“When we make our central message anything other than the gospel of grace, we end up being known as a people of hate—judgmental, hypocritical, and defined by what we are against.”

A thought by Darren Whitehead and Jon Tyson (2011-07-19) from their book, Rumors of God: Experience the Kind of Faith You´ve Only Heard About (Kindle Locations 1160-1161). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Somewhere along the line we got off track. They say it takes only two generations to get away from the core values of any organization and that for sure has been true of us.

So why in the world would we take the greatest announcement that was ever given and make it the complete opposite? I mean Jesus came into the world to save it not to condemn it. That is what He said and that is what He did.

Now we live today in a world where we believe that people should get what they deserve. This is one of the main reasons for a lot of people’s anger. Somewhere in their life they didn’t get what they deserved in a positive way and it makes them angry. Or someone did something wrong and they don’t get punished as they deserved to be punished and that makes them angry.

But here is the problem. Jesus didn’t come into this world to give us what we deserve but to give us what we don’t deserve, grace and that doesn’t seem right to us. We must earn whatever we get but we find that grace is giving us unmerited favor. We don’t deserve it. It is a gift from God through His Son, Jesus.

Also we want to have a hand in all of this so we came up with a bunch of religions. You see religion is man’s poor attempt to get to God and we put all of these doing things or not doing things to earn the right or deserve to be favored by God. Man perverts what God wanted. He came to us through His Son so that we could be saved from our self, saved from getting what we deserved. That is the gospel of grace.

So I do believe it is right that too many times we are known as people of hate—judgmental, hypocritical, and defined by what we are against. Somehow, we’ve got to get back to who Jesus was and what His message was.

Now there will be a day when God will give us if we haven't accepted His grace what we deserve, He will judge us all but this is not that day. This is the day of salvation that comes through our asking Him to forgive us of our sin and to accept us into His family even though we don’t deserve it. That is the message that Jesus came to give and it is our message too.

What about you?

Comments

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