R-rated Hearts

THE way I feel about being around unbelievers will tell me a whole lot about my concept of God and how I stand before him. Jesus put it this way: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Matthew 7:1-2 NIV).

In other words, you get what you give out. You want a loving God? Then be loving. You want a merciful God? Then be merciful. Want God to forgive you? Then forgive your fellow man. Want God to condemn you? Then be an accusatory person. Want to put yourself above the rest of the world? Then get ready for a God who is going to strain out every judgmental thought you’ve ever had and measure all the thoughts and intents of your hidden heart by the same standard.

That’s enough to send me to my knees, because I know my heart. You and I as Christians need to realize that however  acceptable our lives my be for the general audience, we still possess an R-rated heart, and we’re as good as dead if we want God to meet us on any other ground than his grace and forgiveness.

The joy of this truth is that once I can believe that forgiveness for myself, then I can believe it for anybody. I have new eyes to see beyond my neighbor’s sin and love him or her with the love of Christ.

When we search the Gospels, we never find a place where Jesus was offended by a sinful person. But there are repeated accounts of his being offended by the self-righteousness of so called holy people who set themselves apart from the rest of humanity in their own eyes. For these people, he didn’t even have the time of day, except to warn them of the judgment to come, a judgment brought about by their refusal to see themselves as needy as the next guy.

AUTHOR: John Fischer. Taken from TRUE BELIEVERS DON’T ASK WHY  by John Fischer.  Copyright 1989 by John Fischer. Bethany House Publishers.  Extracted from Men’s Devotional Bible New International Version Page 1044. Copyright 1993 by Zondervan Publishing House.

Whose Sacrifice Is It?

OUR relationship with God requires sacrifice and forgiveness, but it is not our sacrifice. We could not and would not give up a thing for God. Sin goes far too deep in us. It has twisted us all out of shape, making us hardly recognizable to the one who made us. We push God away, hiding behind excuses of being too busy to find time for him or of not being inspired by our church or if not having an answer to some question about the meaning of suffering or — you name it; the variations are limitless.

Behind these excuses we hide our hostility toward God. We hide it even from ourselves. We are constitutionally incapable of sacrificing ourselves for the real God; our nature will not let us forgive him. We can forgive others, conditionally, because they are weak like us. We cannot so easily forgive God for being perfect, for knowing everything, for being above us, for being our maker. We cannot easily accept absolute, eternal dependence. It is the ultimate insult to our pride.

Consequently, our “sacrifices” for God easily become manifestations of our sin, not our love for him. We use them as a bargaining weapon: “If I do this for you, God, will you do this for me?” We try to use these sacrifices to control his behavior and bring him down to our own level. But this will never lead us to deeper intimacy with God. If we are to know him, we must know him as he is: our perfect, all-knowing God who sacrificed himself for us when we were helpless. He gave up, not just his glory to become a man, but his own life — the just for the unjust, the deserving for the undeserving. His initiative broke the barrier. Ours not only could not, it would not …

God placed on Jesus the sin of the world: our rejection of God … He absorbed our full rejection, sacrificing his life to it. When the anger was absorbed, it lost its power. Then we could begin anew, forgiven by him.

AUTHOR: Tim Stafford from KNOWING THE FACE OF GOD. Taken from Men’s Devotional Bible New International Version Page 115. Copyright 1993 by Zondervan Publishing House.