Life SUCKS, I blame you GOD! (2 of 17)
The times are harsh. I am stuck in what seems to be the grimmest of days. Even my brightest of moments are just flashes of lighting in this turbulent storm. I don’t even see the sunshine at the end of this pathetic tunnel we call life, and to think it was GOD who granted me this breath. I blame you GOD…
Ever felt this way? Ever thought God was playing favorites and didn’t pick you for a “blessing?” Ever thought he was unfair because things just didn’t turn out the way you expected them to?
Consider this quote:
“It is less injury to Him to deny His being, than to deny the purity of it; the one makes Him no God, the other a deformed, unlovely, and a detestable God… he that saith God is not holy speak much worse than he that saith there is no God at all.” – Stephen Charnock
Man do I ever think twice now at the thought of even questioning God’s decisions in my life.
We often forget that God is HOLY, free from evil and HATES sin! It is against the very nature of GOD to be unfair. Jerry Bridges explains it well, “the holiness of God also includes His perfect conformity to His own divine character. That is, all of His thoughts and actions are consistent with His holy character.”
Mr. Bridges asks us to imagine that God possessed infinite power, a perfect and complete knowledge, ever present but did not have a perfect holiness… I would agree with Jerry that I could no longer describe Him as God.
He goes on to say, “Holiness is the perfection of all His other attributes: His power is holy power; His mercy is holy mercy; His wisdom his holy wisdom. It is His holiness more than any other attribute that makes Him worthy of our praise.”
I couldn’t agree more.
So where is the application? Well, God calls us to walk in His holiness, “Be holy, because I am holy.”
Ironically, I read a tweet from Bert of Rap Fest Inc. this morning where he quotes a line from one of Brother E’s songs… “we aint sinless, we just SIN LESS.” Before my read this morning I was thinking about that. It’s a clever line, and it’s true… but even though we are sinning less, we are none the less still sinning (and yes, yes, we are bound to the flesh and will continue to) but that sin is still something that God HATES! Every time we lie, cheat, steal… we are doing something that God completely HATES!
My challenge is not to walk in perfection, but to not become so accustomed to our sin that we feel at peace with them. That’s scary!
Jerry Bridges says it best:
“We need to cultivate in our own hearts the same hatred of sin God has. Hatred of sin as sin, not just as something disquieting or defeating to ourselves, but as DISPLEASING to God, lies at the root of all true holiness. We must cultivate the attitude of Joseph, who said when he was tempted, ‘How then could I do such a wicked thing and SIN AGAINST GOD?” (Gen. 39:9)
I pray our hearts break every time we offend God. All things happen according to His good and perfect will.
Grace & Peace
This blog entry are some of my thoughts from reading Chapter 2 of “The Pursuit of Holiness” by Jerry Bridges.
