Violent Grace

My friend replied, "It seems like the greater the fiascoes we create, the more He wants to use us, because we are the ones who really understand the depravity of man and the righteousness of God, and He gets more glory when he uses the discarded ones, the ones the world said were trash and useless, discarded; it confounds them.”

I wish I could say I never looked back. But I did, and do fairly often, for that matter. I turned into salt, returned to dust, then was told to be the salt of the earth. Oh, how He redeems everything! I often waver between being completely disgusted with myself and broken over my sin, and trying to justify it away by sorry excuses that momentarily satisfy. I read the Word, pray, and attend church services, long for community, then willingly choose my favored sin. Sexual sin affects a person in ways I never could have imagined. And I know I'll be dealing with the repercussions for the rest of my life, even though I'm forgiven and being forgiven constantly. Because of my weakness, I'm so afraid of relationship now, for fear that I'll fall again, yet eagerly whore about for attention and sex. Isn't Satan a master at his trade?

Oswald Chambers wrote: "when once we know that the Almighty Being who reigns and rules over His creation does not do so in calm disdain, but puts His back the the wall of the world, so to speak, and receives all the downcast, the outcast, the sin defiled, the wrong, the wicked and the sinful in to His arms, then we are arrested. An intellectual conception of God may be found in a bad vicious character. the knowledge and vision of God is dependent entirely on a pure heart. character determines the revelation of God to the individual. The pure in heart see God. Jesus Christ changes the worst into the best and gives the moral readjustment that enables a man to love and delight in the true God. Of a great Almighty Incomprehensible Being we know nothing. But of our Lord Jesus Christ we do know and the New Testament reveals that the Almighty God is nothing that Jesus was not."

Chambers goes on to write: "Our understanding of the Atonement depends on our spiritual growth, not on our Bible study or on our praying. As we "grow up into Him in all things" the one thing about which we get more and more understanding is the mystery of Redemption, and we understand why Jesus said 'Blessed are the PURE IN HEART for they shall see God.'"

My friend goes on to explain (and this is where it gets good!), “So remember, and I'm talking to myself here also, those times we fell, we slipped up and made a mess of things, God allows those things to happen to purify our hearts and to cause us to grow. Give thanks in all things (yes, even in weakness), for this is the will of God in Christ, even the mess ups, for in the mess ups, I am refined and in my refinement i am made pure, and in my purity, due to Christ in me, I shall see God. I love how the Kingdom principles are paradoxes and totally opposite of the worlds logic, its when I fall and mess up that i come to know God and my dependence on Him and the weakness and depravity of my own self apart from Him. In essence, we fall in order to be made pure.”

Now, I'm with Paul: Let's not keep on sinning to let Christ's payment cover even more of our continuing debt. Let's try not to break His heart. But there's a depth to His grace that's meant for drowning in. It's meant to overwhelm us. It's meant to kill us. This death catalyzes regeneration. And at the end of this wrestling match, at the end of this long night, we get a new name.