Copyright by Shea Oakley<\/p>\n
All rights reserved<\/p>\n
It is so easy to take God and His blessings for granted. More than that, it is easy to care more about a myriad of earthly things than to keep His Son as the deepest focus of our hearts and minds. The capacity, even of the believer, to put Him to one side and care mostly about self is a truly remarkable thing. <\/p>\n
How often do we choose to avoid the required disciplines to know, love, and obey the One who made us and died for us? How much different are we sometimes than the person who openly rejects Christ? Perhaps not as much as we would like to think. The soul, even the redeemed soul, is capable of amazing feats of rationalization. We employ such mental gymnastics to justify putting God on a shelf in our lives. To put Him there is to sin grievously against a Savior who loves us more deeply than any other person in our lives, and who deserves our steadfast love in return.<\/p>\n
With all the contemporary emphasis on self-esteem and the avoidance of reckoning with guilt feelings even Christ-followers sometimes forget that mourning over sin is a godly practice. It is James who forthrightly tells his readers that the right reaction to sin is to \u201cGrieve, mourn and wail\u201d. He then goes on to tell us to \u201cChange your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom\u201d (Js 4:9, NIV.) How many of us can say that we have cried recently over how much we have pushed Jesus to the side in our day to day lives? Have we wept lately over grieving the Spirit of the One who died, who suffered such anguish with our sin the cause, and our redemption the goal? Or do we give Jesus lip service in our morning devotions and then pretty much forget Him during the course of our day? (I know this has been a persistent problem for this writer, and I am sure I am not alone.)<\/p>\n
This is not an occasion for self-condemning shame, however, for mourning as the world does. At least it need not be. It is better that Christians allow the hard truth of their unloving hearts to render them more willing to marvel at the patient, inexorable love of the Savior. The best way to reckon with the sin of neglecting our Lord is to realize its depth inside us without forgetting that it is He, Himself, who is the answer to such sin. If we let our hearts melt with the realization that the love of Christ is greater than even our disregard of Him then we can know the joy of restoration.<\/p>\n
However it must begin with a willingness to gaze at the wounds, to hear the cries, to sense the anguish our Lord endured outside the gates of Jerusalem 2000 years ago. It is largely in this way that we are convicted of our own callousness towards Him in favor of our self-obsessions. It is also largely in this way that we can come to know that the very love that led Jesus to the cross is sufficient to put Him back in His rightful place at the center of our heart\u2019s affections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Copyright by Shea Oakley All rights reserved It is so easy to take God and His blessings for granted. More than that, it is easy to care more about a myriad of earthly things than to keep His Son as the deepest focus of our hearts and minds. The capacity, even of the believer, to… <\/p>\n