Chasm closer

I have been a Christian the majority of my life, yet I will humbly admit that I spent many of those years ignorant of the gospel. 

I saw it as a clique. 

I saw it as a message that was my entry fee into church. 

I saw the gospel as what defined Christianity, but I never gave it the power to define me.  

The biggest barrier to my understanding of the gospel is that I thought I was good enough. I was really impressed with myself and I always thought “Wow, God must be really amazed by me.”  But then I failed and thought “Wow, God must be really disappointed in me.” I was exhausted by how unfulfilled both of those thought processes left me. 

The starting place for understanding the gospel is being wrecked by the glory of God. In the Old Testament, there’s a reason that limitations were placed on being able to enter God’s presence. Not because God wants to be authoritative, but because his holiness is too great for us to be in proximity of (Isaiah 6:1-10).   

His holiness then cast a new perspective on how I saw myself. Even when I did something right,  that did not transform me into perfect. How could I compare with God whose very essence is light and who has no trace of darkness in him? 

I will fall short every single time.   

In fact it is my tendency to choose the things that destroy me and I love to run back to them simply because they feel the most easy and natural. 

Because of my own choices, I stand at a far off distance from God (Ephesians 2:3). 

We need to understand the overwhelming weight of that contrast if we want to understand the power of the gospel. 

If we do, God’s next action goes radically beyond logic.  

God didn’t want it to be impossible to encounter his presence. 

He wanted to make himself available to us.  

Humans do not have enough willpower to get ourselves out of our ugliest situations without help, so the paradox of the gospel is the story of how someone else did what we could not do ourselves. 

Jesus was the son of God. 

He lived on earth experiencing the full range of human emotions and seeing firsthand the depravity of our brokenness, yet he did it while walking in full accordance with his heavenly Father while empowered by the Holy Spirit (John 14:9-14).  

Because of this, he was able to stand against sin and pursue holiness.

Jesus is the only one worthy to enter the presence of God. 

Whether we believe it or not, we deserve the fullness of God’s wrath. 

The crucifixion is the beautifully painful collision of both those facts. It is the place where Jesus bore the full wrath of God on himself so that we don’t have to. 

He paid what we owned by suffering what he didn’t deserve (2 Corinthians 5:21).  

But the power isn’t found in what the grave accomplished because if the story ends there then we lose. 

Because Jesus was raised to life, we have hope to be raised out of our depravity to walk in the newness of life (Romans 6:5). 

But perhaps our biggest obstacle is to have the humility to believe all this could actually be true.  

To reach that end of ourselves that finally agrees to put pride on the shelf. 

When I understand the gospel in its fullness, why would I strive so hard to be something? 

I am given the gift of knowing God and that propels me to love the world around me. 

My failures no longer make me less and my success no longer makes me more. 

The gospel changes me because I don’t have to fight for victory, I fight from the place of victory.