Our Heavenly Father’s love for us is not a message. It is Love itself: personalised and personified in and through the person of Jesus Christ. It is an infinite and inexhaustible love which Father has in His heart for you and which He is unceasingly releasing in you, right now by Holy Spirit. Abba. Quite simply, it is who He is and He cannot be anything else.
For too long now, we have archived the love of our Heavenly Father, the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the person of the Holy Spirit, alongside other teachings and categorized them as subjects we have been instructed in and, therefore, ones we claim to be proficient in or at least understand. And so, we move on to accumulate yet more doctrinal instruction and reach out for that which is already within.
My story? Sorry to disappoint, but there is no gossip nor juicy details to tantilise…no christianese testimony of brokenness, shame and striving….That guy’s dead and buried and I would rather you got to know the me that is alive in Christ! My story is simply unfolding –an ongoing discovery of who my Dad is, of who He says I am and of learning to simply enjoy His Grace, rest in His love and trust in His Goodness: a journey from Law to Grace.
The revelation of the New Covenant as the Gospel of Grace, and of the finished work of the Cross, is an astoundingly arresting and beautiful reality, and yet, like most of us, I have loadsa questions! Loads of them…
Living life, hand in hand, with my beautiful wife, Cate, gloriously entangled with our five amazing children (and a muppet, eh, I mean, dog) provides ample opportunity to not only see and experience His Grace, but to cry out for it…daily! In abundance!
My life is messy and playful. More messy than playful sometimes. Yet, I am learning that I can play in my mess because Jesus Himself does! He’s not even conscious of any mess! To Him, life is life. An abundantly full, Grace filled and joyful one.
I want to live the life He died to give me. A life appropriate to who He is and who He says I am. I desire Him and to know Him. I want Father to be blessed by allowing Him the pleasure of indulging Himself upon me as my prodigious Dad! Jesus said that eternal life is to know the Father, that only the Son knows the Father and only the Father knows the Son. No-one comes to Father except through Him.
The Christian life is a life only Christ can live! That’s why Father placed us in Christ, and why the Triune God has made their home with us; we were created to experience and be included in this amazingly, beautiful and intoxicating romance between Father and Son, in the light and power of the Holy Spirit.
Seated with Him, I am learning to live from Heaven to earth. No longer trying to get somewhere, as I am already there by Grace. No longer trying to earn a righteousness which has been freely given. It’s in Him I live and move and have my being. My life is in Christ and Christ’s Life is in me…whether I am experiencing it daily in all its fullness or not, whether I am aware of it all the time or not.
It is my hope that “my story” resonates with your own and that we can journey together, discovering what it means to be saved by Grace, to be justified by faith, to live life in Christ, and bump into some wonderful mysteries, of who He is and who we are, along the way.
Simple.
So, if you don’t mind getting messy and playful…there’s no better time to start.