God is Jesus

I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. Oh sure I’ve heard “Jesus is God” my whole life but never “God is Jesus” and lately I’ve been wondering why. My conclusion is that “Jesus is God” leaves us a whole lot more room to make god in our image. We can fall back on thousands of years of misconceptions, hold  to misunderstood traditions and discount the very teachings of Christ by thinking Him to be just some portion of God that we can’t really understand.

Jesus said, “When you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.” And I think he meant it quite literally. One of (if not the) primary reasons for God becoming one of us was to show us who He truly is and to put to rest our wrong notions of Him. It’s very sad how soon we went back to them and created a good God/bad God rationalization. If you want to know God you need look no further than Jesus. He is the One and only God in totality.

Marginal Values

With Jesus solidly at the center of our lives, we not only gain freedom from guilt and forgiveness of sin but we have Him there to push out the marginal values that have a way of sneaking in and becoming dominant. Deliverance from the trivial.

Transgression

Sin, offense, failing, wrong doing, evil doing… Jesus’ teachings on these are intended to help us find our own faults, not aid us in becoming the authority over others’.

Straight to Hell

I heard this phrase a couple of times today. Think about it for a minute… It’s an absolute impossibility.

Response

Grace and trust go hand in hand. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they are inseparable as they each have their place but they certainly are vital to each other. Grace is the proper response to trust but it’s also the appropriate reaction when trust has been broken.

Thank you very much for your input yesterday.

Four Ninety One

That’s the magic number at which we no longer have to be forgiving. We need to be sure we keep an accurate count ‘cause we wouldn’t want to over forgive. Or does keeping track nullify the whole idea? Maybe there really is no end to forgiveness.

But My Way Makes More Sense

Isaiah 55:9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” There are times when this verse brings great comfort to me and other times when it’s just frustrating. Somehow I forget that he has always been at work in whatever was going on and has never failed to have my best in mind. Yet today I think my way will work out better? Lord forgive me for being absurd. I trust you.

Holy

The holiness of God is that He is completely apart from sin and totally incorruptible. His every thought and action are pure and in the best interest of everyone. That’s a hard one to wrap our brains around but true. The other attributes we’ve looked at so far help us understand this a bit better but from our view sometimes it doesn’t seem so. I’ve heard it taught that it’s because of God’s holiness that He’s not around when we are in sin. Nonsense. God’s always around and eager to help us exchange our crap for treasure. I use the word help here because we are usually part of the process. We are faced with choice at every turn, we can choose with God, or we can choose without.

Blame

“The woman You gave me…” Adam’s blaming God here. We are called to a life of other centeredness; it’s too bad we apply this concept to pointing out sin. It’s okay to move to the front of the line when the topic is shortcomings and weaknesses. Thank You for Your forgiveness Lord, thank You for Your Grace.

Where are You?

This is another beautiful piece of scripture from Genesis chapter 3. No matter what we have done or how far we have stepped away, God is always pursuing us. He has not gone anywhere. He is not off somewhere waiting for us to come back to Him. He is fervently seeking us, wooing us and doing what is needed to bring us back into intimacy with Him.