Wednesday's Word of Encouragement - Being is the Key to Overcoming

We can never have victory in our lives, no overcoming power, no triumphant finishes if we deal with sin at sin's level.

Trying to not do the evil we don’t want to do only compounds sin in our life and keeps our focus off the heart of the matter. Sin in all its ugliness is not what needs to be eradicated, it is merely a symptom of a larger sore. Sin is the consequence of a heart that is far from God.

We’ve been so bludgeoned by our sins, of being bad, and of the guilt and shame from the habits, thoughts, addictions, idiosyncrasies of our lives that can’t be obliterated by self effort that shiny lure of the American dream, that it is hard to see the bigger picture. 

The enemy would want us blinded, deceiving us so much so that we think the butcher is God because we believe we’re supposed to “be good” so that we’re not “bad” but we know we’re not able so we hide, cover ourselves with fig leaves like Adam and Eve and live in denial – limp, ragged lives usually behind masks and veils of having it all together.

It is time to come out of hiding.

God never cared about our “goodness” – He created us to be what we are, Holy.  There is an important distinction between goodness and holiness.  When you are made to be something, you don’t have to try to be it, you become it.  Holiness is not a lifestyle defined by sainthood it is a lifestyle marked by sanctification. A saint is a saint not on merit, but on election – not on notches on a belt, but believing in the blood’s sufficiency.

Holiness is nothing more than living in relationship with God. It is both static and fluid, sealed and moving.  It is and it is becoming, like the great I AM who was, and is, and is to come. It is the chief characteristic of who He is.

How do we become Holy, our western minds want a 1, 2, 3 guide to achieving? You don’t have to, rather you turn to Him and ask, you seek, you knock. It will be answered. It will be found. It will be opened.  This is genuine repentance. Not I.  And it is the beauty of relationship built on unconditionals. It is dynamic, unfolding in its constancy, and consistent in its Grace.

See if you walk with God, the stains of sin are washed away as you live in His glorious love and let His radiant light be the way that guides you into learning to do the good because you are Good.

This is what His Love paid for. This is what His blood bought us. Authentic, unadulterated relationship and the Joy that comes from the freedom of not striving and trying but of receiving worth and living in victory.

For further reading: Isaiah 1. Romans 1. Romans 6 & 7.