This world isn’t perfect and neither am I. There are some things we need, if we're ever gonna get this right.
We need intimacy – Knowledge of the God who has created us. Lord, give us knowledge of who you are.
There is only one God. A God who is ultimately good, compassionate, loving, full of grace, just, merciful, eternal, righteous, glorious, beautiful, worthy, strong, all-powerful, mighty, intentional, steadfast, personable, perfect. These are not my conjectures. I do not wish God to be this certain way, and serve a God who only measures up to the attributes I think He should possess. No – I know my God, because He has made Himself known. He has made promises – of His plan, His grace, His sufficiency, His justice – through covenants in the Old Testament, and in regards to sending His Son as atonement for the sin of the world. He has promised these things about Himself, revealing them to us through Scripture, and He has fulfilled them all. In this I know His trustworthiness, and in this I can place my full trust that He will be this way, steady and unchanging forever, fulfilling promises He makes to us about His sufficiency (Phil 4:19), peace (Prov 1:33), victory (Rom 8:37), strength (Is 40:19-21), rest (Mat 11:28), plan (Jer 29:11), our present salvation (Rom 10:9), and eternal life (Rom 6:23). I know Him through the word and through the Spirit. I’ve seen His work in Scripture and personally felt it first hand. And as I’ve seen Him come through on these promises, I am always learning more about Him, as I would learn more about any other person. My God does not disappoint. We need to know this. We need to know this because we were created to know this.
We need Faith. Lord, give us faith.
Have we forgotten what these words mean? “Faith that can move mountains”. Now I’ve never physically moved an actual mountain. Through God we have knowledge of a world without sin, no longer separate from God. And we eagerly hope for that final day to come – we look to the clean-up work Jesus did, and we hear Him say “Go and do likewise”, but instead we sit on our hands and wait for Him to come back to clean up the mess we haven’t found time to clean up ourselves.
God has given us the Spirit, and a promise that we would do even greater work than Jesus did. We need faith to work by the Spirit. Faith that there is something greater than the world we live in now. Faith to eradicate disease. To heal sickness. To empower underprivileged youth. To father the orphans, and look after the widows. To do away with poverty. To know a God that wants to be known. To serve. To love. To step up out of childhood and engage, as men and women, in God-glorifying marriage. Faith that no one be sold into prostitution or slavery, that no one lose their home, that no one go without food, that no one go without clean water. By grace we have been saved through faith to do good works. And it is only through faith that we will see them done.
We need Humility. Lord, give us humility.
We need to grow in knowledge of our God, in subservience to His glory. We need to know that we are not God, and that He might not do things our way. We need to remember Him when we are serving, remember Him when we are working, remember Him when we are speaking. Only in surrender of ourselves can we enter into knowledge of His love for us, and truly align our hearts with His. And when we are in that right place, when God’s glory is the only thing we are living for with everything we have – His glory will shine through us all the more.
There is no Christian that has ever ‘figured it out’. There is no magic formula for pursuing God, no perfect, check-it-off lifestyle that satisfies the glory of our Lord, save the life lived by Jesus Christ. While the hallmark of God is constancy, the mark of a Christian is growth and sanctification. Let’s never get comfortable, never feel like we’ve arrived, like we’ve ‘made it’. We need to expect to be pushed, we need to desire to be molded, by God and by others. We need to take a step back, and learn what it means to keep on learning.
We need Boldness. Lord, give us boldness.
Our enemy is routine, brought on by timidity. Somehow we’ve taken the radical Gospel of Jesus Christ, the same Gospel that grew a movement that people were dying to maintain, and turned it into comfort. We’ve watered down the message until we have to practically beg people to fill the pews. We’ve turned Christianity into the conservative political agenda, and labeled any faith outside of church walls, and even some faith inside of them, as extremism. We’ve somehow bought the lie that the best way to follow Christ is to look and act like everyone else. And somehow we’ve lost sight of the fact that Jesus calls us to way more than that.
He calls us to stand up for love and grace and truth until it hurts, to risk life and limb for the discomfort of the Gospel. We need to, as a united Christian community, take bold strides for a God who deserves our everything, because He paid for everything. We need to be radically unashamed of the Gospel, and drastic in our efforts to glorify God, that we might not miss the mark. As boys and girls alike we need to step up and fulfill the roles God calls us to as men and women of the faith, that we can stand unashamed before our God at the final day, to hear those 7 most beautiful words: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” In this boldness only can we be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
We need Grace. Lord, give us grace.
There is one thing that differentiates Christianity from all other world religions: grace. You can’t earn your way into heaven. You can’t work your way there, you can’t buy it. You can’t be righteous enough, you can’t study the bible enough, you can’t memorize scripture enough. You can’t sing worship songs loud enough, you can’t work in a church long enough, you can’t pastor your way to eternity or pray your way there either. The only way we can be reunited with the God of the universe, for which we were created, is if someone else was to pay the price for us. Thank you Jesus.
We need more grace. We all do. We need to be radically aware of the fact that none of us, even as Christians, deserves heaven any more than anyone else. We need to share this grace. Grace for hope, grace for purpose, grace for light. Grace to the junkies and the adulterers and the idolaters and the homosexuals. Grace to the embezzlers and the corrupt, to the hopeless and the condemned, to the self-righteous and the embittered. Grace to the teachers and the farmers and the Arabs and the nomads and the business men and the teenagers and the presidents and the French. We need to wash this world with grace, to remind us all that there’s something more. Because the prize of grace doesn’t just come at the final day, when our ticket is punched – it kicks in now, ushering us into all the joy of adoption and fullness of purpose that comes with knowing we were freely saved to find our ultimate satisfaction in the wonderful pursuit of the glorification of a most beautiful God.
That’s what we need.
Love,
Danny
