1 Peter 2:16 - Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God's slaves.

How do we use our freedom? Usually, it seems we use it pretty selfishly. A couple of years ago, LA Laker Andrew Bynum (an all-star center who plays close to the basket) took a ridiculous three-pointer in a game. It barely touched the rim, missing by a mile. Incensed, coach Mike Brown immediately called Bynum to the bench and put in a substitute.

"I'm good," Bynum said postgame. "I guess 'Don't take threes' is the message, but I'm going to take another one and I'm going to take some more, so I just hope it's not the same result. Hopefully, I make it."

So there you have it - message received, freedom asserted, and message ignored. People think that punishment will correct behavior. Andrew Bynum's postgame comments illustrate a competing (though more accurate) truth - punishment incites rebellion. The law asks for a certain behavior. Bynum got it right, don't take threes. When it doesn't get what it's looking for, the law inflicts punishment, hoping that a program of reeducation will produce better results the next time. Unfortunately, as Christian theologians have always noted, the law is much better at asking for a result than it is at achieving it.

Martin Luther likened the relationship of the law to the results of a lion held down by steel bands. As the lion fights against the bands, the tighter the bands become and the more viciously the lion fights. We fear freeing the lion because of the ferocity with which it strains, forgetting that, all the while, the lion is fighting the bands, not us. Released, the lion has nothing to struggle against and will likely cease its struggling.

The true freedom of grace overwhelms the asserted freedom that we shout in the face of the law. Here's real independence: the freedom that comes from the Savior who has kept the law in our place, allowing us to live and delivering us from bondage.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Romans 7:19  For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing>

In the 2011 film Terri, John C. Reilly plays a high school assistant principal. In one central scene, he's caught by a student in a lie. When confronted, Reilly's character responds in an interesting way. He shifts the focus away from the lie and tells the kid a story about a temp who's working in the school because his secretary is very sick and in the hospital. he says, just that morning the temp had, through a series of sideways questions, tried to figure out just how sick the regular secretary was, because she would really like the job for herself. In a deep, dark secret place that she likely won't even admit to herself, Reilly says, a part of this temp wants the regular secretary to die. It'll get her the job.

When the secretary does die, and the temp finds out that she will be hired permanently, the temp makes a big show of being sad, even though she's happy about the job. Reilly finishes his story with these words: "Life's a mess, dude... Maybe I will do better or maybe I'll do even worse. I don't know. I screw up all the time, 'cause that's what people do."

We think, as Reilly's temp does, that the important thing is how we appear. We know when it's appropriate to be sad, and so we make our display. We know we're supposed to love our neighbor, so we act the part. But Reilly (and, usually, the people in our lives too) see right through us. We are significantly more transparent than we believe we are, and everyone know inherently that what's most important is what's inside us.

And then Reilly admits that, ultimately, he's just like his temp. He messes up. He does his best, but he's likely to keep messing up. This is true of enlightened guidance-counselor types and this is true of Christians. We screw up all the time, 'cause that's what people do. It reminds me of the saying, "People are bad, and Christians are people." Simple, yet profound.

As usual, the best news for us is the good news, and the good news is only good if it's true for Christians, too. Jesus said that the healthy don't need a doctor.

Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Romans 11:33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!

Normally, the outdoorsy image of choice for spiritual growth is mountain climbing. You can picture it - new Christian at the bottom of the mountain, mature Christian near the top. But perhaps we should be looking at it as spelunking.

Spelunking is cave exploration, and it's another way to think about spiritual growth. Instead of thinking of growth in Christ as a climb up a mountain, let's think of it as a trip into a cave. When a mountain climbing expedition gets higher and higher (and as Christians, we might be tempted to think, better and better, however we define better0, a caving exploration goes deeper and deeper, exploring the undiscovered depths. Spiritual growth is not about climbing a mountain, getting better, and therefore needing Christ less and less. Spiritual growth is about discovering more and bigger caverns of need into which more and more of Christ's grace can flow. We think spiritual growth is about height, when spiritual growth is about width. We think it's about the heights we've attained when, in truth, it's about the depth of our need.

True growth as a Christian involves recognizing that there is always another cavern to explore. There's always another crevasse of self-centeredness or stalactite of jealousy. The light of Jesus shines into deeper and darker corners and proclaims, "Yes, I can redeem this, too." True growth as a Christian means realizing that all the climbing we need to do is down into the depths.

We hear, "For God so loved the world that He gave his one and only son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life," and we think, "Got it! Simple! What's next?" The Bible answers, "Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation" (1 Peter 2:2). It is this milk, the simplicity of the gospel message, that grows us into a deeper awareness of our desperation and therefore a deeper awareness of our deliverance.

-Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Song of Solomon 8:7 - Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned.

One of the most audacious con men in American history, Frank Abagnale Jr., flew for free on more than 250 Pan Am flights, impersonating a deadheading pilot. He forged a Columbia University degree and taught sociology at BYU for a semester. He pretended to be a pediatrician at a Georgia hospital for almost a year, and for another year, after forging a Harvard degree, he passed the Louisiana bar exam and worked in the Louisiana State Attorney General's office. All before he turned 21.

You may be familiar with the movie made about his autobiography, Catch Me if You Can. In the fil, the event that is alleged to have started Abagnale on his life of crime is the divorce of his parents, brought about by his father's financial ruin in the face of an IRS investigation. Abagnale believed that his mother left his father because of the family's financial woes and that if their lifestyle could be restored (through his thievery), everything would be returned to normal.

The twisted lengths to which we will go to prove our love are astounding. And there's a bit of Frank Abagnale Jr. in all of us. We're all in some way working for love. Abagnale thought of it in literal financial terms: if he could "earn," in his own highly illegal way, enough money to set the family's lifestyle right, love would return. The IRS, in his view, was holding love hostage. Often Christians think of God as holding His love back until we earn it and acting according to that old extra-biblical proverb "God helps those who help themselves." Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is the truth, and it's a truth that Frank Abagnale Jr. probably could have stood to hear as a sixteen-year-old: the kind of love we actually need, the kind of love that satisfies, and the kind that really helps and changes people is not the kind that is deserved. In fact, real love is not handed out on merit at all. This is why the greatest love, the love that satisfies most deeply and changes us most thoroughly, is the love of God revealed in the free gift of grace in His Son Jesus Christ.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

1 Peter 5:10 - And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.

Seemingly every day, we ask a question like this one: How could that have happened? How can it be that our mother has cancer? How can there be a God who allows children to be molested by their fathers? When you read books and articles by people who don't believe in God - once you get through all the pseudo-intellectual jibber jabber - their arguments come down to: "I can't believe in a God who presides over a world that has come out like this."

We tend to think that God is present in comfort but not present in pain. We tend to think that if God exists, He wouldn't have let this place go off the rails so badly. If you're looking at the world from that vantage point, and you see it as it is - all the suffering that is apparently allowed to happen - you would naturally think either that God doesn't exist, that He's not a very nice guy, or that someone in the situation sinned, right? In response to questions like that, though, Martin Luther said a very interesting thing. He said that a "theologian of glory" ends up calling the good bad, and the bad good. What did he mean by that?

It's quite simple, really. The things that we think are bad - suffering, pain, and the like - are actually the things that strip away our ability to rely on ourselves. They show us that we are incompetent saviors, and they remind us that we need salvation from outside ourselves. On the other hand, the things that we think are good - prosperity, health, comfort - are actually the things that build up our defenses against recognizing our true needs.

This is why Luther promoted the "theology of the cross." This theology looks at the world as it is and proclaims a God active in suffering and who suffered Himself. It proclaims a God who is active in suffering and who suffered Himself. It proclaims a God who comes to those in pain, a God who offers new life to the dying. 

Sin has made the world the way it is, but Christ, on the cross, has redeemed it.

--Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

John 10:11-13

What we do in life is look for hired hands. This means that we look for people to tell us what we want to hear: "You're a good mother, a good son, a good coworker." All the while, though, we know deep down that it's just not true. That's why we keep asking. We think that if we get enough people to tell us that we're great, we might be able to believe it. But we never do.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He's not like the hired hands who run away when they see how bad things really are, when the wolves start to come, when your life starts to really fall apart, and when the "I'm okay, you're okay" charade starts to break down. And what does Jesus say? Not, "I'm the good shepherd. I know what my sheep need to hear." Not "I'm the good shepherd, I know how to get my sheep to relax." Not "I'm the good shepherd, and I know how to get my sheep in line." He says, "I am the Good Shepherd. I lay down my life for the sheep."

The wolves are real. We feel guilty about all sorts of things in our lives. We have not loved God with our whole hearts; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. These are the wolves that are coming for us. We look for hired hands to tell us that these wolves aren't really all that bad. "Oh, you're not a bad person," they'll say. "You're sure better than so-and-so." And that'll make us feel better, until we look over our shoulder and see the pack of wolves just a little bit closer. So we look for another hired hand. But then, as things get worse and worse, hired hands start quitting. When we do something that makes it impossible for someone to say, "You're not a bad person," we find that there's no one around anyway.

No one, that is, except Jesus, who lays down His life for us.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Job 19:25

I know that my Redeemer lives!

Now, if we're being honest with ourselves, who woke up this morning ready to make a proclamation like Job's? Don't we more often think, I sure hope my redeemer lives. We envy the people who have this kind of faith. But us? We're a little more wobbly. We're freshly recovering from a fight with our friend or our spouse. We're trying to forget about the situation at work that might end up getting us fired. We can't stop thinking about the trouble that our children have gotten themselves into. We consider the people in our lives, wondering what they would think of us if they knew what was really going on. We hope that our Redeemer lives. We know for sure that we need redeeming, otherwise we wouldn't have read a devotion like this. But we're not 100 percent sure that redemption is available for us. We hope it is, Job, though, seems pretty confident.

But this is Job! Job, the one guy who doesn't seem to have any reason to be confident. Job is the guy who was minding his own business, living a good life, when he became the subject of a bet between God and Satan. Job, whose wife deserts him and whose children all die, whose cattle are killed and who is covered, head to foot, with sores. And yet, in his suffering - through his suffering - Job is aware that he has a Redeemer.

When Jesus hung on the cross, His cry was not for a redeemer. When He was abandoned by those who loved Him, when He was assaulted, beaten, scorned, mocked, tortured, and killed, He didn't say, "I know that My Redeemer lives." He said, "It is finished." He might as well have said, "You cry out for a redeemer. I am the redeemer, and I have done My work."

Jesus' "it is finished" - His life, death, and resurrection - is our assurance. We have a Redeemer, and He lives.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,