Which reminds
me of the church. The church is designed like a scale that tells us how we are
doing (the speaking-truth-in-love kind of thing). Because we are growing up to
be like Jesus, there is always some kind of improvement going on. The church
fellowship is the positive family measure that keeps our eyes focused on where
we are heading from wherever we are beginning.
However, the truth-in-love
scale of the church has a way of exposing that many children of God fear the
light of church fellowship when they are “doing poorly”, and feel safe with
church fellowship only when they are “doing okay”. This is the residue of both
the law, and the sinful world we have left behind. It is also the result of a
whole host of painful experiences that have proven that we are safer with
people when we are measuring up to whatever standards they expect than when we
are failing to keep up to group-expectations.
One of the
wonderful gifts of God’s grace is to teach God’s children that we are just as
loved when we are doing poorly as when we are doing well. In fact, the Bible
comes right out and declares, in God’s own words, that “God shows his love for us in that while we
were still sinners, Christ died for us.”[1]
A summary of
the Bible’s teaching on the love of God for his children has to include that
this love predates time, that it never fails, that God’s love never changes, it
is everlasting, and it accomplishes all that it has set out to do. The reason
that nothing in all creation “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our
Lord”, is because it is the love of God we
are dealing with. Any other love fails, but God’s love endures forever, and the
recipients of this love remain in this love forever.
Now, while God
displaying his love for us while we were still sinners is central to the gospel
of the Lord Jesus Christ, it is often a sadly lacking ingredient in the daily
experience of some of God’s children. I point this out (kind of like a scale
identifying an area of concern), just to weigh in on the side of encouraging us
who fear exposure of how poorly we are doing that Jesus expressed the love of
God to us on the cross, while we were doing our worst as unregenerate sinners.
If nothing
else, please accept that God has you on a journey where it is his own mission
to bring you to the conscious experience of his eternal love that has already
proven itself while you were a sinner, and now delights to continue proving
itself to you as an adopted, eternally loved child of God.
Along with
this, believe God’s word that, no matter how many bad church experiences any of
us have had, Jesus is still building his church somewhere in our world, and we
can trust him to fill us up with the love we need to bear with other believers
as they are growing up in Christ, even while he also fills those other
believers up with the love they need to bear with us as we also grow “from one degree of glory to another”.[2]
From my heart,
Monte
© 2013 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good
News Publishers.)
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