If I'm being honest, I am struggling to find my identity in who Jesus says I am and made me to be. My lack of surrender and lack in submission is deliberately denying the gospel and leaves no room for grace. I often find myself intimidated or too prideful to come before God with a humble heart about my shortcomings. Even to an intimate God that knows all of it already, I tend to avoid and foolishly forget to run to Him with my day-to-day sin or repressed sufferings and beg for a difference in my heart. I fail to acknowledge my unwelcoming responses, my longing to be affirmed by the world, resentment, apathy, and conformity as a complete misrepresentation of our Savior who died a gruesome death to set us free from it all. It's the sin that I grow comfortable in, the sin that I justify, the sin that mirrors the current culture.
"The person who accepts the ways of circumcision [meaning conforming to and following the world] trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law. I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love." Galatians 5:3-7 The Message Version
I don't know about you but this was the Holy Spirit with me loud and clear when I read this. Sometimes I try to live the way I think God expects me to without inviting Him into it. It sounds crazy when it's put simply, and maybe that's because it is! When I try to be a good Christian, a selfless servant, loyal friend, etc. and try to be things and look any kind of way, I miss out on authentic grace and sanctification. Bob Goff captures it perfectly:
"When it matters more what our faith looks like than what it is, it isn't faith anymore, it's theatre."
I'm also drawn to the way Paul captures our intentions. It's not like I meant to try to do it all on my own or keep things hidden away in my heart (even though there's no hiding from God) but it was just the sly product of complacency, comfortability and not feeling like I really need Jesus - we all know how well that one works out.
But I am not called to be comfortable, in control, superior or "good." Though I AM called into freedom. Every day, I am free. I am free from how the world sees me - I am free from having it all together - I am free from being "good" - I am free from disappointment and loneliness. But fully embracing that freedom takes surrendering the sin that holds me down and surrendering my entire heart to God with confident hope that He can and will make something of it. I must realize and believe that there is absolutely nothing at all that I can achieve or be that would make me any more or any less loveable in the eyes of the Lord. When I place my identity in that, it's a game-changer.
"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free." It is not a dismissal of our sin, but a liberation from it. Sometimes we need to be reminded of who we really are:
His
precious
honored
loved
accepted
redeemed
righteous
free