Actually in Us

More thought on yesterday’s post –

“When God forgives us for violating His design, He pours His life into us; and that restores our capacity to connect, first with Him, then with others. He makes us alive with the actual life of Christ. The energy with which Jesus heard and obeyed the Father, the impulses behind everything He did – His tenderness with the lame man, His indignation with the moneychangers, His patience with Philip, His red-hot scorn for the Pharisees, His love for children, His resolve to endure injustice without complaint – are in us. The impulses that energized Jesus’ life on earth are actually in us. That’s part of what it means to be alive in Christ.” – Larry Crabb

What he said.

Gracious

My favorite definition of God’s grace is, God’s gift of Himself to humankind. This gift is totally spontaneous, completely free, unexpected and most certainly undeserved. It’s the fulfillment of God’s plan from before time and the One that can bring completeness to each of us. We typically think of Jesus coming here as one of us to be the totality of this gift but it is so much more.

God’s offer of Himself to us includes everything that He is. All of the attributes that we’ve been looking at are for us to accept. He wants us to have it all: the gift of forgiveness through His death, the gift of eternity through His resurrection, the ability to know Him intimately and personally through Christ living in us, to hear His voice and be able to act on it through His Holy Spirit, to trust Him because of His veracity and on down the incredible list of who He is. It’s all for us.

This is the conclusion of our specific look at the attributes of God. This list is by no means the wholeness of God after all He is infinite. There is much more of Him to be discovered and all of that is for us too.

Immanence

Immanence is another of my favorite attributes of God. It means that He is here with us. It might seem to some to contradict His transcendence (He’s outside of space and time) but it doesn’t at all because as we said earlier, He is infinite. Our immanent God is never far from us in fact scripture is abundantly clear that we literally have Christ in us. On top of that we have the Holy Spirit to guide and lead us and The loving Father to speak to and hear from while His greatest wish is that we would allow Him to shower us with His love.