We Belong to God

It never fails. Whenever I’m having a bad day, things always seem to go from bad to worse. It seems that I struggle with my own mortality and my own frailty at the same time that I struggle with my spirituality. My problem is not my faith in God; my problem seems to fall into my own realization that I am a horrible mess. This realization never comes on my own; it always comes from the constant reminder of what a horrible man that I am.

Paul struggled with this and wrote about it in Romans 7. If you read through the first 7 chapters of Romans, Paul addresses God’s wrath against wickedness, judgment, Jewish law, God’s faithfulness in spite of our lack of righteousness, our death through sin, and how we struggle with sin ending with the phrase, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Whenever I fall and fail I always feel like Paul in Romans 7:21-24.

“So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members.”

Paul is a very divided man and illustrates how divided we are fighting between our sinful nature and our constant drive to become more like Jesus. If this were the end of Paul’s rant, we would be left pessimistic and empty. He would affirm our feelings without giving us any hope for the future.

Sometimes when we read the Bible, we follow a paragraph or a chapter and then we set the Bible down. When the Bible was written it was formed as a narrative that was not divided. Ideas were not broken into chapters. The Bible continues on into itself. It is not simply a narrative about God; it is a narrative from God about us. About our humanity, our relationship to him, our past, our present, and our future. We must read the Bible in context. When we continue reading, we will fall into the message that God has for us. Let’s continue on in the passage. (Romans 7:24-8:2)

“What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.“

When we are feeling down and beat up and attacked because of our past mistakes that haunt our present day reality, we can thrive under the passage of Romans 8:1, “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

There is a phrase that says, “When the devil reminds you of your past, remind him of his future.” While its cute, I think it should be rephrased. “When the devil reminds you of your past, remind him of your future”. You are a child of God and nothing will separate you from Him. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” Romans 8:38-39. Thank you for all that you do. We appreciate your ministry and remember that it is noticed by God, and is life-changing for the kids whose lives you are impacting.


Announcements

Be sure to check your emails for an evite for our Team Time Out and please remember to RSVP. We're hosting a Pie & Cider Night at Surprise Park on November 15, you don't want to miss out!