us with an everlasting love.

You have never been an after thought to God. You were not some annoying problem that he had to solve. You were never a thorn in your father’s side.

For God is and has always been your provider, your protector, your deliverer, your lover.

He declares that he will heal our waywardness and love us freely.

He comes to crush our disappointment, to heal our brokenness and to restore us to wholeness. To unite our spirit to his spirit and declare that we are New Creations in Christ.

Every seed of goodness and righteousness planted into your heart will produce a tree of his goodness and righteousness in your life.

This lie traps our heart into the captivity of our circumstances. It imprisons us into the oppression of the moment. It kills hope, slays faith and delays all our expectations. We start to accept our captivity and distress as the normal.

It is believing this lie when we begin to doubt the goodness of God.

For the promise of God is that he will make all things new and that his glory will be made manifest in us.

It is here in the garden of our heart that we must keep out the lie. We must catch it before it destroys the harvest. We must release ourselves from its condemnation. For it is in the heart that condemnation runs riot and destroys the harvest.

And how do we catch the little foxes of condemnation?

We believe the truth of all we are now in Christ. We believe the truth of our right standing in Christ. We acknowledge the finished work of Christ alive in us. And we release our hearts by acknowledging all good things we have received in Christ.

For the promise is that God never leaves us or forsakes us and that if our heart drifts he still stays faithful to his promises to us.

The truth is that God delights and desires us and that he loves us with an everlasting love.

It is a desire that rages inside that causes us to search towards the mystery.

He speaks and we hear his voice.

He reaches out to us and invites us into his embrace.

This embrace is found in his unconditional reconciliation through the death and resurrection of his son. A reconciliation universal, eternal and complete. Offered in sacrifice and given in love. But this reconciliation has to be received and has to be accepted.

For God who has done all things to bring you into a new abundant life wants you. He has provided everything and has demolished everything that stood in the way of giving you his all. All you have to do is receive the favour of God and live in its beauty.

Today God is whispering to you, to come and receive. Are you listening?

The vastness of God’s love for us is found in Jesus. His life was a living sacrifice of God’s open display of his glory. For Jesus was the physical declaration of God’s goodness, mercy and compassion to a people seduced by religious fanaticism and lost in self righteous indulgences.

For it is in these indulgences that control is pursued at the price of freedom.

We hide from the one true God but God finds us.

Jesus found us and declared to us that he was bringing us into a new day of God’s favour. That he was here to set free the captive, to heal the brokenhearted, to turn our hearts back God.

Jesus leaves us free to love and wooes us with his passionate love and overflowing desire.

Jesus is not hiding from you and you never have to hide from him. Come out from behind your rock of your own security and embrace the grace of God.

Regardless of our decisions and actions God’s goodness and grace reaches out to us and invites us to come and eat and know that He is good.

The ripe fruit of grace invites us to taste and know for ourselves that God is a faithful provider.

For grace is God’s exceeding, abundant life above all we could ask or think alive and working within us.

His season inside our hearts is the new ripe day of his abundance.

Yes God gives us the freedom that love demands. We can have whatever destiny we desire. We can have whatever future we want.

But Christ invites us to come and eat the ripe fruit of grace and let the love of God blossom in our hearts. For In Christ all things work together for your good, as he works and lives inside you.