God's Kindness

I got lost in the desert for about 40 years. I went to church; I prayed; sometimes, I read the Word. I rarely thought about sin and I was miserable. I thought I was a Christian. But now I don’t know.

When my life seemed to be the best ever, I was still miserable. I had just graduated from college. I had good, smart kids (and cute, too, as you can see on this site) and a good husband. We were doing well in life. But I was still miserable. In that misery, God reminded me that I had wandered away from him and had let others and things take his place. He taught me to repent and helped me to see the anger towards him, a hatred in my soul towards some in my past, and an idolatrous attachment to people. That was 15 years ago next month.

God is replacing my anger with joy and a passion for him. But along with that he is always leading me back to repentance over and over for the same attitudes, the same ways of looking at the world. I can fake a pretty good Christian. He helps me to repent of that, too. He helps me to confess to my Christian friend the awful sin still in my life: how I put people down and work towards my own gain, especially at work. And my laziness and lack of desire for God.

In his book, “When I Don’t Desire God, How to Fight for Joy,” John Piper says that part of the mystery of joy is that “we are commanded to do what we cannot do. And we must do it or perish. Our inability does not remove our guilt-- it deepens it. We are so bad that we cannot love God. We cannot delight in God above all things. We cannot treasure Christ above money. Our entrenched badness does not make it wrong for God to command us to be good. We ought to delight in God above all things. Therefore it is right for God to command us to delight in God above all things. And if we ever do delight in God, it will be because we have obeyed this command.

That is the mystery: we must obey the command to rejoice in the Lord, and we cannot, because of our willful and culpable corruption. Therefore, obedience, when it happens, is a gift…St Augustine prayed, ‘Give me the grace to do as you command, and command me to do what you will…O holy God… when your commands are obeyed, it is from you that we receive the power to obey them….We must delight in God. And only God can change our hearts so that we delight in God. We are thrown back on God utterly. The Christian life is all of grace.” copyright 2004 Desiring God Foundation

see Rom 11:36, Ps 51:12, 90:14 and Rom 15:13

If you are not passionate about Christ perhaps you have not repented or are not living a repentant life. Repentance is seeing your sin the way that God sees it for all of it’s ugliness and the reason Christ suffered and died. Repentance is committing to changing your heart and mind and actions. Repentance is remembering the One who took my sin on his back and treasuring him in my heart. Repentance is knowing that I can do nothing of any worth on my own.

As John Piper says above, "life is all of grace." It’s God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. Pray for his kindness to lead you to repentance.

The Israelites wandered in the wilderness because they did worshipped other things. They did not repent and their hearts became hard. Today we have so many distractions that make us wander around lost: families, work, TV, sports and keeping up with all the new inventions. It doesn’t take long for God’s calling on our life to be drowned out by all of these other interests. Gradually our hearts harden towards God. We barely notice the difference and it's why we don't stand out in the world. We become too comfortable with our lives. God calls us to stop wandering in this useless way. It's robbing us of our delight and passion for God.

“Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.” Hosea 11:3,4 ESV

God, draw us to you and into repentance for every sin that causes us to turn away from you. Keep us from wandering in the desert and lead us to your streams of living water.