A LIfe We Don't Deserve

A Life We Don’t Deserve

“But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.  I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.” Philippians 3:7-11 NIV

I think Malcolm X said it best. “You’ve been bamboozled! Hoodwinked! Run amuck! We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us!”  Except the rock that landed on me was the Rock of Ages, Jesus Christ.  We have been sold a bill of goods by the prosperity teaching, “God wants you to be wealthy”, “become a Christian and everything will be great”, kind of preachers.  They must have forgotten about this book in the bible, and a host of other books that speak to the contrary.  The prosperity gospel works great if you are not a true follower of Christ, but maybe just a church goer.  It works fine if you ignore the actual call to participate in the sufferings of Christ so that you can participate in His resurrection power.  It works fine if you want to still be under the law.  Because then you get what you deserve.  You get what you work for.  What you put in is what you get out.  That’s a perfect gospel for American churches.  Land of the free.  Home of the brave.  It makes for a wonderful campaign to tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make something of themselves.  But that argument does not hold water in the kingdom of God.  Why?  Because none of that stuff matters.  What you have done is irrelevant if you live a life of grace. 

Now I know that we want things both ways.  We want to be forgiven of our sins, even though we deserved death and when we are forgiven, we want to be able to proceed to only have good things happen in our life because we are “good people” who deserve it.  I get it.  I want that too.  But the problem is, following Christ, that is not what happens.  We can’t always get what we think we “deserve” because what we deserve from God is actually death.  If God flipped that around so that we don’t have to take that eternal punishment, then why do we want things to flip back the other way so that we can always get what we think we deserve when we think it’s good for us.  So to be clear, we don’t want what we deserve when it’s bad, and we do want what we think we deserve when it’s a good thing.  Right. Let me know how that works out for you.

The truth is, when we accept to live our lives under grace instead of the Law, we will always be living a life we don’t deserve. And sometimes that means incredible favor with God and man, while other times it means suffering when we don’t deserve to do so.  And to make it worse, sometimes we have to choose to suffer as an expression of our faith in the God we know.  Just like Jesus.  He didn’t do anything that deserved death, but chose to do it anyway for our sakes.  And if we live a life where we accept this as our salvation, then sometimes we will have to do the same.  God will put us into some “unfair” situations that we don’t deserve to be in but choose to stay in for the sake of God’s glory.  We are partakers of Christ’s suffering, on purpose.  But the promise from God is that if we participate in His suffering, then we will also participate in His resurrection.  That is our hope.  That by choosing to “die” we will live forever.  We will know the power of never being able to be die again.  We will be raised up if we choose to continue to suffer for the sake of the Gospel.  It’s a hard thing.  Don’t be fooled.  It is HARD.  But God gives you what you need to go through it.  You have the grace for it, and to many you will look foolish.  You probably look foolish to yourself.  I look foolish to myself for choosing to suffer for something I didn’t do or don’t deserve to suffer for.  For feeling the pain of someone else’s sin. But love demands that we do this.  It is in seeing the unjust suffering that we get the revelation of God.  Many people followed Jesus when he was doing miracles in the towns and preaching about the kingdom.  But those stories of what he did may have become just stories centuries later of a nice man who had special power.  But the story of a man who suffered while he was innocent in order to ensure that we all would have an opportunity to come to know God intimately has lasted for centuries and the power of it still works today. 

If we are followers of Christ, just know that it won’t always be easy.  The love that you have received from God will have to be given to someone else in order for them to have a chance at also getting into relationship with God, and for you to remain in close relationship. You will always live a life you don’t deserve, good or bad.  But you will also have more power than any human being could ever have.  That is resurrection.  To see life come out of dead situations.  To see life rise again when everyone thought the final nail was driven into the coffin.  When you even thought, that it was all over.  But soon, life will come again.  We have to continue to have faith.  And if we want to be mature Christians, we have to do these things.  We are not children who want what they want, when they want it and throw a tantrum when they don’t get it.  Like Paul said, “All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.” Philippians 3:15 NIV.