Friday, December 9, 2011

December 9 Repentance and Vision Casting

Joel 2:12-13 Therefore also now, saith the Lord, Turn ye even to me with all your heart, and with fasting and weeping and with mourning, and rend yoiur garments and turn unto the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness and repenteth him of the evil.

Proverbs 29:18  Where there is not vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.

These two verses were part of my morning reading, and in some ways they seemed like bookends to me, beautiful bookends. 

God loves us so much that not only did He provide Himself through Jesus Christ as a sacrifice to redeem us from our sin, but He wants us to live a joyful and productive life, and He tells us how. 

He calls us to turn to Him with all of our heart, and then He tells us what that might look like; a real turning to God will involve emotion and action, a passionate expression of the kind of emotion that would demonstrate we mean what we say.  As I meditate on that, I wonder if there are people who struggle with the reality of their salvation because it has become all about the rational, about believing and receiving, not about getting heart-involved.

When we are in a relationship with a human being, a real love relationship - even a like relationship, it matters to us.  We feel things - we cry and sometimes yell, and we are moved to a variety of actions or behaviors because it is that real and important to us.

Somehow, it seems to me, we look down on emotion, at least in our circles, as it relates to God.  It is almost as if an economic transaction has taken place - our belief that Jesus paid the our sin debt, so there. I wonder how different our lives would be, our churches would be, if at least personally, we allowed ourselves to feel - the amazing joy of being redeemed, the overwhelming awe of being in a relationship with God who, though He is gracious and merciful and kind, really does want our attention, as any lover would. 

The difference between God and any lover is that He is pure and good; His motives are pure and good, and as we obey Him, we will be blessed beyond our comprehension.

And as we begin to feel and understand what we have in Him, a vision and passion must be generated, to share all that we have with others.  I remember the day I believed.  I ran home and poured it all out to my parents, shaking my Daddy's arm, begging him to believe, "in case it was true."

How sad it is that we become placid, stagnant, even asleep, in our blessedness, forgetting what we have and Who we have, so sound asleep that we cannot be moved into action with a vision for the lost.

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