I don't know about you, but sometimes I am so overwhelmed by ME that it is all can do to hope that God loves me or is going to help me recover from my hurts, habits and hang-ups. I try to remember the cross, remember God's love, remember God's faithfulness, but so many times I still end up being overwhelmed with guilt or shame or distraction or anxiety or one of the multitudinous other vices that can grip me.
Well, this morning I read Psalm 106, an amazing Psalm with an encouraging truth about God's love. And more specifically, what God bases his love on, what he hinges it on, what determines for God whether he loves us.
Psalm 106 traces the history of God's working in the historical nation of Israel. It makes particular mention of the many times where Israel was unfaithful to the Lord: their grumbling in the desert; the golden calf they made and worshiped at Horeb; their Baal worship in Canaan. And those examples are only the tip of the iceburg of their unfaithfulness.
Honestly, though, it doesn't sound too foreign to me. How often do I rebel against the circumstances God has placed me in; how often do I complain and accuse him of wrong; how often do I fail to rest in what he provides and instead run about like a headless chicken trying to feed himself!
Sometimes I am afraid and ashamed and discouraged, because after all my unfaithfulness, what reason does God have to continue working in my life? I feel like God could with complete justice throw his hands in the air with me and say, "Enough's enough!!" Well, I think Psalm 106:8 has the answer: "Yet he saved them for his name's sake, that he might make known his mighty power."
That should be one of the most liberating verses you've ever read. God doesn't look at me and you for a reason to save us, to help us recover, to make us new people. If God was waiting for us to get right first, he and we would be waiting for all eternity. God doesn't base his love on anything we do or are; he bases it on what he does and who he is!
It is a freeing thing to realize that our recovery isn't our pact with God--in other words, "You're recovery will succeed if you do this and this and this and this perfectly."--but instead is really God's pact with himself, e.g. "You're recovery will succeed because I am God and I love you and I will make you new so that all men will know that I am God."
God wants you and I to become new people so that we and everyone around us will know that he is God. Only One can save, only One can give life, only One can take away our brokenness and pain and replace it with joy and make us new and fresh and alive.
If you're suffering under the weight of the realization that you are a sinner too far gone to help yourself, then you are in a much better position than the one who believes he or she has it all together. Just take your gaze off yourself to the cross where Jesus died for your sins and rose again on the third day, to this greatest beacon of the love of God from whom flows life and rest and joy and peace. God will save you, and not because of you; because of Him.
Man, that is awesome! Trust Christ daily through your recovery; he is providing the strength, and he will provide the success! I am energized for the day!
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