In my past I saw Jesus more as a standard or law to live up to. I saw Him as being disappointed with and condemning of me. I tried to be more righteous, to be good enough. I knew I could not earn my salvation totally. I knew Jesus had to make up the difference. Yet, I put too much on my self to win Jesus’s help, to clean and reform myself partway, in the hopes that Jesus would see my efforts and come to help. What a stressful and impossible form of Christianity.
God drew me truly to Jesus. A true trust in Jesus, for God to do all from start to finish through mercy, love, and faith given me by Him. Trusting His righteousness and mercy not my own.
I want to look at psalm 85. Continuing the idea of thinking and meditating on God’s goodness, character, mercy, and love. Filling our minds with these beautiful and peaceful thoughts of Him.
You have forgiven the iniquity of your people. You have covered all their sin. Selah. Psalm 85:2
One of the first things we must, and I mean “we must” learn well is: Through Jesus, His mercy, His love, His blood, His work, our sins are forgiven. He covers all our sin. Not just the sin we have seemed to attain victory over. He covers all our sin. This is the mercy of God, to me, this is the most important and most; love to God, and peace to us, producing thought there is. Through His mercy and love, He covers our sin. He covers our remaining sin, that sin we cannot attain complete freedom from. He breaks the chains of sin by covering our sin and crediting us with righteousness, righteousness we are not even close to actually living out day to day.
This is where our faith in God can really become established and settled into Him, and out of ourselves. If we do not come to a settled faith here, finding much greater peace in Him, we will always be in a performance type of Christianity. Our faith and trust in God will only be as strong as our last performance. We will become those who begin to compare our performance with the performance of others. Since most all of us will give ourselves much more slack than we give others, you can see where this will lead us.
God wants us to have an honest, desperate, and stubborn faith in Him. He many times puts us in situations where peace can be found no where else, we must run to Him. He desires us to cling tightly to Jesus, to His word, to His words of promise and peace to us. To be finding peace and comfort in His psalms written for us, in verses like Psalm 85:2, to be finding beautiful, peace producing verses such as those scattered through out the book of Isaiah, to be searching for and finding comfort and peace in His word.
The seed sown in good ground:
That in the good ground, these are such as in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it tightly, and produce fruit with patience. Luke 8:15
Finding Peace in the Aftermath 