God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [61]
That’s the truth about our freedom from the law of sin and death. We live life on a higher plane. The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has delivered us entirely from the law of sin and death. We can celebrate that or even abuse it (1 Cor. 6:12; 10:23), but true fulfillment only comes as we allow grace to teach us to say no to sin and to live the upright lives that are our destiny as children of God:
For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age. (Titus 2:11–12)
All Eyes on Jesus!
If I were to challenge you to a one-mile footrace, you might win. But one way to ensure my victory would be to ask you to run backward. It’s a lot more difficult to run if you can only see where you’ve already been, and not where you’re going. Similarly, it’s really hard to run the race called life if we’re consumed with our past or present struggles. Professional runners not only face forward, they look way out in front of them. Often they fixate on another runner out in the distance.
The incredible, irreversible forgiveness we have in Christ enables us to look out ahead. Rather than obsessing about our own performance, we can look out ahead at someone who is not us. We can fix our eyes on our forerunner, Jesus Christ—the author and perfecter of our faith:
This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek. (Heb. 6:19–20 NASB)
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (Heb. 12:2)
God is calling us to a new way. We may feel it’s spiritual to analyze ourselves and our sins. Maybe we think that by dwelling on our sins for a time and doing some sort of guilty penance, God will be pleased and restore us to a former state of “fellowship.” But the gospel is better than all of that. The gospel invites us to dwell on the work of Jesus Christ instead. We are invited to be obsessed with the cross, not our sins.
Are you infatuated with your sins when God remembers them no more? Are you obsessed with your failures instead of God’s success on the cross? Are you so consumed with your struggles that you aren’t looking anywhere else except upon yourself?
The Son of Man has been lifted up. Religion would have us look at our sins. God is saying, “Look at my Son.”
28
The Lord is coming back tomorrow,” he said, “so it’s important that you know where you stand!” When I was twelve years old, our church youth leader invited us to his house for a special meeting. It seemed he’d been doing some reading and calculating, and 1984 was the year of Christ’s return. On top of that, he apparently had narrowed it down to the exact day. At the meeting, he revealed that Jesus was coming back to “get us.”
As you can imagine, there were mixed reactions to that phrasing.
Some kids were excited, while others got real nervous. My reaction? Well, my mom had warned me about the evening: “Drew, if you go to youth group tonight, the leader is going to tell you that Jesus is coming back tomorrow. But I want you to know—it’s not true.”
“Um, okay, Mom,” I said. What else do you say to that one?
So I weathered the storm. I sat there all evening, with trust in my mom’s words, undisturbed by what I was hearing. And through stealthy whispers behind the leader’s back, I was even able to rescue a few kids from their confusion. It was all because my mom knew something—she knew that no one can predict Christ’s return (Matt. 24:36; 1 Thess. 5:2–3).
Double Jeopardy?
What surprised me the most about that evening was how scared everyone was! It seems to me that if our Savior is returning, we should be celebrating,