Do you love yourself?
Enough to accept the love of others?
I think that we try to impress God sometimes. Trying to earn his love, his favor, his blessing. This Christianity thing is so confusing—I wouldn’t have it any other way—and yet simple. What has kept me at times in rapt interest is how our faith is such a dialectic. God is immanent and yet transcendent; our faith does not need works and yet it is dead without it; the Kingdom of God is within us and yet it is coming. How are we ever to understand it?
On Easter Sunday a pastor used a visual demonstration for his message that showed how foolish we are sometimes. He got on the treadmill and continued to speed it up which represented all our actions and busyness trying to please God. If this really worked that would mean that we would be earning our salvation and we’d ultimately be bringing God down to us. Yet, as we could clearly see all his running wasn’t getting him anywhere. In my mind I like to take it a step further and picture us smaller, like hamsters who run and run in the little wheel as if they think they can reach a specific destination. This does not mean that we do nothing, we still must seek God. This is one of those confusing things.
We need to be reminded of these things from time to time. We all know it and hear it in different presentations that speak to us at the right moment. I have just been thinking that we need to really love ourselves in order to accept God’s love for us. I have been thinking about how I go through phases where I feel God’s presence, love, or closeness more than others. Usually it is in the midst of struggle and feeling that he is my ultimate support. Or when serving him, you feel that he is especially near. Yet at the same time, does this make any sense? God loves us just the same. We are clothed in his grace, so that when he looks at us he sees Christ and all the ugliness that we feel is only real to us (Col 3).
Total depravity. The T in TULIP in Calvinism. Sin has devoured and destroyed the human nature and so everything in us is affected by it. Even though we are born of a new nature, the sinful has been buried and death died, it is easy to introspect and get our focus on the wrong things. This I think, causes us to harden our hearts. We feel guilt or embarrassed and do not want God to see us in our wretched state. In a sense, we look at our missteps and say that we haven’t read our Bible, prayed, attended Bible study and that’s why our faith is struggling or we aren’t hearing from God. We do not give God access to our hearts even though he can see them because we want to clean things up before we let him in the door. From Revelation 3:20 I have had this vision of preparing a room for Christ. When he knocks, I am surprised, although he has warned that he is coming and I have been preparing—I am not ready. Naturally, I want the place to be immaculate and so I keep him waiting outside. How long will he wait, how long will he knock?
Anyone that has read anything on here in the past might have noticed the heading “skulking in the dark searching for the light.” The idea behind that is, knowing, believing that the light exists but not being qualified to be in the light. This is the wrong mindset, because we are sons of light.
Let him in.
How long will he wait, how long will he knock?
