after thinking about my post yesterday, i felt really convicted to follow it up with this one.
my brother luke, who i raved about yesterday, deserves hell.
my brother miles, who i often rave about, deserves hell.
i deserve hell.
mark driscoll put it this way…
anything short of hell, is grace.
we have free will,
that is limited by what we know.
we only know evil.
no one is good.
sin entered this world,
& now is very present in every breathing persons life via nature & decision.
we deserve eternal darkness,
separation from God,
death.
but Jesus came.
and lived a flawless life.
and died the death i deserved.
as propitiation,
as a payment for the warranted wrath of God.
i deserve hell & i end up with a reconciled relationship with God, a marriage to Ashley, & a Christ-exalting family?
that, my friends, rattles me to the very core every time i think about it.
that is wildly unreasonable.
that is God and God is love.
i felt like i needed to bring this up so that nobody out there starts idolizing anything or anybody other than Jesus Christ,
and i felt like yesterdays post could have easily been a foundation for an idol if not understood.
by the grace of God and act of the Holy Spirit,
luke has been the source of a lot of my deepest life change in some of the most profound ways.
but that wasn’t luke…remember, he only knows evil…it was God, working through luke.
this post might be as much for me as it is for everybody out there,
and the only reason i say this is because it is true,
it is straight from the Word.
…
after Noah survived the flood, he made some burnt offerings to God & this is what the Lord said:
“never again will i curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood…”
Genesis 8:21
let’s start destroying the idols in our lives and recognizing God’s grace for what it is, all around us, all the time, everything short of hell.
do we (or some) deserve something else? what? and who?
rlowenfield
Un REASON able, and Un CONDITION al, Its the Way God works, because we were ALL born into sin, from our mothers womb, and then must each decide what we are going to do with it. Accept or ignore the blood, its there for each of us, it happened. Hosea was told to marry the prostitute, he did, had three children, she re-lapsed, went back to her old ways, he took her back and cared for her in her old age. Unreasonable, and Unconditional, just like Gods love for us, or David, or Peter. For generations it has been the same story of His grace for us, His faithfulness, not our faith, He is the same yesterday, today, and FOREVER!