Monday, December 21, 2009

A bit of encouragement for you

When the aggravations of day-to-day life get added to the larger problems we face it is very easy to start feeling insignificant, or as Chip Ingram put it "a nobody going nowhere". Speaking of Chip Ingram, I am re-reading his book Finding God When You Need Him Most, and came on a passage that I wanted to share.

You Are Desirable To God!

Are you ready for this? You are desirable to God. He's pursuing you, but not to point out all that's wrong with you. He's pursuing you because he desires an intimate relationship with you. God is pursuing you every moment of every day. This idea is staggering.
The Bible is filled with references that show that God values us so much more than we think he does, especially when we're feeling like a nobody. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus explains his reason for coming to the earth: "to seek and to save what was lost" (Luke 19:10). Elsewhere God calls his people "the apple of his eye"; believers are called the object of his affection. In the New Testament, God calls those who are his beloved, chosen, holy, dearly loved. We are told that nothing and no one can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ. Nothing.
When you feel like a nobody you need to remind yourself that God understands how you feel because he knows you completely. You need to remember that you are wanted in a very special way.


This touches on something I think gets lost sometimes when people talk about God. Yes, you need to go to Him in a spirit of humility and repentance; that is, you have to own up to him that like everyone else you've screwed up in relation to His law, and you have to be willing to accept what He has to say about that sin. The point of that isn't to drive us into the ground and condemn us, however. God's not pursuing us to merely wag the finger at us and say "Shame, shame! I know your name!", but because he wants to fix our broken relationship with Him. We have to come clean about our sin because that sin grieves Him and drives us away from Him. Our mental image of Him shouldn't be that of some Cosmic Cop who's waiting to bonk us on the head with his billy club when we do something wrong, but our Heavenly Father (and a loving, intimately-involved Father at that; the original word used in the Lord's Prayer for "father" is "abba", the Aramaic equivalent of "daddy"). Like a father, He will punish us if we willfully disobey him, but he's always ready to make things right and restore our relationship with Him. As Chip put it, "He's pursuing you because he desires an intimate relationship with you."

Anyway, I hope that's an encouragement to you, should you have chanced to read it. :o)

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