A Greater Glory Part Three

One of the things Jesus came to do was to correct mankind’s perspective of God.

How we perceive things effects how we receive and what we will do with what we perceive.

For instance if a girl goes to her mirror and all she sees is an ugly girl she will carry herself as an ugly girl. Her shoulders will slump and she will walk with her head hung low seldom making eye contact.

Her father may tell her she is lovely, but until she sees it differently for herself she will be what she believes herself to be.

Christ gave Himself to change what we see in the mirror of the Spirit. Before we could only see the sin that fogged the mirror and marred our image. We were even afraid to really look at ourselves in the mirror because we knew we would see an enemy of God. We would see indebtedness so great it could never be paid.

Then Christ came! Here it is in a nut shell, we owed a debt we could not pay and Jesus paid a debt that He did not owe.

He paid our debt and took away our sin and shame nailing our offences to the cross. The instant we truly come to Him in faith believing He did what we could not do for ourselves, we begin to see the fog in our mirror lift and the image that was once marred begins to look beautiful.

The artist, called grace, transforms our image and makes us to be what we could not be otherwise.

Apart from the grace that came through Jesus Christ we had no hope, just the nagging fear of God’s wrath upon us. Everything good that happened was our doing and everything bad was God getting at us for our wrongs.

Still today believers who have a string of bad days begin to recount all the things they have done wrong and then begin to lay down and accept the idea that all this bad is God’s judgment against them for how awful they are. They will even drudge up past offences that have long since been forgiven and begin to wallow in condemnation over it.

Not only that, but when we fail to understand grace we hear of something bad happening to someone else and we immediately wonder what they did to have this happen to them.

The apostles would hear of something bad happening and they would ask whose sin was it that caused this to happen?

Luke 13:1 ¶ IT was just at this moment that some people came up to tell him the story of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with that of their own sacrifices. 2 Jesus made this reply to them: "Are you thinking that these Galileans were worse sinners than any other men of Galilee because this happened to them? 3 I assure you that is not so. You will all die just as miserable a death unless your hearts are changed! 4 You remember those eighteen people who were killed at Siloam when the tower collapsed upon them? Are you imagining that they were worse offenders than any of the other people who lived in Jerusalem? 5 I assure you they were not. You will all die as tragically unless your whole outlook is changed!"

If that is not enough to convince us that looking for fault when bad things happen is not seeing life through lenses of grace, consider this.

John 9:1 ¶ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. 2 Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?” 3 “It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him.

I wonder how many situations have been encountered in churches where it was intended that the power of God could be seen but it was missed because there were no eyes of grace to see it for what it truly was, an opportunity to manifest His glory?