Even though I’m still very wheezy, I feel like I just might pull through the crud.  The hubs is home sick now.  Nothing like sharing the love???  🙂

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I have the television on this morning as I answer my e-mail and do my morning “chores”.  A Christian station provides background noise for me, but then it catches my attention.  What did I just hear?  No, not anything bad.  Something good.  Something very, very good.

The hosts and guest (Nancy Kennedy – “When perfect isn’t enough”) discussed the feelings that plague us concerning our sense of not being pleasing to God.  The host states, “I always feel like I’m a fraud, and I’m going to be found out.”  That was a wow moment for me.  I didn’t even realize I felt that way, but it’s so true.  I’m guessing, at times at least, you feel the same way.

Have you ever thought:  “If you really knew me….”, or “If they ever found out that I …”, or something similar?  I have to tell you I think things like this all the time!  Why do we do this?  Why do we do this to God?  Are we mind readers?  We can’t even read human minds, so what makes us think we can read God’s mind?  We tend to project these things onto Him.  The host of the show said, “We read into His mind….”

What do you read into His mind?   Rejection?   Anger?   Dislike?   Disapproval?  _______? 

 

In reality, God never rejects us!  We can reject Him, but He wants us.  He wants us so much He sent His only Son to earth to die for us so we could be in a real relationship with Him.  Jesus paid our sin debt and opened the door for us.  How can we believe He did all that, and still believe He’s up there with a lightening bolt waiting for us to mess up?

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Ms Kennedy showed it this way:  hold up your fist – that’s you; cover the fist with your other hand – that’s Jesus; look down and you see the covering hand, not the fist.   When God looks at you, He sees Jesus.  He sees His righteousness that was imputed (given) to you on the cross.

In one of my lessons I like to teach in Sunday School (a simplistic view):

♦Go over the 10 commandments, looking below the obvious to how we break each of these commandments all the time.

♦Give the students an envelope and a list of the 10 commandments.

♦Ask students to cut the commandments apart and place each one they have broken into the envelope, seal it, and put their name on the front – Angie’s Debt.  (Contemplative and Private – no students looking at others.)

♦Go to each student with an envelope marked “Jesus”.  Say something like, “Jesus paid your debt for you, would you like to accept His payment for your sins?”  {Again a very simplistic example, I said a lot more.} If they say yes, hand them the envelope and take theirs.

♦When all students have been approached, have them all open their envelope together.  Inside is a paper that say’s “Jesus’ Righteousness.”

♦Then take the sin envelopes and nail them to a cross, burn them, whatever works for you.

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This is a profound visual for my students.  They finally understand (at least to a greater degree than before) that when Jesus imputed His righteousness to them, He gave them HIS righteousness and took their sin.  Once and for all!  The sins are gone and in their place is Jesus’ righteousness.  We cannot attain that on our own, and yet so often we keep trying to ‘earn’ it, leading us to feel like failures.

When God says, “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”  He is saying, “This is my beloved son/daughter in whom I am well pleased” to you.  This is not an excuse for continued sin, but it is a freedom from the consequences of sin and that need to win God’s favor.  It’s already won!

He is pleased with you!  He even likes you!  Just like our children, we may not like everything they do, but we love them and even like them – no matter what!

I’m going to leave you here and let that sink in for a while.

Are you free to be ‘human’?  to be imperfect?  Can you accept that you don’t have to keep trying so hard to be ‘likeable’?  To God?  To others?  What are your thoughts?

Are you covered?

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