Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? Will God? No! He is the one who has given us right standing with himself. Who then will condemn us? Will Christ Jesus? No, for he is the one who died for us and was raised to life for us and is sitting at the place of highest honor next to God, pleading for us. --Romans 8:33-34
Enough could never be written about the work Christ did for His children on the cross. He suffered a painful death in order to make us right with God. He who had no sin took the condemnation of our sin upon Himself so that we would no longer have to bear it. Thanks to Christ, we are now what we never could have been without Him--right with God. And after the magnitude of the act of dying a sinner's death for a sinful world, Christ continues to sit on His throne and plead (intercede) on our behalf as we continue to lead lives that are less than righteous before God.
For too many of us who have been Christians for a long time, this message has been repeated so much that we are almost desensitized to it. Many of us no longer feel in our spirits what He did for us because we accepted Him awhile ago, and we have gone on living lives that, while changed, no longer reflect the power that God gave us when He sent His Son to overcome the darkness within each of us. For us, it takes a powerful movie like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ to move us emotionally towards recognition of the depth of what Christ did for us. And that emotional high may only last a couple days before we revert back to our state of non-excitement.
God does not want us to always seek the emotional high, but neither does He want for us to lighten the weight of Christ's sacrifice to a point where we are not down-on-our-knees-grateful on a daily basis. Even on the days we don't feel the emotional freedom that Christ has given us, we are wrong to take His sacrifice for granted. He has bridged the gap between us and God, something that could not have otherwise happened. If we are not constantly overwhelmed with gratitude, then a good place to start would be to read Romans 8:31-39 outloud every morning until God has firmly written the words on our hearts and the sacrifice He made for us is ever-implanted into our consciousness. We need to fully grasp not only the nature of the sacrifice itself, but also all that the sacrifice did for us. One act with more power than we could ever muster without God's help.
Posted by Kim at March 27, 2006 01:53 PM