Promise or Justice?

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Many people because they believe that God wants them to be good will seek the help of the Lord in being good so that God will in turn accept them and love them. God does not want this. God does not want us to seek good. That does not work. God wants us to seek God. Remember it is relationship, relationship, relationship. Even with God’s ‘help’ we cannot be good enough to please God. When we seek God Himself, we automatically get better without hardly noticing it. That is the easy way. 

Christian believers get only what Jesus deserves, which is the very best of favor and goodness from God. When we fail and sin, we get what Jesus deserves not what we deserve which is condemnation and punishment. We have to root this out at the deepest levels, or rather the Holy Spirit has to root this out for us, but we need to realize His task and try to cooperate as much as possible. Our repeated failures are what defeat us more than the occasional ones. We feel that we deserve to be punished by God. Sometimes we actually feel like we want to be punished then we can feel that we have earned the return of God’s favor. But we cannot play this game with two sets of rules. It is one or the other. If we try to change the rules away from outrageous grace, then the failure loop is in place again in our lives. 

Be convinced that you ALWAYS get what Jesus deserves. He got what you deserve. He nailed it to the cross and allowed it to kill Him and then rose from the dead having conquered sin and destroyed the works of the devil. Even if you do good consistently, you will not get what you deserve but only what he deserves. In other words, you can take no pride in personal growth since it is His work in you but you do not have to take the blame either. The object of the game is change. You will change, you are changing by the power of grace. The thing is  once you do change you do not see it clearly because if you are really walking convinced of outrageous grace, you are not seeing yourself but Him.