IT IS FINISHED - Easter Sunday

For the Cross- Bethel Music, Tides

Riches to Rags: The Story of Joseph

I'm reading through the Old Testament at the moment and keep being astounded by seeing how God moves throughout it. The way He acted on Sarah's behalf when Abraham's lies landed her in another man's bed. The way He appeared to Jacob who was running away from home to escape the punishment he deserved. The mercy He exercised on Judah when He slept with His daughter-in-law.

Right now I'm reading about Joseph, in Genesis 39. Jacob, Joseph's father is rich. Very rich. He amassed a lot of wealth working for his father-in-law (because God was with him). So Joseph has grown up fairly cushty (comfortably). We don't read anywhere before the slave situation about Joseph doing any kind of manual labour, and in fact, when he was out in the desert in his specially made coat (Jacob, his father, had commissioned a special coat for him because he was his favourite) he was only there to check on his brothers and report back, he wasn't even out there helping them!

And then all of a sudden Joseph finds himself working as a slave. Riches to rags. Everything he has ever known is gone...except God. (The following verses I am translating from my Svensk Folkbibeln Translation into English)

Genesis 39.1-2 - 'Joseph had been taken down to Egypt. And Potiphar, one of Pharoah's officals and the commander of the guards had bought him (Joseph) from the Ishmaelites who had brought him. The Lord was with Joseph and in everything he did he succeeded. He was in the house of his Egyptian Lord...'

And then as if Joseph hadn't been humiliated enough, going from a wealthy, luxurious lifestyle to one where he was a slave, he gets accused of attempted rape and finds himself in prison.

Genesis 39.19-20 (Summation) - 'When Joseph's master heard..he became furious and put Joseph in jail...'

Genesis 39.21 - 'But the Lord was with Joseph and showed him grace and let the prison manager respond well to him.'

Genesis 39.23 - '...because the Lord was with him and let him succeed in all he did.'

I always think Joseph's is such an amazing story. He starts off like a big shot, gets dumped in a well, sold as a slave, accused of attempted rape and thrown in jail...but he ends in triumphant fashion. He ends up saving his entire family from famine...not to mention all of Egypt.

I like his story for a number of reasons:

1. God just seems to be with him all the time. And not only that, it says continually that he succeeds irregardless of where he is physically because God is with him. That's pretty cool. To be a slave, and be a success. To be in prison, but to still be a success and have special kindness given to you.
2. His prison background didn't stand in the way of God's plan for his life. God is so much bigger than our pasts. He is in the business of shaping big futures for people whose lives at one point looked hopeless.
3. No time is wasted time with God. Later in the story when Joseph explains the dreams of the two court officials in jail and they forget him when they come out, it seems like it was a waste. But God is always true to His promises, and when He says that all things will work together for the good of those who love Him, He means it.
4. His great beginning was only a shadow of his extraordinary ending. Yes, Joseph's life started fairly comfortably, growing up in a wealthy family, nice coat and so on, but at the end of his life he is governor in a land, second only to the king. In Christ our futures are so much richer than our humble beginnings. As CS Lewis once said 'There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.'

God has such great things planned for each of our lives that go way beyond our own needs, happiness and comfort and touch the lives of others. Sometimes we can be on our way somewhere great and it doesn't quite go how we thought it would...but it goes as He knew it would...and the best thing is that in those 'hopeless', 'wasted' seasons, He is most at work in the things we can't see preparing us for the futures He sees for us.

Missio Dei - The Mission of God

One of the things I love most about God is His love of working with the small things. He could have sent Jesus to the earth riding on a unicorn with a thousand trumpets declaring His arrival, but instead He sent Him to be born the son of a nobody carpenter in a nothing town, and out of that simple nothing town came, the Messiah, the Saviour of mankind, God in human form and millions and millions of believers.

And He isn't done yet, there are still so many who don't know what a glorious thing God did for them in dying on the cross, so God wants us to continue spreading the good news of free, unearned, wonderful salvation. At the end of Matthew 10 Jesus says 'You have a great amount of work to do, but don't let it stop you. Begin with the small things. Give a thirsty person something to drink, for example.'

See even now God is working in and through the small things. He wants us to get on board with His rescue mission, and this is how He wants us to do it; simply giving people what they need.

Talking about Hell

I find it so frustrating as a Christian when I talk about the goodness and greatness and awesomeness that comes when you accept Jesus as your Lord and saviour, only to have someone ask,"But what about those who don't accept Him?"

I get irritated about this because I know the question is really about hell, and in my experience people become indignant at the thought of them not going to heaven 'just because they didn't accept Jesus'.

But let's forget about hell or heaven for a minute, and go back to what I was actually talking about.

What I'm talking about is the all the goodness that comes from saying yes to Jesus. What I'm talking about is love; crazy, over-the-top, passionate romantic love, and at the same time that fatherly love that protects you, always looks out for your best interests and does everything it can to help you succeed, what I'm talking about is peace; not just calmness and quietness, but a peace within you, that comes from the deep-rooted knowledge that someone has your back always, what I'm talking about is forgiveness; not just 'Look, you really hurt me but, I guess I can get over it' forgiveness, but forgiveness that sees beyond your failures and mistakes and refuses to judge you according to them, what I'm talking about is GRACE.

So when people ask me about what happens to those who don't accept Jesus, there are two thoughts that cross my mind. Either those people haven't really heard the truth about Jesus, His love and all that He has done, or those people are crazy.

Think about it, who in their right mind, would hear about unending joy, perfect peace, life in abundance, love and forgiveness that never fails, a constant support and encourager, and say, "Nah, I'd rather be alone, always depressed, always worrying and confused, constantly weighed down and defined by every little thing I've ever done wrong in my whole life"?

It's like being offered free first class passage on a plane and choosing to pay to ride in the hold with the luggage instead. Why would anyone do that? It doesn't make sense!

Of course there is also the option that people haven't heard the truth about Jesus, and His love and His mercy and His compassion, but that's what we should be telling people, that is the gospel!

Because, whilst yes, hell is a very real consequence, and yes it is forever, people shouldn't chose Jesus in order to avoid hell any more than they should chose Jesus to get to heaven.

Heaven and hell are not the point, Jesus is!

His radical, unrelenting, passionate, forgiving, merciful, love and grace are the point. A relationship with the one who created the universe and created you and knows you is the point.

So to those who get offered all of that, and chose to go it alone, I don't really understand you, I kind of feel sorry for you. But for those who have not been shown or offered all of that, and have instead been offered a 'gospel' that sounds like a set of rules, a curse, or a burden, I sincerely apologise, because that is not Christ at all.

Christ is a blessing, is life itself, is love itself. Heaven is forever with Jesus. If you don't want to be with Him in this short period of time we call life, why would you want to be with Him FOREVER? Or what do you think heaven is?

Heaven is forever with Jesus, it's life without Him that you should be concerned about, because that's  hell.

Right and Wrong vs Sin and Righteousness (The Need for Jesus)

I think a lot of people (non-christian) get offended and dislike Christians because they believe that all we do is go around telling people what is right or wrong, judging, and I think a lot of us do.

What we Christians need to remind ourselves about is the fact that the bible talks about sin, not right and wrong, and sin has nothing to do with what is right or wrong. Right and wrong can vary. They depend a lot on circumstance. For example, the vast majority of people would say that killing a person is wrong, but if you say to them 'What if someone came into your house and was about to kill you, would you kill them if you had the chance?' and they would say of course!

For right and wrong there is a scale. You can be partially wrong or right. It could be wrong to steal today and perfectly fine to steal tomorrow; in other words right and wrong are relative.

Sin is a completely different issue. It isn't about right or wrong, it has no scale. Sin either is or isn't. You can either sin or not sin. And this is because isn't about us or our circumstance or anything else, sin is about God Himself.

With sin, we only have two choices; God's standard or sin, and God's standard cannot change, it is a fixed point, which can be likened to the bar on the High Jump in athletics. You either clear the bar or you don't.

Understand then, that anything even a little less than God's standard is NOT God's standard, and therefore it is sin.

And this is exactly why we need Jesus. No amount of doing the right thing can bring you to God's standard, because it is not the doing of the right thing that takes you up to God's standard, it is BEING God's standard, being inherently righteous, being right.

Think this way about it, if someone has even one percent out of one hundred wrong, they can NEVER attain to God's standard, because 99% percent pure is not 100% pure, and you can add as much pure as you want, but that impurity remains.

So because only God Himself is inherently pure, without even a hint of impurity, He sacrificed Himself, sending us His 100% purity in exchange for our impurities, so that in this way we could attain the otherwise unattainable purity that is required to be with Him.

That is why Jesus was born of a virgin. He had to be. The bible says that from day one we are born with the desire to sin (be dishonest, take what isn't ours, put ourselves first etc.), in other words we are born impure. It's in our genes. In the same way that a drug addicted mother can give birth to a child with an addiction, or a mother with AIDS can give birth to a child with AIDS, sin is a generational defect that no amount of chemistry can do away with. So God sent Jesus into Mary, to be born in human form without the sin defect, so that He could be God's perfect standard in human form, the perfect sacrifice, the perfect exchange.

So Jesus came here perfect. He gave us His inherent righteousness, and took all our impurities away, separating us from them for eternity (should we want Him to) so that we can finally be accepted, having His inherent righteousness, and thus attain to God's standard.

This means that whether we have always done the 'right' thing or 'wrong' thing, God, in Jesus, has given us the key to become inherently right, through and through righteous, which means we are above judgement (I don't mean in a Worldly sense; if you break the law you go to jail end of)  meaning that we are now above the scale of right and wrong and we are a part of Him, with Him, in Him, RIGHTEOUS.

Revelation 3.20-21 | Uppenbarelseboken 3.20-21

"Jag står vid dorren och knäckar. Om du hör och oppnar kommer jag in och vill umgås över en god middag. De som seger ska få sitta bredvid mig vid hedersbordet, precis som jag segrade och fick sitta på hedersplatsen vid min Fars sida."

- Uppenbarelseboken 3.20-21 (MSG)

The prize that awaits us is worth fighting for. When we overcome like He has overcome, we get the same reward; eternity with God, and the daily delight that comes from being in His presence.

Mark 10.24-27: Jesus Makes It Possible

We tend to have a scale...as if goodness can be measured, but God has no scale. God says that He is goodness. The only way we can ever be the standard of goodness He can accept is if we are in Him. Anything less than God isn't good enough.

Thankfully, this is not something we need to be disheartened about, rather we should be encouraged. God gave us His goodness in Jesus Christ, so that by taking Him on board, by giving ourselves to Him, we would be good enough to be in relationship with Him, which has been His desire since before the world began.

Sin separates us from God because it is unacceptable to Him, but Jesus reconciles us to God, because He was and still is and will forever be perfect and acceptable.

Put simply, Jesus makes it possible for us to be with God.

Welcome Jesus into your life and watch His goodness permeate through all your sin, so that you blossom, and reach and become all that God wants you to be.

The Gospel : In Bullet Points

First things first, my intention is not to offend anyone with this short summary of what Christianity is all about...my intention is to simply put it out there in a straightforward way as a starting point for people who have not got a clue what it's about.

The reason being..I wonder if people don't like the gospel (good news) because they don't hear or see it. If all they hear and see is judgement, hate and a list of rules... they are not going to want to know more, they're going to run in the opposite direction, and so they should...none of that sounds like good news to me either.

So, for those of you reading this that have never really heard what Christianity is all about, this is for you.

Here goes:

• Christianity in one word is probably best described as forgiveness. We believe that Jesus died for us, thereby paying the price for the sins of each and every one of us (past, present and future) and in exchange giving us His perfection and righteousness (lack of sin). 《1 Peter 2.24》
• We believe that in dying for us Jesus, opened up the way for us to have a purposeful, loving relationship with God the father and therefore live life through Him, and as a result live better.

That's pretty much it. The bible is all about the situation we were in before Christ came to earth (in need of forgiveness), what happened when He came to earth (paid the penalty for our sin and brought forgiveness), and the new situation we can be in if we choose to accept Him in our lives (living a supernatural life -beyond natural, realer, deeper and more vibrant than what we see and do day-to-day).

I could go on..but I wanted to keep this short and sweet. The gospel is that Jesus died to set us free from lives full of sin and all that go with them and enable us to live a life of righteousness with Him, our closest, most trustworthy and faithful friend; leading the way.

The Abundant Life

"Kristus har befriat oss för att vi ska leva i frihet. Stå för det! Låt ingen förslava er igen."

Galaterbrevet 5.1/ Galatians 5.1 (MSG)

Something has been weighing on my mind a lot quite recently to the point where it's been dominating my thinking, distracting me and worrying me. The root of it is the fact that I just don't seem to trust God with it, I've been enslaving myself to worrying about something that is out of my control when God has fully assured me He has my back in ALL things.

You ever done the same?

John 8.36 says that 'He who the son sets free is free INDEED." Jesus died for a lot of reasons, most importantly to make a way for us to have a relationship with the father, but He also died so we wouldn't have to live as the bible puts it 'in the way of the flesh'; struggling and failing daily as we try to do things in our own strength, but we could live in the way of the Spirit; knowing God is our strength and support.

Have you, like me, been living in your own strength, going back to the way of the flesh when God has empowered you for supernatural living?

If it's worry you're dealing with...tell Jesus about it and let yourself relax in the knowledge that He has it under control and knows what He's doing.

If it's something else...see what God has to say about it...but don't just return to the stressful earthly way of living. God wants us to live a better life, an abundant life, full of Him, full of hope, miracles and excitement, not to be sat at home rocking back and forth worrying about things that in reality we have no control over.

Trust Him and walk in the freedom He called you to, remember that He who the son sets free is free INDEED.

God bless x

Salvation is here

{image source; tumblr}

WHILE WE WERE STILL SINNERS, CHRIST DIED FOR US

{source; tumblr}

You see, we could never have earned salvation. So God gave it to us for free, sending His son to pay the ultimate price.

This is what it means to be Saved by Grace

#whatagospel

The Prize

"And He [the Lord] has made from one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being..."

- Acts 17.26-28a

God's heart's greatest desire is that we might know and love Him above all else. This life is not pleasant; and God tells us that we will see trouble in this world, but that He has overcome it [John 16.33]. He says this because it is when we see that God is beyond whatever it is that we are going through that we get breakthrough. Breakthrough is not the solution to our problem. Real breakthrough is Jesus. Real breakthrough comes when we see beyond our situation, and see Jesus.

In his letter to the Corinthians Paul talks about running a race for a prize that is imperishable. Jesus is the prize. When Olympic athletes train they face obstacles and difficulties and push through. In our times of distress, loss, sadness, disappointment and unhappiness, God wants us to grope for Him, to fight to find Him, because He is worth fighting for. He is the bigger picture, the breakthrough, the prize worth fighting for.

Celebrating Easter

I know that in terms of timing, this post is a little late, but I really wanted to share this anyway.

Easter is such a big deal for Christians because it is the heart of the story. It is what Christianity is all about.

Whilst Christmas is a lovely celebration; we recognise Jesus came to Earth, the son of God, fully man, fully God etc etc. the reason why Christians are Christians and call themselves Christians is because Christ died for their sins.

History proves that Jesus existed. A man, called Jesus was alive at the time the bible claims that He was, and He caused quite a stir. That much can be proven.

What makes this Jesus man particularly significant is the fact that He claimed He was the son of God. If you think carefully about it; the place and culture in which He was saying this, the gravity of the statement He was making and the fact that saying such a thing would have a MASSIVE impact on the people who belonged to the culture He was speaking to... you have to think about it...He was either completely nuts - as in the guy wanted the people of Nazareth and Bethlehem and Judea to kill Him, or He was telling the truth.

If He was telling the truth; which is what Christians believe, if He was telling the truth, then this is what He was saying:

Jesus was claiming that the root of all problems faced in the world, in this life, all of them, could be found in sin, something which is found within us.

Jesus was saying that it was sin that caused pain, distrust, corruption, dishonesty, poverty, harm, and general disaster.

So if Jesus was telling the truth about Himself and about sin, then, as He said, the only permanent solution to the problem would be Himself.

Hear me out. In humbling Himself; that is in coming in the form of a man, with all the temptations, exposure to sin and its effects and ordinary people, and then dying as He did, he provided us with the grace to live SIN-FREE, dealing with the source of the world's problems permanently, so that sin could no longer cause any problems.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am fully aware, that some Christians, in fact, A LOT of Christians (myself included), have acted sinfully (outside of God's will) and as a result done A LOT of stupid things. But here's the difference between how Christians deal with sin, and how non-Christians deal with sin.

In my experience, when non-Christians sin, or, as a lot would say 'do bad things' or 'do the wrong thing', they will say this; 'I couldn't help it', or 'it's human nature'. There is an acknowledgement that what happened was wrong, and more often than not they will also say something along the lines of 'I won't be doing it again though', or 'I'll try harder next time not to'.

When Christians sin, they also acknowledge that they did the wrong thing, but they acknowledge that the wrong thing was not only done against the person or persons or object, but against God, because they were falling short of His standard, i.e. sinning. This is significant because when we acknowledge that we did the wrong thing before God, we are also acknowledging that there is a penalty we are required to pay for our sin. God being Good (without sin) and just (fair - as in, He can only accept Good), means that when we sin, He has to acknowledge it. He can't just gloss over it, because immediately He's not always Good, because He's allowing sin. It's like a judge saying to a murderer, 'no you're good, be on your way', it immediately makes us question how Good God is. And when God acknowledges our sin, He acknowledges that there is a penalty we have to pay for it.

BUT, because God is merciful and gracious, He didn't want us all to pay the full wages of our sin (death - eternal death, eternal separation from Him). So He looked for a way for us - if we wanted to - to be reconciled to Him, without compromising on His Goodness and Fairness. So what He did, is that He put Himself in our place. He gave us His son, the human embodiment of Himself on this Earth (Jesus), to go through the same everyday struggles as us; betrayal, hunger, friendship, family, even the paying of taxes, and yet NOT sin, so that all the sins we have ever and will ever commit, would be accredited to Him - as in, we did the crime but He did the time - so that we could still have a relationship with Him.

Got it yet?

He gave up a part of Himself, so that we could be part of His family.

So when Christians acknowledge their sin before God, they acknowledge the penalty that they owe, but even greater than that, they acknowledge that the penalty they owe (to God), has already been paid, so they can still be in relationship with God despite their sin, and so that next time, when the opportunity to commit that same sin arrives (and it always does, trust me), they can be sure, that the person who went before them, Jesus; God Himself, already went through temptation and resisted it, so that there is another way to do things, and they don't have to give into human nature; therefore meaning, that those impulses they have always given into, are not the only way to live, that they don't have to be in a sin-guilt-sin-guilt cycle, but that they can have a new future shaped by a new way of doing things, with the help of someone BETTER than themselves: Jesus.

To sum up why Christians celebrate Easter. Easter is a celebration, a party if you will, at which Christians remember and get excited about the fact that God loved them so much, that despite all their idiocy; the silly day-to-day sins they commit and mistakes that they make, He gave Himself up for them so that they could be free from a sin-FULL lifestyle, and live one of grace, with forgiveness in abundance, available every nanosecond.

Happy Easter - Jesus died to set you free, He said, "take up your cross, and follow me".