Imagine God thinking about you…and He is – always. You are in His mind because He is always accompanying you (Mt 28:20). You don’t leave Him behind when you decide to sin. He is there. He is always watching over you in all your ways (Prov 2:8). He knows what you are thinking even if you restrain yourself and don’t say it (Psalm 139:4). He knows the hidden motives of your heart (John2:25).

The fact that God knows me so intimately, that nothing I do, say, think, or dream is hidden from him, is this good news or bad news for me? Once in a while I sense it is good news. When the fears of life invade my mind and circumstances, it is comforting to know He is with me. But to be honest with you, it is easy for me to interpret His continuous mindfulness and perpetual presence as bad news. I can imagine God being pretty disappointed in me…after all I disappoint myself. I think that the first thing that catches God’s eye is my sin.

When I think this way, and turn the good news into bad news, I am so WRONG! So what do I do in my wrongness to set it right? I must go to the good news of the gospel. To the truth. One of my key truth passages is John 17:23 where Jesus is praying to his Father about his disciples:

Then they will be mature…

And give the godless world evidence

That you have sent me and loved them

In the same way you have loved me.

(The Message)

Peter, in his denial of Jesus, was so disappointed in himself that “He went out and cried and cried and cried” (Mt 26:75, The Message). But Jesus says that God his Father, loved Peter just like He loved him. HERE IS GOOD NEWS:  God loves us just as much as He loved Jesus. HERE IS EVEN BETTER NEWS: The apostle John says “God is love” (I John 4:8), it is the very character of God. And you know what? Our behavior does not change the character of God! He loves me in all the ways I feel I disappoint Him. “What a small God we would have if divine character was dependent on our behavior.”* And so my hope and my stability is never in my love for God, but in His love for me.

“When God thinks of you, love swells in his heart and a smile comes to his face.”*

PS: Not only do I need to remind myself of this truth, so do my friends. And I guess your friends need the stability of this truth as well. Let me suggest you not only forward this to your friends, but encourage them to subscribe to this blog and weekly reminder of the good news of the original gospel. Then they can forward it to their friends – and the transforming power of the gospel spreads. That is my desire. And don’t you forget to subscribe – in the weeks ahead I will have some special things just for those who have joined the Laying it Down family.

*  David G. Benner, Surrendered to Love.

 

 

 

Just a short post this week. As I was on a 17 hour non-stop flight from San Francisco to Singapore earlier this week, I didn’t feel like watching a movie, and I wasn’t sleepy, so I decided to read the gospel of John. I have a lot of underlines and highlights – but here is one that stood out.

In John 12:42ff, John tells of many authorities that believed in Jesus, but out of fear that the Pharisees might take away their authority and their positions, they would not confess their belief in Jesus. They became duplicitous. They compromised their integrity. Why? “For they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.”

What is going on here? As leaders climb the ladder of success and with the success attain power and prestige and all the perks that go with it…the temptation to compromise their character increases exponentially. The temptation is to hide your weaknesses because there are subordinates who covet your position and will use your weaknesses against you.  There is the temptation to use your power to hold on to your position – even if it hurts others. We become more focused on what is best for us rather than what is best for those we are leading. When this happens, we might retain our position, but we have lost our influence. People trust leaders with integrity. It is easy for leaders to forget that their leadership is for the benefit of those they are leading.

To preserve our integrity and character, we may need to take the risk of losing or giving up our position, our role, our titles – and all the perks that go with it. We may never get back what we have given up. But we have gained something much more important, the character and influence that God designed for us to have, and the freedom to become who He intends for us to become. Our greatest impact on others will never come from our position of from what we do, it comes from who we are…and from why we are that person.

 

This summer on my blog sabbatical, I read Lewis Smedes’ book Shame and Grace. Understanding that the gospel of grace is the only power that deals with my shame, I was  immediately curious. I would say some things differently than he does, but I love his pastoral approach and understanding of grace. I particularly enjoyed how he compared the heaviness of shame and the lightness of grace, and how shame depresses us and grace lifts our spirits. Smedes writes “If our spiritual experience does not lighten our life, we are not experiencing grace.” With Smedes’ help, let me try to capture some of the ways that we experience grace bringing lightness to our steps. Eugene Peterson in The Message quotes Jesus saying, “Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly” (Mt 11:30).

Grace eliminates the heavy burden of shame.

Shame is heavy. It is like carrying a lead weight in my stomach. It always lies, never telling me the truth of who I am in Christ. It tells me I am filled with not-good-enoughness…and that I never will be no matter how hard I try. As Paul, a student at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO, wrote in his journal, “I could not longer ignore the possibility there was something very wrong inside of me…I cannot tolerate another day of pain…I will never experience light-heartedness…I feel like they swept the floors of the people factory and pasted the leftovers together to make me.”

The gospel of grace is my assurance that the lies shame tells me have no validity, “…and its message of shame has no threat” (Shame and Grace, p. 154). It carries no weight. As God looks at me through the work of Christ, I am never so unacceptable as to be unaccepted. Never.

Grace eradicates the burden of perfectionism.

The gospel eliminates perfection as the criteria for God’s love and acceptance. I can’t look to my obedience and expect it to do for me what only His amazing grace can do. I don’t establish a relationship with God based on my behavior, Jesus establishes a relationship with God for me based on what he has done.

Grace lightens the weight of criticism.

The lie that I so often hear being whispered in my ear is this, my worth is dependent on what people think of me. When I don’t negate that by the truth of the gospel, I carry the heavy weight of pleasing people to find my worth. And it is a weight that never goes away. For people-pleasers, criticism is an unthinkable terror.

The apostle Paul, understanding grace, said this, “I’ve got a job to do and what is asked of me is that I do it as faithfully as I can. What is not required of me to do is to please you. So what you – or anyone else for that matter – thinks about the way I am doing my job does not matter much to me…The only thing that really matters is what the Lord thinks about what I do and how I do it.” (I Cor 4:2-4)

And I know what He thinks – he loves me just as I am, not as I should be.

Keep company with Jesus and live lightly.

 

PS: I constantly need to remind myself of the lightness grace brings to my life. I have a hunch you have friends who need to hear this good news as well. And so again, share this with your friends. Post it on your social media. Let’s not keep the lightness of grace hidden.