Sometimes God repeats Himself.
We shouldn’t need the God of the universe to repeat Himself, but when He does He’s displaying divine forbearance and making a point, and we should definitely pay attention.
Over the last week, our sweet Savior has repeated Himself loud and clear a few times. Allow me to share a couple of the moments with you and you can figure out what God’s trying to teach me.
My friend BCJ tells me: “God doesn’t need your help. Not even in your own life.”
My pastor’s awesome wife tells me: “God doesn’t call us to fix but to surrender.”
My best friend tells me: “It’s part of being human. You can’t be perfect.”
BUT I WANT TO BE PERFECT. *whines*
Well, here’s the thing, as a million people have reminded me this week: I’m not. “There is no end to your crap or mine this side of heaven,” BCJ told me. Ew.
Praise for g r a c e.
“The beauty of grace is that it makes life not fair.”
Praise for an unfair life.
Praise for God’s grace.
Praise for friends and family who give grace even when you don’t want it.
Praise for grace that shows you how much you don’t want grace.
Grace has also been on repeat this week. In the last few days, each of the following came up:
James tells me: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, ‘He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us’? But He gives more grace. Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you.” -James 4:1-10
Molly Lockwood tells me: “God’s economy operates on the currency of unlimited grace.”
A.W. Tozer tells me: “We can never know the enormity of our sin, neither is it necessary that we should. What we can know is that ‘where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.'”
My pastor tells me (and a ton of other people in yesterday’s sermon, which I highly recommend): “Pride doesn’t like grace,” and “God loves us as we are not as we should be.”
Sophie Miller 