Every day I find is a battle between failing to realize my corruption before God and my just deserves for such corruption and this other sense of feeling I deserve health, wealth, prosperity, ease, and comfort from God. C.J. Mahaney says that our response to life in the light of our corruption should always be, "I'm doing better than I deserve!" Oh how much do we need a fresh sense of our sinfulness and God's amazing grace, especially when trials and suffering come our way.
A most perplexing theological question is not why bad things happen to good people, but why good things happen to bad people! Considering what our sinfulness must look like in the sight of a most Righteous and Holy God who created us, why are we even still here, alive and breathing? God's amazing mercy is indeed an incredible mystery. Let it sink in and pray right now that God would make it sink that you and I deserve nothing but trouble and persecution and sickness and death and hell. We are, the Bible says, "by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind" (Ephesians 2:3). "All ... are under sin ... and every mouth [is] stopped, and the whole world ... accountable to God" (Romans 3:9, 19). The "wages" of our sin is eternal death (Romans 6:23). We are under the curse of God's law, because "cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them" (Deuteronomy 27:26). Our natural mind is "hostile to God" (Romans 8:7). We are "strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world" (Ephesians 2:12). We are destined to be cast into "outer darkness where there is "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (Matthew 8:12; 25:30). If something doesn't intervene, our lot will be in the lake of fire where "the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest" (Revelation 14:11).
Do we realize the terrible threat facing us in our human condition? Do we even less experience amazement over what God has done on our behalf to meet that threat through the atoning sacrifice of redemption by the blood of Christ? Do we assume that we deserve grace and mercy and health and wealth and ease and comfort from God and therefore presume upon it?
Oh how easy is it for us to lose the sense of amazement , surprise, and stunning awareness we deserve nothing yet we are lavished with unceasing mercy. What a difference it makes when we view our afflictions in this light. Think with Jonathan Edwards on your condition:
"How far less [are] the greatest afflictions that we meet with in this world ... than we have deserved.... The greatest outward troubles and calamities that we meet with ... must needs appear very little things to the misery which we have deserved.... A man may meet with very great losses ... his cattle may die, his corn may be blasted, his barn may be burnt down and all the goods consumed, and he may be brought from a comfortable living to a poor, low, stricken state. This is very hard to bear, but alas, how little reason have such to complain if they do but consider how little this is, compared with that eternal destruction that we have been informed of."
Is it any wonder that Paul said to such people, "Do all things without grumbling" (Philippians 2:14)? Ponder how you would react to things if you lived hour by hour in the heartfelt awareness that you HAVE BEEN SAVED from horrible death and eternal suffering, and that, in spite of deserving no help, you are lavished with mercy every day (even in the hard things) and will be made perfectly and eternally happy in the age to come. Then add one more thing to your thinking. The one who saved you had to die to do it, and he is the one Person in the universe who did not have to die. "For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18)
Oh, Christian, know your condition-the misery without Christ and the mercy from Christ. And let he horror from which you have been saved, and the mercy in which you live, and the price that Christ paid, make you humble and thankful and patient and kind and forgiving, you have never been treated by God worse than you deserve. Finally, rejoice in that no mater what comes your way in this life, that you always being treated by God better than you deserve.
Amazed, humbled, repentant, and overflowing with joy,
Pastor Bill
1 comment:
Sometimes we can take God's goodness and mercy for granted...
But when we are hit with hard times ( pain, suffering and tragedy),
It is easy for us to lose sight that God in Christ is saving us with his profround love and mercy that he has for us.
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