You’ve made it.
You’re more than halfway through 2015.
Back at the beginning of the year I wrote a short note with this beatitude:
“Blessed is the man who restarts devotions.”
Where are you today? Maybe this is the year that you started a year long devotional plan on January 1st and you are cruising along right on schedule. Maybe it’s the first time in your life you’ve done this? If so, congratulations! Take some time to celebrate.
But maybe you have a calendar in your desk that you left off writing appointments in back in March. Maybe your Bible reading plan never made it to February, or maybe it has been more like once a month rather than once a day or even once a week. Let me tell you one important thing: Now is NOT the time to beat yourself up and admit defeat.
How can you make the most of the rest of the year?
You don’t want guilt and shame to be your motivators. Instead let grace motivate your life. I wrote about that back in January. Jesus covers us with his righteousness so that we stand faultless before the Father. It’s very motivating to know that the status of our relationship before God is that we are children who have been adopted in love.
Grace isn’t just the motivator though. Grace is also the power to live out our life. Let me explain it this way. If the voice in your head says, “You should…” more than it says anything else then you are regularly tossed between two responses--despair (e.g., I’m so terrible!) or self-righteousness (e.g., I’m at least as good as everyone else!) Bryan Chapell provides this balm:
“Healing of the soul begins with the message that God graciously accepts our work offered to him in the love and thanksgiving that result from apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ. Our acceptance and our ongoing sanctification are never a result of anything but grace.”
The more you realize the depth of Christ’s love for you expressed in his death that took your sin onto himself on the cross, the more you will grow in your ability to do works of love. If you were homeless and didn’t have a dollar to your name and someone asked you to loan them $100 what could you do? On the other hand, if you were homeless and someone took you in, cleaned you up, and then gave you a bank account with $1 million and someone asked you to loan them $100 how easy would it be to write to the check?
In Christ, we have $1 million dollars. How can you make the most of the rest of this year? Pick up your Bible only as often as you need to remind yourself of this truth and find all the places where this is spelled out.
Here are a few to get you started:
How many more can you find?
In Him,
Tag