Stop Trying, and Start Believing!

“Now the just shall live by faith…” –Hebrews 10:38

Growing up in a mostly white community in the central San Joaquin valley my understanding of ‘diversity’ was limited to a handful of people I knew who represented different cultures.  When my family moved to the Bay Area I was introduced to what real diversity looked like.  The city of San Jose alone represents the most culturally diverse place on earth, with people of nearly every nationality living there.  A diverse place however isn’t necessarily a tolerant place, and the communities were often segregated by race along very distinct lines.  This had the effect of producing one of the most racially conscious places I had ever been in, and it was common to classify people first by their background and then make judgments about them based on local stereotypes.  Something about this grieved me deeply, and I felt the Holy Spirit minister to me, “For the LORD sees not as man sees; for man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” – 1 Samuel 16:7

I knew that God was challenging me to see people the way that He saw them, as souls first and not according to the outward appearance.  However, knowing the standard that God wanted me to live by only seemed to make me more racially conscious than ever.  I would look at a person and think to myself, “OK… I am not going to look at the outward appearance” – but in the very act of thinking that I was thinking about the outward appearance!  The more I tried to free myself from being racially conscious, the more racially conscious I became.  Feeling like a complete failure I cried out to God in my shame and He spoke to my spirit very clearly, “Stop trying, and start believing!”  Up until that point I had been trying to be like Jesus through my own ability, instead of believing that Jesus and His love were inside of me.  The last several months had proved that it was impossible for me to love the way Jesus wanted me to, and now it was time to let Jesus Himself love through me.

The approach was radically different from what was doing before, because before I needed to focus on the problem to overcome it.  Instead of focusing on the problem, now I was focusing on Jesus – and believing that His love would flow through me whenever I would see anyone.  It was the most freeing thing in the world, and it worked!  I couldn’t boast within myself saying that I had disciplined myself to see people the way God does, because that proved to be an utter failure.  It was only when I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t love like Jesus that I was able to allow Jesus to step up and start loving through me.  Suddenly the message of the gospel became very clear to me, and what it really means when it says that the just shall live by faith.

Many of us view Jesus as only being our Savior at the beginning of our walk with Christ.  It is as if we think the purpose of the cross was to give us a clean slate and a fresh chance to get things right the next time around.  Nothing could be further from the truth, as we are just as much sinners after the cross as we were before it.  In fact sometimes we get even worse in our sin after we come to Christ, because we learn more about the standards that God wants us to live by.  But the good news is that we were never meant to live up to those standards, and we can’t.  The Apostle Paul said, “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am fleshly, sold under sin.  For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that I do.” –Romans 7:14-15 Paul realized that it was impossible for him as a fallen human to live by God’s Holy standards.

What the world needs more than anything else is Jesus – and He lives in our hearts by faith.  God never intended for us to focus on all sin in the world, but on Him instead!  If the Holy Spirit reveals an area in your life that needs to change, He already knows that you can’t change it on your own.  Just as the children of Israel were tormented by poisonous snakes and couldn’t save themselves, we have no ability to live a righteous life on our own.  But when Moses lifted up a bronze snake on a pole that represented Jesus, they received healing by looking at the image.  Today we receive healing through faith in the power and love of Jesus inside of us.  Romans 5: 17 tells us, “…they which receive abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness shall reign in life by one, Christ Jesus.”

Perfected By Weakness

“Are you so foolish?  Having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect by the flesh?” –Galatians 3:3

As a 14 year old radically transformed by the power of God, it wasn’t long before I began to think highly of myself.  It’s amazing how easy it is to confuse the gifts of God with ourselves – as if we never received them as gifts to begin with.   The church at Corinth had a similar problem, and Paul wrote to them saying, “For who makes you different from others?  And what do you now have that you didn’t receive?  Now if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you didn’t receive it?” – 1 Corinthians 4:7  It was impossible to deny that the change in me was from  God, but in my pride I began to develop a theology that would allow me a little more credit.  I reasoned that the gifts I now possessed had always been inside of me, but were now activated through my encounter with God.  Now that God had done His part in activating them, it was up to me to perfect them.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, this kind of thinking permeated everything I was doing, and I began to trust more in my own power than in the power of God.  Before my encounter with the Holy Spirit I was never athletically inclined, but I started running using wildly inappropriate Adidas shoes.  Out of compassion my mom bought me a cheap pair of running shoes of a brand called ‘Saucony’ that I had never heard of.  Back in those days the brand name of a shoe was more important than the shoe itself, but I figured since I was only using them for running they would be acceptable for the time being.  My running ability improved dramatically over the next year of high school, and I thought to myself “wow, if I am doing this good with a cheap pair of shoes, how much better will I do with a ‘real’ pair of shoes?”

The next year as a junior after running my first marathon I bought an expensive pair of Nike’s that I thought would turn me into a superstar – but just the opposite happened!  The next years of high school proved to be some of the most painful years of my life both physically, mentally, and spiritually.  My shins and knees were so wracked with pain that I could barely run a few miles without stopping.  Bending my knees I could hear cartilage grinding against the bone and I began to wonder what in the world happened.  For the next nine years my running ability would never be the same until I realized after college that those cheap shoes in the beginning were the best and most perfect pair of shoes I ever had.  Like everything else in my life up until that point, my attempts to perfect what was given to me at the beginning only hindered their effectiveness.

I spent those nine years wondering how I did all those things in the beginning, and why I seemed to have lost the abilities I had.  After all I loved God – spent time in His Word, prayed, faithfully gave to the church, and worked hard; but something was still missing.  I didn’t understand it at the time, but the Lord was speaking to me from 1^st Corinthians 1:29 saying, “…no flesh shall glory in His presence.”  In my mind I had always associated the term ‘flesh’ with all of the works of the flesh listed in Galatians chapter 5: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry…   But I didn’t realize that ‘flesh’ is really all human ability apart from Christ!  The works of the flesh listed in Galatians 5 are the result of our own efforts to live without the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Galatians began their walk in the power of the Spirit, but later attempted to perfect that walk through the law and religious observances.

It’s not easy to learn, but Christ’s strength is perfected in weakness.  Jesus told the Apostle Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” – 2^nd Corinthians 12: 9  When we first give our lives to Christ, we surrender it to Him in weakness – having nothing to offer but our sin and broken lives.  At that moment even though we may feel like we have nothing to offer, we are at our most beautiful to God and shine with His glory.  As we grow older we are often deceived into thinking that we have something more to offer God than our own brokenness, and begin to offer the efforts of our own ability instead.  When we do this we drift from our Savior and His strength, and before we know it have lost the strength that once characterized our early days.  As I discovered through years of discipline, growing in Christ’s strength is all about realizing our own weakness, and learning to rely on His strength instead of our own.