You will need your bible for this one...go ahead...I'll give you a minute to find it. (You can google passages too fyi.)
Please take some time and read Psalm 103. This is one of my favorite passages in the bible.
Amazing, right?!
I’ve grown up in church. I can’t remember a time when my family didn’t attend church. I’ve been to loud churches, I’ve been to quiet churches, I’ve been to churches that have been everything in between.
In all of these different church experiences I was taught that God is holy, and I am not. God is perfect, I am a sinner. I deserve hell, Jesus suffered and died a brutal and horrible death so that I would not have to spend eternity there.
I was told that it was my sin who put Jesus on the cross. If I were the only human being to have ever lived, Jesus would still have had to die for my sins.
These things are very true.
I carried the burden of this reality with me everywhere. Maybe you do too. Maybe you are one of those who live with the realization of your sinfulness every single day. Maybe you are like me who was so crushed beneath the weight of my own guilt that I wanted to hurt myself for my failures. It is a great burden indeed to know your own heart.
But…there is good news.
God, our father, remembering how He formed us out of dust, remembering our frailty, remembering to be patient with us, remembering to shower us with grace and mercy, remembering to not deal with us as we often deserve, remembering to forget our wrongs…
God, our father, love for us as deep as the heavens are from the earth.
Think about the expanse of the universe just for a moment; not too long, it will melt your brain! The volume of the universe is the comparison for the volume of God’s love toward us… Pause again… Let that saturate your soul for a moment. Fill yourself up with that thought.
Now read vs. 17-19. How does this work with everything we have just read? Isn’t that the point, I don’t keep his covenant! I don’t do His commandments! That’s why I need Him to be gracious and merciful and slow to anger and remember that I am just dust!
This is where Jesus comes in. See, Jesus did not come to simply pay the penalty for our sinful lives, He came to show us how we can begin to live otherwise all together. In Jesus’ sermon on the mount in Matthew 5-7, several times we see Jesus say things like, “you have heard it said, but I say to you…”, and “Truly, truly I say to you…”, and “unless your righteousness is even more than the scribes and Pharisees (religious leaders), you will never enter God’s kingdom.” Jesus called us to follow Him to learn another way altogether. What is this way? The way of transformation. Transformation of our hearts, transformation of our character, transformation of our passions and desires. The way of a stream naturally flowing with good water (John 7:38). The way of a tree naturally bearing good fruit (Matt. 7:16-18).
So how do we walk this way of transformation? John 3:16, that’s how!
“For God so loved the world (there’s that infinite expanse of His love!) that He gave His one and only Son (Jesus coming to provide a better way) that whoever would believe in Him (this word “believe” could literally be translated “to place one’s confidence in, to place one’s trust in”) would not perish (here we are back to Ps. 103:4, “He redeems your life from the pit”, this word perish can be translated “to come to ruin”) but have eternal life (this is not eternal as in very long, but eternal as in John 17:3 (look it up)).
So can I paraphrase? Thank you!
God’s love is so infinitely deep and wide for the entire world that He sent us His Son to put His life and love on display for us to see, so that anyone at all who would choose to live trusting Him with their entire lives would not come to lives of ruin, but would instead live His very kind of life, lives full of relationship with Him!
This is good news!
You no longer need to focus on your unworthiness, but instead you can choose to live God’s very way of life; fueled and empowered by His infinite love to choose to trust Him with your very life. Every area of your life. Even your sin.
Take some time to just bask in the overwhelming reality of His infinite love for you.
Try not to pray, try not to be distracted, try not to read, try not to think about anything else, just sit saturated as if in a pool of His love.
Now, release your life into His very capable hands. He can handle it better than you. Follow Him.
