desperately wicked // unbelievably loved : shift (4)

This is part 4 of my grace blog series.
Check out part 1 here: desperately wicked // unbelievably loved
Check out part 2 here: desperately wicked // unbelievably loved : condemnation (2)
Check out part 3 here: desperately wicked // unbelievably loved : self-righteousness (3)

In my last post, I said that we need a perspective shift, from what I do to what Jesus did. This shift will cause our lives to testify to the truth that we no longer live under the law, but we live under grace.

When we live under the law, we are either condemning ourselves due to our inability to keep the law or improperly considering ourselves righteous before God due to our perceived ability to be good. In both cases, we are counting on ourselves for a right relationship with God. We are putting in our own hands a responsibility that is not ours, thanks be to God! Paul tells us in Romans that no one is righteous, not even one. Not even one! Jesus is the only righteous one. Even more, he gives us his righteousness. We don't deserve it. We don't earn it. It is ours when we believe in him. When we stand before God, he sees the righteousness of Jesus, not our sinfulness. Isaiah tells us that God puts all our sins behind his back. David tells us that God separates our sins from us as far as the east is from the west. So, how do we get to a point where belief in these amazing truths overflows into our lifestyle?

First, I think we have to realize the depth of our sin and our need for a Savior. We who live in condemnation and we who live in self-righteousness (and for we who struggle with both) don't recognize that we are completely wretched and helpless before God, that we need him always. This goes for even "the best of us." Like I've said before, our righteousness is like filthy rags to him. When we live in condemnation, striving to improve ourselves so that God only has to fix the gaps in our righteousness, and when we live in self-righteousness, believing that we are right before God on our own, we shrink our great God. We think we can help him out by bridging the gap between us with our own good deeds. Listen. Without Jesus, the gap between us and God is eternal separation. There's nothing we can do on our own to bridge even a decimeter of that gap. I can't convince you of the depth of your sin, and I don't want to try to do so. That's the Holy Spirit's job. I pray, however, that the Holy Spirit will make you aware of your great need for the saving work of Jesus.

After we get over ourselves and realize our utter need for Jesus, in order to live under God's grace rather than under the law, we have to truly and deeply believe what God says about those of us who have been saved by his grace through faith. We have to let him transform our hearts and our minds with the truth of who he is and who we are as his children. When we start believing and understanding who he is and who we are, our lives change--not because of the improvement of some flaw that we have "worked on," but because of God's grace to come in and transform us from the inside out.

So, you may be living in condemnation or self-righteousness, and you may have realized that you've been doing such. You may want to change. Great. Rather than mustering up a lot of resolve to "be a better Christian," just look to Jesus. Immerse yourself in who he is rather than who you are or who you are not. Shift your focus from yourself to him. This shifting probably won't be a one-time thing for you. It's a practice of daily looking to Jesus, remembering who he is, what he has done, and who you are in light of that. Ask him for faith to believe him in such a way that your life reflects the truth of the Gospel. You see, our knowledge about God, however deep it may be, means nothing when we don't truly believe what we know about him. Our actions for God are not to make him accept us or love us more; our genuine actions for God are evidence of our already established belief in all that he is--our Savior, our friend, our inheritance.

More to come. The next post will be about the grace-filled life that flows from the shifting of our focus.

desperately wicked // unbelievably loved : self-righteousness (3)

This is part 3 of my grace blog series.
Check out part 1 here: desperately wicked // unbelievably loved
Check out part 2 here: desperately wicked // unbelievably loved : condemnation (2)

"These people come near to me with their mouth
    and honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship of me
    is based on merely human rules they have been taught.
Therefore once more I will astound these people
    with wonder upon wonder;
the wisdom of the wise will perish,
    the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish. "
-Isaiah 29:13-14

In the last post, I talked about one lifestyle that comes out of living under the law. When we live in slavery to our sinful nature and to the law, we become obsessed with our own actions. Last time, I talked about one side of this coin, the condemnation side. When we live under the law, we feel that our relationship with God depends on our actions alone. We may live in constant condemnation because we understand that we often blow it. However, the other side of this coin is self-righteousness.

The self-righteous lifestyle is similar to the condemnation lifestyle in that they both cause us to focus on our own actions. The self-righteous lifestyle is essentially the flip-side of the condemnation lifestyle. While someone who lives in condemnation constantly tries to "work on" flaws they see in themselves and their actions, someone who is self-righteous is blind to their sin and glories in their own good deeds.

The self-righteous person depends on comparing themselves to others in order to feel good about themselves ("holier than thou" attitude). They are nearly, if not completely, blind to their own sin. They seem holy on the outside (does a lot of good things, says the right things), but are empty on the inside (Jesus describes the Pharisees as "whitewashed tombs"). This is just a snapshot, but does any of this sound familiar to you? Do you ever think you're doing alright on your own? Do you ever think you need Jesus less on one day than another?

When we live in self-righteousness, like the one who lives in condemnation, we show disregard for what Jesus did when he died on the cross for our sins. Living in condemnation is unhealthy and unfruitful, but living in self-righteousness is plain dangerous. We see below that Jesus condemns the religious leaders of his day but frees the adulteress to sin no more. 

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."
-Matthew 23:25-28

(the woman caught in adultery)
When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
-John 8:7-11 


John says in 1 John that if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. There it is. If we think we are sinless, we essentially think we don't need Jesus; we think we are living by the truth while we're not. If we think we are living rightly, we're not looking for another way. In fact, we're probably narrow-minded about any other way. While strivers long for rest (found in Jesus), the self-righteous think they don't need it. While those living in condemnation recognize their sin yet look to themselves to change their ways, those living in self-righteousness are blind to their sin and count on their own good deeds for right standing before God.

Those of us who continue to live under the law need a perspective shift, from what I do to what Jesus did.

More to come. Blessings to you!

desperately wicked // unbelievably loved : condemnation (2)

This is part 2 of my grace blog series. Check out part 1 here: desperately wicked // unbelievably loved.

"Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up! Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God." Galatians 3:2-6, The Message

Like I said in my previous post, as Christians, a skewed perspective concerning grace and the law can dramatically impact our lifestyle and relationship with God. I think one of the most common perspectives is one that relies heavily on our own efforts rather than God's work in us. We often even unintentionally see the Christian life as time to work on our own righteousness so that God doesn't have much of a gap to fill once we die. You may have this mindset without even realizing it. I know I do sometimes, probably more than I would admit or even realize.


Just ask yourself if you do any of these things:

-You are constantly thinking of things you need to "work on." "I need to work on my patience." "I need to work on reading my Bible more often." "I need to work on obeying my parents." The list goes on and on. These are all good things, but notice the emphasis on I and my. We may change for a little while on our own, but only God can make lasting transformations in our lives.

-You feel like you have to be doing everything right before you can have a relationship with God. "Once I start reading my Bible every day, I can really have a relationship with God."

-You keep a scoreboard in your head, whether it's specific or general, of the good things you've done and the bad things you've done. As long as you're on the winning side of this scoreboard, you're okay, but if you start losing, you freak out. You start rethinking all the things you've done wrong and think of all the good things you need to do to start winning again. 

-When you mess up (or think you might have messed up), your heart drops, you replay the situation in your head, trying to figure what went wrong, how you could have fixed it, how you can fix it now. You can't stop thinking about your failure, and every time you think about the situation you have the worst sinking feeling.

-You compare yourself to other people. You see what other people are doing and feel the need to do as well or as much as you perceive they are doing. Or, you compare yourself to people and think you are better than them, but we'll get to that in the next post.

-Your identity is found in your successes and failures. When you succeed, you are a successful person. When you fail, you are a failure. Your successes and failures determine your mood, your state of mind, your outlook on life.

Do these sound familiar? I'm definitely guilty of all of these to some extent.


No wonder we live this way. The world tells us from childhood on, "You did good. You deserve a trophy. You hit your friend. You'll sit in time-out. You committed a crime. You'll do community service. You made a difference in your community. Here's a plaque." This is the system of the world. You succeed, you're rewarded. You mess up, there are real consequences, and you have to earn back your credibility. This is the system we know, so often we expect God's system to be this way, but it isn't. His grace transcends the systems of this world.

Often our striving for our own righteousness comes out of our deep settled understanding of grace and the law. Those of us who live in constant striving and condemnation slip into slavery to the law and to our sinful nature. When we tally our deeds, we tell Jesus, "Thank you for dying for me, but I'm just gonna keep striving over here, because your sacrifice isn't quite enough for me." (Disclaimer: Don't worry, I will talk about the improper perspective that says, "I can sin all I want because God's grace covers me"). Whether it's intentional or not, sometimes we see God's grace as a filler for the little gaps in our righteousness. Listen. Our righteousness is like filthy rags to God. Filthy rags. The "best thing" we have done in our lives. Filthy rags to him. So, if our righteousness looks like filthy rags to him, why does he have anything to do with us? I guess it doesn't have much to do with our own righteousness. Jesus doesn't just complete us where we lack, he fills us with himself. His righteousness becomes ours in this great exchange. He took upon himself all of our unrighteousness so that we could have his righteousness. So that we could stand before the Father clothed in the righteousness of his Son, not merely our own righteousness patched with his.

So stop striving to fix yourself. Let the Holy Spirit come in and change you from the inside out. If you strive for anything, strive to know him. As you know him, he will transform you into that person you were once striving to be. He's waiting for you to let go of your own righteousness, take hold of his, and live as a fully known, fully loved child of God. 

Blessings to you! More to come. Keep reading.   

desperately wicked // unbelievably loved (1)

For much of my life, I've known the God who loves me and has a plan for my life, who sent his son Jesus to die for my sins. But over the past couple of years, God has been teaching me about his grace, about the seriousness of sinfulness and the power of his love.

Growing up, grace was something I knew how to define, but, for me, grace was a churchy word and not much more. I cognitively understood grace as a component of the Gospel, but not as an element of everyday life. I knew that grace ultimately affected my eternity, but I did not understand that grace also had implications for my day-to-day living.

I was going to write one blog post about what I've been learning about grace, but I soon realized that was impossible. So, welcome to the first post in a series of posts about God's grace.

Recently, I've been learning about the relationship between grace and the law. These two are sometimes seen as enemies, though actually, they can be great friends. Furthermore, I'm learning that one's deep settled beliefs concerning the relationship between grace and the law actually have a great impact on how one lives. Therefore, in my next few posts, I want to present a few of the different lifestyles that result from skewed perspectives of grace and the law. I'll also talk about the relationship between grace and the law. Then, I'll discuss how a proper understanding (and resulting deep settled belief) of grace and the law affects the life of the believer.

Jeremiah says that our hearts are desperately wicked. Paul tells us that our sins sentence us to death. But wait. Jesus tells us that if we believe in him we will have eternal life. We deserve death, but Jesus gives us life. This is grace. Unmerited favor. Eternal life for those who deserve eternal death. This is unbelievable love. No strings attached. He loves us, and he wants us to come to him.

More to come. May God awaken your heart to his incomprehensible grace.

we do not lose heart

This week has been full of grief and pain and questions for the Union University community. (See this article if you don't know what I'm talking about.) However, it has also been a week full of love and grace and support.

God has been showing me what it means to trust and praise him even when I don't understand and can't wrap my mind around the circumstances. He is teaching me what true faith looks like. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." In reality, this sounds crazy. Who wants to depend on something they can't see? However, on the other hand, this kind of faith allows us to rest in truth rather than fight to have all the answers.

I believe that the book of Job teaches us that God allows tragedies to happen to his people in order to bring glory to himself and ultimately good to his people. If you're not familiar with the story, you should read it. Long story short, God allows Satan to bring terrible tragedy in Job's life because Satan claims that Job only fears God because he is blessed with much. Satan essentially takes everything from Job and inflicts unbearably painful sores on his body. Job's friends tell him that he should curse God and die, but Job has unwavering faith in God. Job laments his status, sure, but he refuses to curse God. Seriously, read the story. It's incredible. Anyway, after Job stood the long and horrible test, God made him twice as prosperous as he was before. Out of great trial came great blessing, and God was glorified because his servant remained faithful.   

As Christians, we have the opportunity to stand firm in our faith even when we don't have the answers. Our response can cause the world to look at us and want the hope that we have. In times like this, it's hard to wrap our minds around the sovereignty of God. In the Psalms, David says that God doesn't slumber or sleep; God wasn't snoozing when our student died. He allowed it to happen. If we believe that God is ever present and all knowing, we have to believe this. How can we believe this and also believe that God is love? I can't answer this well enough to even try, and I'm okay with that. I respond to questions like these with truth. John writes, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that God is love. So it's true. David writes that God is good, that his love endures forever. So it's true. Maybe I don't see it clearly right now, but it's true. This is my point. God is glorified when we trust him, even praise him, even when we can't answer every hard question our minds or other people throw at us.

God is also glorified in the way we love each other through all of this. It has been heartbreaking to watch friends grieve and suffer but incredible to watch this campus respond with such love and grace. God promises that he works all things together for the good of those who love him, who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28). That's us! He brings beauty from ashes (Isaiah 61:3). He makes everything beautiful in its time (Ecclesiastes 3:11). And that is what he is doing. He is turning the ugly into the beautiful, the tragedy into the victory, in his time, in his way. 

What has happened is not something we would ever ask for. But it has happened. So now we cope, firmly believing that God is working for his glory and our good, even when we don't know what that will look like in the end.    

"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." 2 Corinthians 4:16-18

For friends who have been directly impacted by the death of Olivia, know that I mourn with you. I have literally cried for you (that's rare...feel special). I pray for you often. If you need someone to run an errand for you, bring you cookies, take you out for coffee, whatever, let me know.