I'm Hanging My Gloves

Note to Self: Focus on Christ!

Over the past few years, I have come into the understanding of God as a gracious and loving Father who isn’t angry at His children. My upbringing never taught me anything on grace. My religious upbringing confused me when it came to the image of God. He was sometimes good and sometimes…well he would be angry and judgmental.  My walk into grace and living in it has resulted in so much freedom in my personal life. While I am not perfect in my actions and still working through (by believing in His grace for) many other areas of my life, the Lord enabled me to walk in victory in the most tormented area of my life. I was free from many ungodly habits, consistent demonic attacks in my dreams and panic attacks. It’s been over 3 years now and none of this has affected me simply because I believe and have confidence in the fact that God is for me, in vital union with me and I am in Him being loved by Him who has an eternal commitment to love me unconditionally.

        
 I was so excited by this message that I started sharing this awesome gospel of grace with everyone around me. Some loved it and received it with so much joy. They experienced the freedom in being loved by God unconditionally.  Then there were those that got offended. What I said was misinterpreted as encouraging those to go and sin more. I would get into debates in an effort to understand what those who disagreed with me and clarify but to no avail. In addition, lies were usually spread and at times I didn’t respond very gracefully. I began to loose the joy and the excitement that I experienced when I first started believing these truths. My focus was not on Christ but rather trying to convince those who disagreed with me. I would get upset at those preachers, pastors who taught the stuff that I used to once believe. I was upset mainly because I knew in my hear t of hearts that what they preached was distorted and a diluted to a point where it wasn’t the gospel anymore. It very very very sad to see these things happening in the body of Christ.

Additionally I was upset that because “they weren’t getting it”. I realized I was trying to do the work of the Holy Spirit. Frankly, I’m tired. I forgot the fact that I once was in that position until the Holy Spirit revealed it to me personally. Grace will never cause a change until the Holy Spirit reveals it. And He will if you sincerely desire for it. I want to rest from all this and just focus on Christ. Grace is not trusting in my own effort by in His empowerment and His will. I have let offense and bitterness affect me instead of letting the same freedom I experience in Christ for myself that God gives me and I have failed to give it to others. However, it is God’s unconditional love to me that humbles me to write this. My pride wouldn’t allow me to do so.

God loves His church. He will work in all of us. My prayer is that God will open the eyes of those that are struggling and toiling. My prayer also is that I would learn to sometimes let this grace affect me when it comes to my relationships. I refuse now to be offended if you don’t share my view. The unconditional love of God to me enables me to accept you as He accepts you! I say this again my dearest brothers and sisters, let our eyes be on Christ and let Him work in us by His precious Holy Spirit. I ask for your forgiveness if I have offended you by the ‘way’ I communicated these truths. I will choose to continue focusing on His unconditional love and grace for me and show it to those in need.

 

May grace and peace abound to you through the knowledge of our loving Christ!

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Jehovah-Jirah

" God My Provider"

I was wondering the other day at how much many of us stress and worry about how we are going to meet our needs. We struggle and strive, we compete and crave to go ahead in life - to make more money so we can meet all our needs and even wants. Some may end up in a lot of debt buying things that they cannot afford. In all of this one thing is common, we're operating from fear.

Now don't get me wrong. God isn't against any of the things I mentioned above (well except for Debt - it isn't Father's will for us to be in debt and keep worrying about how we can pay it off). He isn't against us making money, having a good house and having the best education. It is in our Father's best interest to provide us anything and everything we need and want.

But the trouble is when we start operating from fear. Fear has its roots in unbelief. Unbelief not only in the ability of God, but also in his willingness to bless us. So we take matters in our own hands. Instead of depending on God, we depend on our strength. God calls us to a faith rest in Him. God says - " Come to Me all those who are weary and I will give you rest" To operate in rest is to depend on Him.

Anything we do outside of our dependance in Him is our attempt to be like Him. The bible teaches us that anything outside of faith is sin.  Also Paul says- "It is not I who live..." why? Because the old self died! The new self is in union with Christ. This new self is dependent on Christ's life.

So let God be God in our lives! Let him do the job of providing for us. Let us therefore learn to sacrifice our bodies (our strengths) and live in and operate out of a dependence on Him. Quit striving and stressing and start resting in  His strength (His resurrection power in us). It is God who provides. Its less burdensome to quit playing God and let Him be our provider. God will provide! GOD will provide! God WILL provide! God will PROVIDE for all our  needs.

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Jesus-Based Acceptance

Hey guys, I just decided to post a portion from a book that I am currently reading. The book is called Lifetime Guarantee by Bill Gillham. I strongly recommend this book for you to read if you are on a journey to understand God's grace.

One of the best-kept secrets in Christianity is that God accepts us. True, He can't stand our sinful acts, but He loves us. He doesn't have us on performance-based acceptance; He has us on Jesus-based acceptance. If you have accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior, the Father has accepted  you completely. Performance has nothing whatever to do with it. Performance is important to God, yes, but it has to do with winning His approval, not His acceptance. It has to do with hearing Him say, "Well done, good and faithful servant" one day at the Judgement Seat of Christ, but it has nothing to do with hearing Him say, "I accept you as My beloved child" (John 1:12)

You can be the greatest performer on the block at keeping God's standards, and you'll still be totally rejected by God if you are unsaved. One of the major purposes of those standards (the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.) is to frustrate you to the point where you'll see that there's no way you're ever going to earn His acceptance. You've got to change methods. You've got to come to the Father through Christ's perfection, just as He said.

To demonstrate how deeply entrenched Satan has made the performance-based acceptance syndrome, consider this biblically based illustration. On a one-to-ten scale, where ten is the best, put a number on how well you accept yourself, your spouse, and your kids, assuming all are born again. Let's suppose you selected a five for yourself. You're saying that you still have five additional points to climb before you can accept yourself perfectly.

But God accepts you perfectly in Christ already. God doesn't grade on a one-to-ten scale; He grades pass-fail. His acceptance of you and me is not contingent on our performance, but on what we have done with Jesus Christ's performance for us. If you have surrendered to Jesus as Lord and Savior, then God has already accepted you completely. He couldn't love or accept you more if you had never sinned. And He'll never love or accept you less no matter how often you do sin.

Actually, any Christian who accepts himself or any other believer at less than ten has higher standards that God! He sees himself and his loved ones falling short of the standard for acceptance. THis person is using performance as the criterion for acceptance. God, however, uses Christ's finished work for us as the criterion for acceptance. Thus, any Christian who is striving for acceptance is fighting a battle that's already been won.

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Acceptance/Rejection

We live in a world system where our acceptance comes off of our performance. Be it in schools, workplace or even in christian families, our acceptance of ourselves as well as others' acceptance of us comes from our actions. This has been so ingrained in our understanding that sometimes it takes a while to recognize the problem.

Parents for example can be so strongly reprimanding the child for his or her wrong action, but end up destroying the child's identity and confidence. Instead of addressing the wrong action, parents associate what the child does to who he or she is by nature. The child soon picks up on this and later in life struggle with many issues (i don't really want to expound on these issues)

Culture plays an important role as well. In my Indian culture becoming a highly educated and earning big money is the dream and goal of every parent for their child. In and of itself, it is a good desire. The problem is when the child's identity and family honor depends on the child amounting to be something in terms of the career or profession. Some succeed in living up to the culture's pressure while others' fail. Those that succeed have confidence in their abilities and their own strength while those who don't succeed feel miserable and many times a failure deep down on the inside. Sure many wont verbalize it. We then bring this into our relationship with God where we think God's acceptance of us is based on our obedience or lack of it.

God doesn't see us the way we see ourselves. God never makes a mistake. He creates value. In fact he created man in his own image. That is how much he wanted man to be in communion with man. Sadly, mankind forgot their own value and fell prey to the lie that they weren't all that and they need more - they wanted to be like God. The enemy has not stopped using this age old lie.

We have people trying to live upto the Jones-es because somehow they still feel inadequate. We have children who turn to gangs just in order to be accepted. You have Christians who acknowledge that God is loving with their mouths, but yet their lives and actions cry out - " I don't really believe it - i don't really believe that He accepts me, that He can love me despite my repeated mistakes, my incomplete love for him and my inconsistent discipleship." And so in choosing to believe the lie- that God rejects me, I choose to reject myself. Its far more easier to go with "God rejects me" rather than "God accepts me". The latter even though is the truth, is something that one has to accept it by faith because of Who he is rather than our actions.

So what does God think of us? God is the definition of value. If he created man in his own image, he created something of value. To reject oneself  and have a poor negative self-image is to reject God and believe the age old lie of Satan - that man is not like God. God sees us as valuable. God loves us because He is pure love. To come to the realization of one's worth in Christ based on what God did - not only in creating this value (i.e., you), but also sending His only son to show us how valuable and dear we are to Him and that He wants to have this deep and intimate relationship with us defeats the lie of the enemy.

God wants us to now derive our sense of worth and identity from Him. Since we are so in union with God, we take our identity from Him. Those who are born-again are now in Christ. And since we are in Christ God accepts us in the Beloved (Jesus). God's opinion of Christ becomes His opinion of you. And since He says of Christ - "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased..", He says of you - 'You are my beloved Child, and I am so pleased with you and I accept you. You don't have to measure up to receive you sense of worth and identity. You are as Christ. Be free to live your life in my unconditional love and acceptance for you."

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