God Is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance & Guilt-free Living (20 page)

Many of our mistakes are made while we are trying to do something right. The apostle Paul said that although he wanted to do right, he found that he kept doing wrong. He had the urge to do right, but no power to carry it out (Romans 7:18). We all experience that, and we must learn to receive mercy when we fail, look to Jesus and trust Him to continue working in us until our transformation is complete. In Romans 12 we learn that we are to be completely transformed by the entire renewal of our mind. We are made new creatures in Christ when we receive Him as our Savior and Lord, and we are daily learning to live according to the new nature we have been given. According to the apostle Paul’s teaching, we must learn to “put on the new nature” (Ephesians 4:24). The simple truth is that God has done something wonderful in us, and we are learning to let Him work it out of us. Philippians 2:12–13
instructs us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, being serious and cautious, and watchful against temptation. We cannot do it in our own strength, but we must let God work in us, and through us.

We may be sincere, but still be sincerely wrong. We may have good intentions, and still create a mess. God sees our heart, our motives and intentions and is willing to clean up our messes while we are growing. We never need to be afraid that God will get angry and give up on us, because He won’t.

Six-year-old Brandon decided one Saturday morning to fix his parents pancakes. He found a big bowl and spoon, pulled a chair to the counter, opened the cupboard and pulled out the heavy flour canister, spilling it on the floor. He scooped some of the flour into the bowl with his hands, mixed in most of a cup of milk and added some sugar, leaving a floury trail on the floor, which by now had a few tracks left by his kitten. Brandon was covered with flour and getting frustrated. He wanted this to be something very good for Mom and Dad, but it was getting very bad. He didn’t know what to do next, whether to put it all into the oven or on the stove (and he didn’t know how the stove worked)! Suddenly he saw his kitten licking from the bowl of mix and reached to push her away, knocking the egg carton to the floor. Frantically, he tried to clean up this monumental mess but slipped on the eggs, getting his pajamas dirty. And just then he saw Dad standing at the door. Big crocodile tears welled up in Brandon’s eyes. All he wanted to do was something good, but he’d made a terrible mess. He was sure a scolding was coming, maybe even a spanking. But his father just
watched him. Then, walking through the mess, he picked up his crying son, hugged him and loved him, getting his own pajamas dirty in the process. That’s how God deals with us. We try to do something good in life, but it turns into a mess. Our marriage gets all sticky or we insult a friend or we can’t stand our job or our health goes sour. Sometimes we just stand there in tears because we can’t think of anything else to do. That’s when God picks us up and loves us and forgives us, even though some of our mess gets all over Him. But, just because we might mess up, we can’t stop trying to “make pancakes,” for God or for others. Sooner or later we’ll get it right, and then they’ll be glad we tried.

God’s mercy sets us free to keep trying even though we often make messes. I recall some of the messes my girls made while trying to learn to bake, or to clean, or wear makeup. I recall our sons doing the same thing with other things. It seemed they were always wanting to borrow Dave’s tools and not putting them back, or borrowing the car and returning it with the gas tank on empty. They were corrected, but loved and given mercy over and over again until they got it right.

Please don’t have a wrong fear of God! Receive His mercy and let Him love you unconditionally. The more you do this, the more deeply you will fall in love with Him, and the next thing you know, you’ll be obeying Him more and more with less effort than ever before. You will get it right if you just won’t give up!

I tease Dave because no matter how good his golf score is after a round, he is never fully satisfied with his game. There is always
something he feels he could have and should have done better. We are like that with life sometimes. Why can’t we do it all right? It sure isn’t because we don’t want to. Before I had a serious relationship with God, I didn’t care all that much how I behaved, but the more I learned to love Him, the more I wanted to do what was right all the time. However, it seemed that I made more mistakes than ever. I am sure I was making them all the time, but then I started noticing them, and not liking them. Even if I improved in one or two areas, there was always another about to be revealed to me that I hadn’t seen before. People express this same frustration to me all the time. How can we passionately want to do good and still do wrong? Here is a Scripture to consider:

Oh my, that seems rather unfair. No matter how hard we try, we are always going to have some flaws. Why? So God can display His amazing mercy in our lives. Experiencing the mercy of God draws us closer to Him. God makes sure that we always need Him. He leaves weaknesses in even the choicest of His saints to remind them that they still have need of Him. I think we must stop counting our mistakes! Don’t keep score any longer. Why are we so obsessed with how much we do right and how much we do wrong? If God isn’t counting, why are we? The score doesn’t matter anyway, because if we do anything right God gets the glory for it, and if we do something wrong, only God can fix it, so whether we do right or wrong, we are “in Christ,” and we belong to Him. Let’s simply love Him as much as we can, do the best we can and trust Him to take care of all things. Be happy in God’s
love and acceptance, enjoy His mercy and forgiveness, grow in His grace and be delighted in His favor.

The apostle Paul was given two-thirds of what we read in the New Testament by direct revelation from God, and yet he had weaknesses that God refused to remove, but instead told him that His grace was sufficient for him (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). Paul said the weakness, or a thorn in his flesh, as he called it, was to keep him from being puffed up with pride over the greatness of the revelations he was being given. Once Paul heard this from God, he didn’t seem to struggle any longer with the weakness. As a matter of fact, he said that he would glory in his weakness that God’s power might rest upon him. He realized it was useless to fight with weakness that God was choosing to work through rather than to remove, and he simply entered God’s rest concerning them. Can we do the same thing? I pray that we can.

Our temptation to become prideful is great as human beings, but nothing keeps us humble more than realizing that we make mistakes just like everyone else. One of the quickest ways to have one of your flaws show its ugly face is to judge someone else for his. We don’t always understand the ways in which God deals with us, but we can be assured that His ways are perfect. When we truly want to be strong and we find ourselves being weak, we can trust God that His grace and mercy are sufficient for us. We might prefer to be strong on our own and not need God’s help, but I have a feeling that if we could see everything God sees, we would realize that needing God’s mercy is much better than not needing it at all.

When I think of the title
God Is Not Mad at You
, I hear the word “grace,” and what a wonderful word to hear. If it were not for the grace of God, He would have to be mad at us, because His holiness demands justice for sin. A sacrifice must be made to atone for sin, but because of His grace, He made the sacrifice Himself by offering His Son’s life for ours. Jesus took the punishment that we deserved for our sins, and offers to care for and bless us instead of giving us what we deserve. My friend, that is grace!

Martin Luther said, “Although out of pure grace God does not impute our sins to us, He nonetheless did not want to do this until complete and ample satisfaction of His law and His righteousness had been made. Since this was impossible for us, God ordained for us, in our place, One who took upon Himself all the punishment we deserve. He fulfilled the law for us. He averted the judgment of God from us, and appeased God’s wrath. Grace, therefore, cost us nothing, but it cost Another much to get it for us. Grace was purchased with an incalculable, infinite treasure, the Son of God Himself.”

Anger and the fear of it reduces us to downtrodden servants, but Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants… instead I have called you friends” (John 15:15). Only grace would allow us to be friends of God.

The Word (Christ) became flesh and dwelt among us. He was full of grace (favor, loving-kindness) and truth (John 1:14). It is by God’s grace that we are saved through our faith; it is a gift of God, not of works, so that no man can boast or take credit to himself (Ephesians 2:8–9). The gift of God’s grace is available to everyone. All we need to do is receive it by faith. Grace forgives our sins, cleanses us from all unrighteousness and places us in right standing with God. Truly amazing!

We could interpret Romans 3:24 to mean, “and God is not mad at you.” We are invited into intimate relationship with God through Jesus Christ. He not only saves us, but He helps us with everything we need to do in life. The same grace that saved us empowers us to live in victory with peace and joy. In many of the apostle Paul’s letters to the churches, he opens with the greeting, “Grace and peace be multiplied to you, from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is impossible to have peace until we understand grace. Without grace we struggle and strive to earn or deserve what is already ours as a gift.

I like to use the example of trying to get into a chair we are
already sitting in. Think of how ridiculous, frustrating and impossible that would be, and yet that is exactly what I did for many years, and perhaps you have also done the same thing. I continually tried to do right things so I could be right with God, but I was always disappointed and frustrated. I finally learned I could not “get” something I merely needed to “receive.” How can we pay for something that is totally free?

“To get” means to obtain by effort, but “to receive” means to
simply
take in what is being offered. Our relationship with God and serving Him was never intended to be complicated. The apostle Paul told the people he ministered to that he was afraid that they would lose sight of the simplicity that was theirs in Christ Jesus, and we face the same danger. The world we live in today is very complicated, and it is not likely to change, so we must change our approach and keep our lives as simple as we possibly can. We should especially keep our relationship with God simple.

We can do that by believing His Word no matter what we think or how we feel. We can receive by faith all that He offers us, even though we know full well that we don’t deserve it. We can be thankful for each favor that He gives us. We can choose to lean on, trust in and rely on Him to meet every need we have instead of worrying and trying to figure things out. And, with His help (grace) we can obey Him and grow in spiritual maturity knowing that His will and ways are always the best for us.

We often say that a person got saved. That is an inaccurate statement, because no one can “get” saved. Salvation is a gift that none of us can attain by our efforts. We don’t “get” it, but we do “receive” it.

Some people feel that they must improve before they can have a relationship with God, but grace meets us where we are in our imperfect state and makes us what God wants us to be. Grace finds us where we are, but it never leaves us where it found us! Grace takes us the way we are! I like to say that when God invites us to His party, it is always a “come as you are” party. If a friend saw you outside your house raking leaves and stopped to say, “Hey, we are having a party at our house right now. Why don’t you come on over?” you might answer, “I am not dressed for a party.” But if your friend said, “We want you there, just come as you are,” that would make you feel pretty special. That is in essence what God is saying to anyone who has not received Jesus as Savior yet. The good news is that you don’t have to get fixed up before you can join God’s party; you can come as you are.