The new year is underway, and with it, thoughts of another cycle of seasons--some elements of which will be familiar, some challenging, some different. If the speed with which January has come and gone is any indication of what to expect in the coming months, I’d better put on my running shoes and start hoping I can keep up. More of the winter season is behind us than ahead, which is good news—despite the groundhog’s prediction come tomorrow. In day-count, February gets short shrift, the occasional leap year not withstanding. Two family birthdays and two holidays tend to make a short month even shorter, which is fine with me.
God created man to fellowship with Him. To live, enjoying relationship with God, was the purposed beginning, middle, and end of man’s being. Our one response-ability was to participate in the God-man exchange of love. In the beginning was God and God created man with an ability to respond to Him and His creation with expectation--an expectancy--full of life and possibility. Life was as good and glorious as God intended. Then sin entered and everything changed. What was once alive and vibrant—man, along with his ability to respond and his expectation of life—died. Law-- rules of responsibility and expectations-- became the laws of life.
Who delivers us from this rule and reign of death? Deliverance only comes one way: God, in His mercy and grace, through Jesus Christ our Lord, restores us to eternal fellowship with the Trinity. God does not give us a list of responsibilities—tasks to perform—to earn our way back into His good graces. He does not enumerate a set of expectations to control our behavior or elicit our compliance to His commands. What does He require of us? He simply desires us to take Him at His word—that there is nothing we must do, because there is nothing we can do, except believe and receive His love. Everyday He sets before us the choice of life and death; life by faith and dependence on Him, or death by unbelief and independence from Him. We can walk in freedom—God Himself, in Christ, our ability to respond to life, or walk yoked to performance, dependent on our own ability to respond and meet expectations.
Another epiphany from The Shack: “Those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust God to live in them. To the degree we resort to expectations and responsibilities…to that degree, we neither know God nor trust Him.” I think there is more work to be done in me in this area—just a little!
He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. Philippians 1:6
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