Rise part 5
There is no part of an abundant life that would expect you to settle for less than God's best for you. And make no mistake: God wants the best for you. That's why He gave the best TO you in the person--in the name, nature, character, Spirit--of Jesus. It's vitally important to understand that on the cross Jesus didn't just give His life FOR you, He gave His life TO you. The Apostle Paul put it like this, "My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20 NLT). We don't try to live Jesus' life. Nobody can live Jesus' life except Jesus. What we do is we present our bodies as a living sacrifice and let Him live His own life in us. Through us. As us. We don't fall in love. We rise to love. We don't try to arise so that the glory of the Lord might rise upon us. We arise and shine BECAUSE the glory of the Lord HAS risen upon us. We don't love in order to be loved. We love because we ARE loved. And that, friends, is literally the difference between life and death. To live is to love and to love is to live. If you know (and believe) that you are loved... you can partake of the divine nature and experience (and enjoy) the gift of God which is eternal life. You won't rob yourself of what you've been freely given because you won't try to earn it by the sweat of your brow. Instead you'll simply receive it and release it. You'll stop trying and start resting. But true rest is something we learn how to do as we spend time with the One who finished the work. As He shows us how He finished it, and what it means that it is finished. See, it's not even really so much about rising, as it is about realizing that we already rose! We are crucified with Christ. When He died, we died. And in the same manner, when He rose... we rose. It's not something that needs to happen. It's something that already happened. And every time we stumble on this journey, we have the assurance that Jesus is the One who keeps us from falling! It's interesting to me that we use the term, "falling from grace" to describe "doing something bad." When really the Bible tells us that the only way to fall from grace is put ourselves back up under the Law of Moses that Jesus brought us out of! The only way to fall from grace is to forsake the love relationship between our heavenly Father and our true identity as His beloved Son in whom He is well pleased... and to embrace the performance based, man-centered, culture conscious religion. We fall when we try. When we try to get love (as if it's something we don't have). When we try to jump through religious hoops. When we try to do in order to be. We rise when we understand that He is risen... in us! When we stop trying to be someone else and just be who we are. When we stop looking for love in all the wrong places, and go straight to the source. Boldly to the throne of grace. Finding love in the God who is love. Finding ourselves in Jesus--God in the flesh, love in a body. We don't have to settle for what the world throws at us. Because we may be in the world, but we are not of the world. We are IN the Kingdom, and we ARE the Kingdom. The King of kings rules and reigns in and through us! And it's His love that has raised us up, and His love that keeps us from falling. It's His love!