What do you have that God hasn’t given you? 1 Corinthians 4:7
Me – – – – nothing, not a thing.
Without what God has done – there’s nothing here.
Just shapeless, empty skin, with nothing to hold me up on the inside. Still walking maybe but hollow and lifeless and crumpled up. Like the earth before God spoke – void and formless and covered by darkness.
But look what He’s done – look what He’s given us.
“Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see— how good God is. Blessed are you who run to Him.” Psalm 34:8 The Message
God has given us Christ and with Him everything else – every good and perfect gift (James 1:17) and every last thing that pertains to life and Godliness. (2 Peter 1:3)
“But by the grace of God go I” – how many times do I say it – even lightly sometimes – but in every pore I know it’s true. That it is only by His grace – this enormous unprecedented favour of salvation that I have anything good and worthwhile at all – that this human outline is filled in and has any substance to it at all. If not for that grace I’d be on my own and there’s just not enough of me left to do this life without Him.
“ – – – that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! Romans 8:11. The Message – – – –
And with Him within the middle of us – can’t we be magnificent – so much more than ourselves, living the way He wants us to live – where it’s about Him and not about us, about what Christ can do in us and not about what we can’t do – where we reflect His glory not because we are perfect or are getting it right all the time, not because our faith is dazzling but because each day we say yes to Him and take his hand and follow and because He is alive and bigger in us than anything else.
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
We lament over our weaknesses, the parts of us that still feel broken and that trip us up because somehow we think it counts for something, that it will be held against us, that we should be better – – – but it’s why He came, it’s where He shines, it’s where He shows himself bigger than anything that’s going on in our lives.
Where there is nothing of us – it can be all of Him, when there’s none of our own praises to sing, we can be singing His, when we hold no hope in our own strength or ability – we hope totally in Him.
We give Jesus our nothing – He gives us His everything.
The birth of the child (Jesus) into the darkness of the world made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it. Frederick Buechner
Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.” C.S Lewis – Mere Christianity.
Much love to you all today
Tracey xx