Moving Towards Wholeness
Let there be light!
And there was light.
God speaks and it is so.
His voice moves with authority.
He has named us as his children.
And it is so!
He has chosen us.
He has chosen to love us.
It is his pleasure to love us!
We should function,
act,
live,
out of our chosen-ness.
His voice, his love, should establish our self-worth.
If not, we will fall prey to other voices.
Imperfect voices.
Flawed voices.
His love, his grace, frontload acceptance, goodness.
But his love does not stop there.
God is loving us into a new way of living.
He loves us where we are,
but he does not want us to remain there.
Such tragedy!
He stubbornly wants to love us into a better condition.
And so…
He invests in us.
Invests his Spirit.
In us.
Empowering us.
Enabling, drawing out of us, the right response to his love.
We move…
From brokenness to shalom.
From fractional to whole.
From wounded to healed.
We change…
Not to be loved,
but because we are loved.
Not to be good,
but because of his good.
But…
He loves us in truth.
For grace, without truth is a naïve endorsement of who we are in our brokenness.
And truth without grace — is despair.
His grace give us new life.
Declares us a new creation.
A new person.
But we aren’t there yet.
Just as a couple is first declared to be married,
then experiences marriage,
and finally grows to be truly married;
We are first declared a new creation,
but then must experience that new life,
as we grow into that new life.
And God is there in that process,
in those experiences.
His Spirit motivates us.
Not with a laundry list of our failures!
But with reminders of how much he loves us!
Since we are now a new creation, our old creation must die.
But we can’t tame our old self; control it.
We must replace it bit by bit with our new self.
We must daily account our old self as dead,
and realign to our new reality, our new self.
When we put off our old self we must at the same time put on the new.
We must act from our new reality — that we are beloved.
If we try to not behave in the old ways, we will fail.
Instead we must replace those old ways with new actions,
until acting from the basis of our new, second, creation is second-nature.
And in the end, we will be formed on the basis of
our willingness to receive, to believe, God’s story for us.
our determination to pursue that story.
Lord, today, because I’m am loved by you, I will pursue my story in you.
. . .
Psalm based on the sermon:
In Christ: One Nature Under God, Pastor Phil Strong
