If you are a Christian, then God has performed a miracle of resurrection.
There was a time when you were dead, room temperature, face down in the gutter with yesterday’s sins congealing around you.
We all were. It was a mass grave. We’d followed the lusts of our flesh and our spiteful ambitions, and it hadn’t helped a bit. We were all born with the cursed birthmark that signified our doom, and nothing in man’s power could remove it.
But in defiance of all expectation, the King of Heaven looked on his wayward creation with pity, for His love is an everlasting love, higher than the firmament and deeper than the sea, older than time, fiercer than death.
And compelled by nothing other than his own good pleasure, he stooped down to that gutter, lifted your head out of it, and breathed in your nostrils the breath of life.
And in raising you up out of that gutter, he bound you in covenant to Jesus Christ, the God-man, such that where He is, you may also be. Just as He is seated in glory, so are you with him seated in glory.
This work of resurrection, this raising up and enthroning, is a flaming example of the kindness of God that shines from age to age like the golden dome of a cathedral.
It is the free and uncompelled gift of God that gave you faith to rest in Christ’s work. You were in the gutter, but God showed you mercy.
So the fact that you may come into the presence of God now, unashamed and clothed in your Sunday best, is gift. If you had had your way, you would still be a decaying corpse. Not much room for high-mindedness there.
But thanks be to God that He did what you could not. You are a resurrected saint, a new creation, and you are to get busy. This is more grace: you are an actual member of the team, you are an ingredient in the recipe, a part of the body with a job to do. So whatever you have been given to do, work at it with all your heart, working as to the Lord and not for men.
And when you stray back to the gutter, when you splash in the slime of your old sins, come to your Father for cleansing, again and again. You are His workmanship, He stands ready to forgive.
Joshua Edgren – June 16, 2024
