To be at rest in thankfulness, and nothing else. Thankfulness for my salvation, resting in my utter inability to pay, my utter poverty, and His utter grace and utter love.
Does it sound simple?
It seems that I am wired to worry, analyze and reconsider. I don’t think that’s what I’m doing, but it is. This constant haze, mist, of ‘what, then, am I to do?’ hangs, drips, inside my head. To see the mist dispersed and sit instead inside the pool of ‘It is finished. He has done it.’ … takes surrender. Means surrender. Takes stopping my planning – for ministry, for relationships, for cooking, for writing, for a moment – even a moment – and, instead, accepting as ALL-sufficient the gift of righteousness
in Christ. I long, oh, Lord, to live in thankfulness instead of in Attempting. Perhaps not attempting to earn pardon or favor, but a constant consciousness of attempting to see you right, to hear you well, to act optimally, and questioning if I have succeeded. If I am, even now, succeeding. How is it…we can know that salvation is free, and then be eaten up by acidic worry that we are not accepting it and living it correctly? Or enough.
There are so many books that, meaning well perhaps, tell us what to do, how to do it better, within our faith. So few about the object of our faith. ! The object, Christ, who is our hope.
So few reveling in the Gospel itself. Each author, speaker, Christian, staring at one tree trunk, intently, nose-to-bark, not seeing the green greatness of the forest in which they dwell secure. We ‘move on’ from the ‘basics’ of what’s been done for us to ‘more advanced’ spiritual food: What WE can do. We sing about how much we love Him but forget to sing what He has done for us, and who He is, then wonder if more guitars would help us feel more.
We are children blindly ignoring the lavish gifts of shelter, food, love and family, sure that our game in the front yard is far more important than the dinner waiting for us inside; we play and play out there, play hard until we’re starving, dead, exhausted. We refuse to go in, and lie in the mud outdoors. Home is ‘basic.’ We’ve seen it once before.
Maybe it is my own toxic, inborn pair of perfectionist’s glasses that causes me to see in so many stories of ‘great saints’ this admonishing finger, waving, pointing, saying ‘and are you? And are you?’ … Words that put faith on a scale of weak-to-strong and walks with Christ on a gradient of ‘right-to-wrong.’
I have been freed by the knowledge that I was chosen in Christ before the foundations of the earth,
so far, far, far apart from anything I did or could ever do, or not do, think or not think. All that so pale next to the great and glittering GLORY of His choosing … choosing even me.
I have been freed by the completeness of His work in Jesus Christ. The beauty of a Gospel no man, no power, can change or take away.
I’ve been so privileged to hear that Gospel preached again and again, to see it loved and dwelt within. Pressed into me by hearing and example.
Lord, help me to stop, to stop and push away the garment of worry and analysis in favor of the garment of righteousness. When that garment, YOURS, is really on me, it’s all-consuming. It leaves no space for thinking
about myself.
Lord, guide me gently, or push me flat-out, into Thankful-ness so I’m immersed in it completely, grinning, drenched, welling up with fullness, secure. Every day. Please. Please.
I can’t do this, get there. With You, nothing is impossible.
“Find rest, O my soul, in God alone;
my hope comes from him.
He alone is my rock and my salvation;
he is my fortress, I will not be shaken.
My salvation and my honor depend on God;
he is my mighty rock, my refuge.”
Psalm 62:5-7
