Our actions will show that we belong to the truth, so we will be confident when we stand before God. Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings, and he knows everything. (1 John 3:19-20)We try our hardest. But as hard as we try, we still do not do what we need to do. After a while, we begin to feel guilty. Am I really a Christian, we ask? If I was really a Christian, if the Spirit of God was really in me, if I was really good, I wouldn’t do those things.
And they may not be good things. In fact, some of them might even be despicable.
But consider this: you are human and as such make mistakes. If you didn’t make mistakes, you would not be human. You would be weird. The only person who ever lived, who ever drew breath and sweated sweat and ate food and so on, the only one who never made mistakes was Jesus himself. Only him. Everybody else, without exception, made mistakes.
Moses was just about the greatest man who ever lived. Deuteronomy said that There has never been another prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face (Deuteronomy 34:10). Yet, he sinned by losing his temper in Exodus 17 and disobeyed God by not doing what he said. True, he was fed up with God’s people and felt God’s own anger towards them, but he still made mistakes. God respected him just about above all others but he still sinned.
Elijah was another. A great prophet of Israel who was so good that God sent a Chariot of Fire in 2 Kings 2 to get him and take him away so he wouldn’t have to die. Yet he had a problem all his life with depression and constantly was in a funk. He was great enough God didn’t want him to die, but he still had problems.
All the rest of the great men of God. All of them were great but all had problems. Noah drank too much, as did Lot. Both were saved by the hand of God from their places, but both had problems. Abraham lied a lot. David couldn’t keep his hands off other women, the apostle Peter had a bad temper, the apostle Paul didn’t seem to like women very much. It goes on.
But the one thing all these people had in common was the knowledge that God loved them and that he was with them in spite of their failures. He was with them and they knew it.
The same goes with us. We try and we try but we still fail. As the apostle Paul said in Romans 7, sometimes it seems that all the things we do not want to do are the things we keep on doing and the things we want to do we cannot seem to accomplish. But as he says in Romans 8, we are still saved by God through his Spirit and through his grace.
Yes, we screw up daily, hourly, minutely – but even so, we are his children and he loves us.
And not only does he love us, as long as we are trying our best, we are saved.
As John says above, Even if we feel guilty, God is greater than our feelings and he knows everything.
We are not serving a God who demands perfection or even expects us to feel perfect. We are serving a God who recognizes our failings and our weaknesses and loves us anyway. And even when we feel that failure in his sight and our hearts figure we have lost it all, he is greater than our hearts.
He loves us anyway, even when we do not think so.
That is the beauty of grace, knowing that we are fine in God even when we do not feel like we are.
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