Daily Thought: "I Get Off Here"

The enemy of our soul will always tempt us, threaten us, and try to strike up fear in us by way of end-time lies. Her will tell us...

• "You may as well give it up now--God will not take you back after your blatant sin."
• "The prodigal son was just an exception--he came back to God quicker than you, so God accepted that wanderer back."
• "You've sinned greater than all others" (which is true), "so you're the one 'black sheep' He'll condemn on the last day. You're out of reach of His forgiveness" (which is not true)!
• "God's forgiveness can only go so far and then He is unforgivingly angry with you. Don't you think you've reached His 70 times seventh forgiveness by now? You have already repeated this sin so many times!"
• This Christian life was once an enjoyable ride, but the restrictions and suffering you've experienced to follow this 'God'--is it really worth it? You may as well get off the train here and come enjoy pleasure. Give it up!

Christian runner, do not shrink God to a limited reverser of His Word as Satan would have you do. Satan's words are filled with lies and techniques that would use truths as arguement for fallacy (see the third bullet above).

For you, even you, to be out of reach of His forgiveness would be to say...

• The Gospel isn't sufficient for forgiveness of all sin.
• Christ died for no reason.
• God is a liar.
• The last words of Christ on the cross before He died, "It is finished!," were false and nothing but a dramatic ending to a pointless life.

None of which are true.

Have full faith in His faithfulness to forgive! Let His mercy drive you to repentance. Our God is the Awesome God and forgiver of the worst! Amen!

The Core Sin of Selfishness

"[I]f we are faithless, He remains faithful--for He cannot deny Himself."

~2 Timothy 2:13 (ESV)

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The sum of all unhappiness of man is our determined discontent with both what God has said "yes" to and what God has clearly said "no" to. What God has given, we are prone to want more. What God has not granted, we claim we should possess. But how patient is our God with us. Even though we must learn the lesson of contentment many times, He is yet willing to bless us with another way to learn it. It takes many arrows for the lesson of contentment to sink in to our initially hard hearts, yet He will pierce us if humility will allow Him to.

God never promised a life of ease or a lesson without a piercing. But this kind piercing of God is never so painful as the piercing Christ received for our sin. And this, my friend, gives us every reason to be content. We have indeed received far more than we could ever have imagined. We have indeed been treated far better than we deserve even in the things that we have been denied--the things that if we had received them might well have pulled us, our affections, our time, and our devotion from Him. Isn't this painful mystery wonderful?

How many days I have grieved God with my discontent, yet how Fatherly He is. Never have I approached Him and felt His shunning except when I listened to the false accusation of my enemy, the Devil. Rather, I have come to see that He has always, without fail, been stooped as a Father with open arms to receive the son who has so grieved Him. Forgiveness is His theme, and sanctification His tool to see his beloved children turn from the sin He despises and to His glorious, indescribable Self. He separates love and hate. In other words, because He loves us, He turns us from what He hates.

We would label the affection we have toward things on earth that God has not granted us as love. In reality, it will help to label it for what it is: Idolatry, lust, discontent. We might also label our Father's denial of those things as restriction, punishment, or lack of love. In reality, God's gift of unanswered prayer and denial of things that would do our souls no good is one of the greatest graces we could ever receive.

The Father's blessings knock
And gladly we welcome them in
The Giver Himself knocks
Yet we relate to Him in sin

The enemy knocks with doubt
And faithlessly we agree
The enemy himself knocks
And God's goodness we do not see

But this truth remains
It does not change
In this we find all faith
When we are faithless
He remains faithful
And his patience and goodness here on earth
Are merely a taste

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Challenge and Application Questions

• Through what trials has God been teaching you contentment?