It's Not a Wage. You Can't Earn It.

I am constantly amazed at just how intricately God works. Every day he is working in the lives of people all around me and sometimes I am blessed to be a part of their journey. I personally have been blessed time and time again by God’s provision for me through his people. God has shown up when I needed him to again and again to provide what I needed at that given time. Sometimes God has shown his faithfulness to me and his love for my by prompting someone I know to offer some form of provision for my needs and sometimes God prompts those who barely know me at all to step out. Not too long ago, I was thinking about how on earth I was going to come up with the $150 I needed to hold my spot for graduate school. While I was devising plans on how to pick up some extra hours at work, God was already at work in the heart of this woman from my church whom I had only met and spoke to a couple times. Sunday came around and as I was headed over to grab a cup of coffee, I was stopped by the very same woman. “Did you come up with the $150 you needed to hold your place yet?” she asked. I admit I was stunned, I don’t even recall mentioning it to her, let alone the exact amount that I needed. “Not yet”, I replied. She looked at me and said, “Good, God wants me to write you a check.” I stood there dumbfounded and I said, “For real?” She looked at me, smiled and said, “Yes, for real.” God never ceases to amaze me. I was blown away by this simple act of faith. What God showed me through this is that all someone needs to be able to bless others, is to know Him and to be obedient to Him. She didn’t need to know me. I wasn’t really the main goal in the picture. It seems as if I was an effect of one woman’s act of obedience towards the God of love. It was, plain and simple, an act of love. When someone we don’t know or who doesn’t know us has chosen to act in obedience to God’s call to love, we can often find ourselves thinking, “Why are you doing this? You can’t love me. You don’t know me. If you did know me, and the things I’ve done, you wouldn’t love me.” Do you know what causes that line of thinking? Are we confused about the love of God? Or are we confusing the love of God with the love of man? God is love. His love transcends all. His love conquers all. It is greater than anything we can ever face. The power of God’s love is far greater than anything the enemy can hurl our way. How do we get this love? How can we tap into the power of a loving God? Many people think that they must earn love in order for someone to love them. They have to do the right things, say the right things and be the person that they are expected to be. While this might be true for some people in your life, it’s far from true about God. Romans 5:6-8 says, “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.” God’s love for us is greater than what we have done. It far surpasses and covers all of our mistakes, all of our sins, and all of our shame. We don’t need to be perfect in order to receive forgiveness and love from God and we certainly can’t earn it by doing good things, or by being good. Ephesians 2:8-9 says, “God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.” Romans 6:23, says “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.” A wage is something we have earned. God’s love is not a wage, we can’t earn it. It is a free gift. What we’ve earned without Christ is death. That is the wage that we are due, but God showed us his love when he died on the cross in our place. He loves us despite our mistakes, failures, and sins. We can’t do anything to deserve this love. It is freely given. God’s love does not work like man’s. Man is not perfect, therefore, the opinion of man, about you, is not perfect. Man does not see things the way that God does. God through Jesus Christ lived a perfect, sinless life. His love is unconditional. His love is perfect because he sees each one of us through eyes of love. God does not give you a little more love for each “good” thing you do. He also doesn’t take away his love when you mess up or fail. Instead, when we fail, when we fall flat on our faces, God is waiting, hand outstretched, to help us up and his open arms are waiting to hold you close. God loves you exactly the same all the time. His love is solely based on the fact that he created you and as his creation, you are precious to him. His love is not based on anything that you do, but on who he is and who you are – a child of God, beautifully designed; a masterpiece more precious than either gold or silver and treasured above all else. You are loved and accepted, and fully pleasing to God apart from what you do or what you have done. You are loved and accepted and fully pleasing because of whose you are. I don’t know about you, but I am relieved that God gives his love so freely, even when I don’t deserve it. Pay attention to this. Man has told you that you must earn love. That you must earn acceptance and that you are not pleasing unless you have earned that love and acceptance. That is not how God works. I’ll say it again, that is NOT how God works. If you think you have to earn love from God, acceptance from God and until you are loved and accepted enough by what you have done, you are not pleasing to him, you believe a lie of the enemy designed to isolate you, to make you feel unloved, and unworthy of love. When will you believe the truth about what God says about you? When are you going to stop and listen to the voice that is calling your name? God says, “My precious child, I love you. I am with you. Let me help you. Let me hold you. Stop fighting me. Let me love you. I created you in my image, you are mine. You are precious to me, more than anything.” When will you stop listening to the lies and start listening to the truth? What will it take for you to believe the truth? Father God, I thank you that there is nothing I can do to earn your love. Thank you that you love me not because of what I have done, but because of who I am. I am a child of God, dearly and deeply loved, totally accepted and fully pleasing to you. Thank you for that truth! Father, open my eyes to the lies that I have believed about your love and help me to walk as your beloved child each and every day. Lord Jesus, help me to fully accept the love you displayed for me on the cross, when you took my place and paid the wage I have earned, in full. Help me to see your love for me in a tangible way each and every day, so that I may love you more. I thank you and praise you for your truth, for you unconditional love, and for your mercy, in Jesus name, Amen.

You ARE Loved. You ARE Accepted. PERIOD.

So many of us try, day after day, to gain the acceptance and approval of others. We want others to accept us despite our flaws and despite the mistakes we have made. We hope that others can look past all that and see us for who we really are. We say things like, “I wish they would just like me for me and not what I look like, act like, hang around with, etc.” But who are we really? How do you define yourself? What do you allow to define you? Who do you allow to define you and your worth? If we base our worth, whether or not we are acceptable people on the opinions of others, we are basing it all on sinking sand; we are basing our worth on something that is wavering, fleeting, inconsistent and not necessarily true. When I lost my job in early December 2007, I felt like I was a ginormous failure. When I considered how I was treated at that job and the mistakes I made that lead to the loss of the job, I felt worthless. But was I truly a failure? Was I really worthless? I discovered that I depended on my job, the opinions of others, and my status as a well paid x-ray technician, to define how much I was worth. When the rug was ripped out from underneath me, I found myself with nothing left to hold onto, including the rug. I found myself in the deepest pit I have ever been in. That's where Jesus came in. That's where my darkness was illuminated by the light of his love through his people and for the first time in my life, I saw that I was loved, and worth something. I saw the truth. Now, 5 years later, I can say without a doubt that losing my job was a blessing. Not only did it take me out of an extremely toxic work environment where I was being belittled everyday, but I had completely forgotten about Jesus. There he was with me the whole time and I ignored him After all, I didn't need him to provide for me. I had a high paying x-ray technician job. Right? Wrong. The last five years have been full of God's provision. They have been full of His light shining through my darkness, exposing lies I have believed for a very long time. They have been full of healing through loving relationships with people who are genuine Followers of Jesus Christ themselves; people who have sacrificed their time and talents to speak love and truth into my life. For that I am extremely grateful. In order to live life as someone who walks in the truth, I had to discover what the truth was. I had to see myself how God sees me and discover why he sent his Son, Jesus, to die for a sinner like me. So, what is true? The Bible is full of passages that speak of our value and worth and of how we are defined because of Christ. I’m going to list some of the passage references for you, but I encourage you to look them up for yourself because there are more than what I have listed. Here’s a short list to get you started. Deuteronomy 7:6 – YOU are his special treasure. Psalm 139 – He knows everything about YOU, in detail. Isaiah 49:16 – YOUR name is written on the palms of his hands. Jeremiah 31:3 – His love for YOU is everlasting. Zephaniah 3:17 – He rejoices over YOU Romans 5:8 – He loved YOU when you deemed yourself unlovable and when you chose to rebel against Him. Romans 8:38-39 – NOTHING can ever take his love away from you. NOTHING. Hebrews 13:5-6 – He will NEVER leave YOU. He has NOT forgotten about YOU. (I hope you’ll look these up and then keeping going and find some more!) One of my favorite illustrations of God’s acceptance of us is found by taking a look at two passages; one found in Matthew and one found in Ephesians. "After his baptism, as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and settling on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my dearly loved Son, who brings me great joy.” (Matthew 3:16-17) This happened way before Jesus ever performed or did anything. Jesus was totally, completely, and perfectly, accepted and loved without doing anything. The same thing goes for each one of you. God loves YOU and accepts YOU without you doing anything. That list you have of things that you think you need to do to be loved and accepted? You know what list I’m talking about… Rip it up, throw it in the trash, burn it, flush it down the toilet (write it on TP first. I did this before. It worked. Ha!) That list is first of all, not the truth, and second of all, worthless. His love and acceptance of you require nothing on your part. He loves you because he created you. You are his masterpiece. His beautiful creation loved greatly and cherished just because you are. ”God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” (Ephesians 2:8-10) Did you read that correctly? Read it again. Memorize it. Hold it close to your heart. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more than he does at this very moment. There is nothing you can do that would cause him to take his love away from you, NOTHING. He loves you all the time. He is with you all the time. He is good all the time. Just for fun and to reinforce the whole FACT that you are INDEED accepted just as you are, I am going to throw in Colossians 1:19-22. “For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross. This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault.” That’s right. YOU my friend are LOVED and ACCEPTED just as you are. Better believe it! Stop listening to the lies that the world tells you and that others tell you and start listening to the truth of God. Seek HIM, Ask HIM what he thinks of you. Dive into his Word and discover how fond he really is of you. Ready. Set. Go!