I am going to keep this short and sweet (gasp! I know! Am I capable?) but I had to write a moment about today!
At church this morning, they did have Children’s Church but I felt led to keep my kids in church with us for worship and the baptisms. Our time worshipping together was so precious, so powerful! Gosh, I love to look to Jesus and sing His praise. He is WORTHY!! Sometimes, it is my only escape, my only way out of my worries, my fears, my mood, my SELF. As I was worshipping, I had these thoughts on my heart:
Words like grace, love, forgiveness…they are hard to explain, they aren’t concepts you could easily draw a picture of, but they took form and shape and being in the body of Jesus. In His day to day life. In His body being nailed to the cross for our sins. In who He was, because He was God…in skin and bones. I looked at the cross just steps away from me in the worship area, and saw grace, saw my rescue, saw all I would ever need. How can I not worship, how can I not raise my hands and sing my heart out?
Then I thought about how the body of Christ still today is to be the embodiment of these hard to define words. We, now, carry God…in skin and bones. He’s alive in us. His holiness abides in us…so when we have holy living, wise and kind living, it’s really just a matter of our selves–our skin–getting thinner and His light shining brighter. It’s a matter of Him increasing and us decreasing. It’s not us getting holier, ever. It’s us getting lesser and smaller and Him gaining more and more ground, more and more freedom, more and more invitation to take over and do what He wants to do in and through us. Loving and blessing the world as Jesus did won’t come through us trying to be better and do more, it’ll come through shriveling up and dying more and more each day to the old self, to the self-centered deserving-better wanting-more self…so that His life can take over in us.
Oh how I want this to be made manifest in me. All the time and not just for an hour or when I’m happy and “together” for goodness sake.
As I close I want to say, too, it was an incredibly special day for my family, because Yemi, my youngest (6 years old) decided to follow Jesus and was baptized! It was not planned, and I actually tried to keep her in her seat, but wow, I was reminded later of the verse where Jesus says, “Do not hinder the little children from coming to Me!” I’m very glad I didn’t force her to ignore that voice compelling her to go and be baptized, in her big fluffy new Easter dress and everything. So now both of my daughters have made public professions of their faith and you know, I don’t know all of what she will remember about this day (and the same for Selah who also asked Jesus into her heart at a young age) but I want to teach them something I didn’t realize until I was much older:
As believers, we are DAILY renewing our salvation! We are daily turning our faces back to Him, asking forgiveness, asking for His resurrection power to free us from the enemy’s clutches. This walk with God is not a one day thing…today Yemi just made the phone call. Now He’s on the line, not hanging up, until the day He sees her face to face in Heaven. As camp counselors, we used to joke about kids getting saved every summer or for the 27th time…Sure, they might not have completely gotten that right, but we sure didn’t either. What harm is it going to do to decide to follow Jesus every day, friends? What harm is it going to do to remember the cross, and thank Him and ask Him to come and take over yet again? He died once and for all, but nothing I, in my humanity, ever do is once and for all. Life is so daily. So is our salvation. We admit. We believe. We commit. I’m finding it’s an every day thing. We shouldn’t expect anything less. We shouldn’t expect a few landmarks in our timeline to guide our walk with Jesus…
I need Thee every hour. We need Him every hour. We need to plan on it…and guilt and confusion will melt away in just acknowledging our salvation is an active and living relationship, not a moment we prayed and hoped we got the words right. Jesus isn’t complicated, friends. He just says, “Come.”
