Sunday, December 27, 2009

All is Gift

How shameful and deep my sin before a holy God.
How utterly debase and without remedy my circumstances before Him.
On what grounds could I possibly approach Him?

Only because I know that His Son has already suffered everything that stands between us.
It cannot be, it must not ever be, anything more or less than precisely that.
I may approach the Father because the Son has made a way.

My life I doubly owe to Him; both the breath of life within me and the Spirit within me are willing and unilateral gifts from Him. My life is simply and totally a gift; therefore I cannot see how I can lay any claim to it whatsoever. And so I must be a living sacrifice, yet even that is impossible to me without Him.

Why would a perfect God create such a situation, with creatures who can give Him nothing, and rely on Him for everything, then pay an unimaginably great price to make a way back to Himself when they rejected Him? It could only be because of His love. No other motive can explain it.

So I am given life, and am loved. The only suitable response can be to live life, and to love. And to do both well. May this coming year be a year in which I learn how.

-Joseph

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