Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
Some advice for the perennially frustrated Christian: learn to depend on Who God is, not on who you think you “should be”. This is one of the traps that most easily ensnare us. The essence of a defeated Christian life is seeing our salvation and sanctification as dependent on who we perceive ourselves to be instead of Who we know Jesus Christ to be.
It is doubtful that many of us wake up in the morning thinking “today I’m going to try to build my faith on my self-perception rather than on my Lord”. The curse of too great a focus on who we feel we should be instead of who Christ has already made us is rarely a conscious one. Most of us have at least the head-knowledge that it is only the grace of a loving God that has saved us. The problem is the proverbial “18 inches between our heads and our hearts”. It is our hearts that stubbornly refuse to believe that God accepts us in all our continuing imperfection, even as He works within us to perfect what we absolutely cannot make perfect on our own.
It is imperative to our spiritual wellbeing that we learn to really trust our Redeemer for our redemption. That statement may sound a bit obvious, but it reflects the need to confront the disconnect too many of us experience between what we claim to believe and what we too often really believe. For millions of professed Christians today the “peace that passes understanding” is a profoundly elusive thing. Perhaps this is so because we spend our time looking at our own sin instead of looking to the One who is the bearer of our sin.
No living human being is behaviorally who he or she “should be”. What every human being should be is perfectly obedient to God. That is the standard required to make us acceptable to Him and it is a standard that is patently impossible for any member of our fallen race to attain to through self-effort. As long as we are focused on our condition in the flesh we will exist in anxiety, fear and, finally, despair. We cannot find our way to God in this way, not before we become believers and certainly not after.
The only solution for the aching reality of our “should be’s” is the deeper reality of what real faith in Jesus has made us to be, persons who have been once and for all reconciled to our Creator by the blood atonement of His Christ. Once we enter into saving faith in Jesus God sees us through the prism of His son’s absolute perfection. We are already perfect in our father’s eyes. Because he stands outside of time He sees us as the perfect beings we will be in eternity. As for now God is working out our temporal imperfections in the process of sanctification, a process that we take part in but for which He is the source. As we learn to look only to Him, to our Source, and not to ourselves, we will be set free of the curse of self-centered effort and finally find the peace of heart that we so desperately need.
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