Hello everyone!
Yesterday's post really opened some things up for me and I hope you too were suitably inspired by it.
Let's carry on from immediately where we left off by taking another look at the difference between being sin-conscious and God-conscious...
Born Into a New Family
We agreed yesterday that the more our focus is upon our sin the less of our focus there is available to be focusing upon God and I'm going to start right where I started in my personal journalling time which caused this series to be born; in Colossians 3: -
If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God.
You see what is above is Heaven and where does God reside?
Heaven.
So in fixing our focus, to paraphrase my journal from yesterday, on the things above we are in fact giving our focus something else to behold that is above our very circumstances and situations. These are the things that are causing us to struggle so much. In doing this, we are acknowledging God's supremacy over all things and by doing that our focus starts to anchor itself to something that is greater that ourselves, something that is eternal.
It is at this precise moment that our sin-conscious state is broken as we become dependent on God rather than on ourselves to meet our needs. We see that we have sinned, fallen short of God's glory, yet have an everlasting vat of grace to fall into the moment we acknowledge that God is over all.
That God is above all.
That God is in all.
The more we start to fill our minds with promises like God being good (Psalm 119:68), God being our "ever present help in times of trouble" (Psalm 46:1) and the earth being God's personal possession (Psalm 24:1), the more you are teaching yourself that God is all that your focus needs to be on. He promises to never leave nor forsake, just like is found in the fifth verse of the first chapter of Joshua: -
"There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses so I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee."
What greater Anchor do we need to set our gaze upon than Christ?
Broken Focus to Fixed Focus
"Yes, but what about my medical condition/debt/addiction? You don't know what I'm going through!" <-- Do you see what you're doing here?
You are doing it again; by spending more time focusing on your problem you are spending less time on finding your promise in scripture!
Take me, for instance, last year I left the last church I had been at for seven years and felt I was heading into a bit of a spiritual limbo. The reality is that, thanks to promises like Psalm 46:1, I kept reminding myself that God's Word promises me that He will always be here for me even when others won't be.
Let us sing this song over our lives that God will "be lifted high" no matter what we are facing today because we know that, through it all, God promises to walk every single step of the way with us. Even when we, through our own error, are entering into sin. He won't cause us to sin, but He can certain pull us from it. Even in the very act itself. We only have to look at the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Daniel 3 to see just how powerful God's presence can be in our very troubles.
Final Thought
That's it for now, so if you are struggling to accept the finished work that Christ won for you at Calvary, let me encourage you to turn your eyes from sin and get them upon God instead. Find a Bible verse that you can stand on, like some of the promises that I have mentioned over this two-part series and watch what a difference it will make to your life.
How do you think I feel? I was crushing on someone I didn't know had been in a relationship for the last two years. I knew that I needed a promise to stand upon and an Anchor that was greater than myself or else I would have fallen apart at the seams.
Peace!
===TLP===
No comments:
Post a Comment