Shooting the Breeze
Many of us live under the control of this false belief: Those who fail (including myself) are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we all tend to point an accusing finger, assigning blame for virtually every failure. Whenever we fail to receive approval for our performance, we are likely to search for a reason, a culprit, or a scapegoat. If possible, we will often try to place the blame on others and fulfill the law of retribution – that people should get what they deserve.
2 reasons why we blame others.
1. We blame others because, for most of our lives, we have been conditioned to make someone pay for failures or shortcomings.
When a deadline is missed at work, we let everyone know it’s not our fault. We says things like: “I know the report was due yesterday, but Frank didn’t get me the statistics until this morning.” If a household chore is left undone, we quickly look to other family members to determine who is responsible. For every flaw we see around us, we usually search for someone to blame, hoping to vindicate ourselves by making sure that the one who failed is properly identified and punished.
2. We blame others is because our success often depends on their contribution.
Their failure is a threat to us. When the failure of another blocks our goal of success, we usually respond by defending ourselves and blaming them, often using condemnation to manipulate them to improve their performance. Blaming others also helps put a safe distance between their failure and our fragile self-worth. Whether our accusations are focussed on ourselves or others, we all have a tendency to believe that someone has to take the blame.
We have a choice in our response to failure: We can condemn (blame) or we can learn.
All of us fail, but this doesn’t mean that we are failures. We need to understand that failing can be a step toward maturity, not a permanent blot on our self-esteem. Like children first learning to walk, we all stumble and fall. And just like children, we can pick ourselves up and begin again. We don’t have to allow failure to prevent us from being used by God.
If we have trusted Christ for our salvation, God has forgiven us and wants us to experience His forgiveness on a daily basis. Moses was a murderer but God forgave him and used him to deliver Israel from Egypt. David was an adulterer and a murderer but God forgave him and made him a great king. Peter denied Jesus 3 times but God forgave him and Peter became a leader in the church.
God rejoices when His children learn to accept His forgiveness, pick themselves up and walk after they have stumbled. But we must learn also to forgive ourselves. Rather than viewing our weaknesses as a threat to our self-esteem, it is God’s desire that they compel us to move forward in our relationship with Him.
What is God’s answer to the false belief: Those who fail (including myself) are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished? His answer is a nice little word called PROPITIATION. Okay it is not so little of a word but it a very important word.
Now before describing what propitiation is, why it was needed, and how it should affect our lives we need to understand some important truths about God. God is holy. To be true to His holiness, God punishes those whose righteousness is not the same as His. This might not seem fair to you but this aspect of who God is also the reason we can depend on God and His word.
It is only as we understand the horror of coming under the wrath of a holy God for our sins that we will fully appreciate what Christ did on the cross. Every day our minds should be overwhelmed by thankfulness for what He did on our behalf.
When Christ died on the cross, He was our substitute. He took upon Himself the righteous wrath of God that we deserved. The depth of God’s love for us is revealed by the extremity of His actions for us: The holy Son of God became a man and died a horrible death in our place (Isaiah 53:4-6; 1 John 4:9-11).
Propitiation means that the wrath of someone who has been unjustly wronged has been satisfied. It is an act that soothes hostility and satisfies the need for vengeance. Providing His only begotten Son as the propitiation for our sin was the greatest possible demonstration of God’s love for us.
To understand God’s wondrous provision of propitiation, it is helpful to remember what He has endured from us, His creation. From Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden to the obvious depravity we see in our world today, human history is the story of greed, hatred, lust and pride – evidence of our willful rebellion against the God who created us.
Our sin deserves the righteous wrath of God. He is the Almighty, the rightful judge of the universe. He is absolutely holy and perfect (1 John 1:5). Because of these attributes, God cannot overlook sin, nor can He compromise by accepting sinful behaviour. For God to condone even one sin would defile His holiness like smearing a white satin wedding gown with black tar.
Because God is holy, His aversion to sin is manifested in righteous anger. However, God is not only righteously offended about sin, He is also infinitely loving. In His holiness, God condemns sin but in the most awesome example of love the world has ever seen, He ordained that His Son would die for our sins. God sacrificed the sinless, perfect Saviour to turn away, to propitiate, His great wrath.
And for whom did Christ die?
Was it for the saints who honoured Him?
Was it for a world that appreciated His sinless life and worshipped Him?
No!
Christ died for us while were in rebellion against Him. For while we were still helpless, Christ dies for the ungodly at the right time (Romans 5:7-11). While we were the enemies of God, Jesus averted the wrath we deserved so that we might become His children.
What can we say of our heavenly Father?
Surely, He did not escape seeing Christ’s mistreatment at the hands of sinful men – the scourging, the humiliation, and the beatings.
Surely, He who spoke the world into being could have delivered Christ from the entire ordeal.
And yet the God of heaven peered down through time and saw you and me.
Though we were His enemies, He loved us and longed to rescue us from our sins, designating the sinless Christ to become our substitute. Only Jesus could avert God’s righteous wrath against sin, so in love the Father kept silent as Jesus hung from the cross. All of His anger, all of the wrath we would ever deserve, was poured out on Jesus, and Jesus became sin for us (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Because He paid the penalty for our sins, and God’s wrath was avenged, God no longer looks upon us through the eyes of judgment. Instead, He now lavishes His love upon us. The Scriptures teach that absolutely nothing can separate us from God’s love (Romans 8:38-39). He has adopted us into a tender, intimate and powerful relationship with Him (Romans 8:15).
Because we are God’s children, performance is no longer the basis of our worth. We are unconditionally and deeply loved by God, and we can live by faith in His grace. We were spiritually dead, but God has made us alive and has given us the high status of being His children. It will take all eternity to comprehend the wealth of His love and grace (Ephesians 2:4-9).
Propitiation, then, means that Jesus has satisfied the holy wrath of God through His payment for sin. There was only one reason for Him to do this: He loves us. Infinitely, eternally, unconditionally, for all time, He loves us! God the Father loves us with the love a father, reaching to snatch us from harm. God the Son loves us with the love of a brother, laying down His life for us. He alone has turned away God’s wrath from us.
There is nothing we can do, no amount of good deeds we can accomplish, and no religious ceremonies we can perform that can pay for our sins. Instead, Jesus has conclusively paid for them so that we can escape eternal condemnation and experience His love and purposes both now and forever. Christ not only paid for our sins at one point in time but also continues to love us and teach us day by day.
We no longer have to fear punishment for our sins because Christ paid for them all – past, present and future. This tremendous truth of propitiation clearly demonstrates that we are truly and deeply loved by God. His perfect love casts out all fear as we allow it to flood our hearts (1 John 4:18).
How do we begin to experience freedom from Satan’s lie: Those who fail are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished?
The Scriptures indicate that Satan accuses believers of being unworthy of God’s grace. It is his desire that we cower under the fear of punishment. Consider this passage from Revelation 12:10-1,
“Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. ”
How are we to overcome Satan, the accuser, and experience our acceptance in Christ? According to these verses, there is only one way: by the sacrificial blood or Christ on the cross, the blood of the Lamb.
To do this, we must first stop trying to overcome our feelings of condemnation and failure by penitent actions. Defending ourselves or trying to pay for our sins by our actions leads only to a guilt-and-penance spiral because we can never do enough on our own to justify our sins.
No matter now much we do to make up for our sin, we will continue to feel guilty and believe that we need to do more unless we resist Satan, the accuser of the brethren. This can only be accomplished because Christ’s blood has completely paid for our sins and delivered us from guilt.
Second, we need to verbalize what the blood of Christ has done for us: We are deeply loved, completely forgiven, fully pleasing, totally accepted and complete in Christ. There is power in verbalize these words. There is something that happens when we declare the truth verbally.
2 practical steps that will help make these truths a reality in our lives
1. On one side of a 3X5 inch index card, write the following:
“Because of Christ and His redemption, I am completely forgiven and fully pleasing to God; I am totally accepted by God.”
2. On the other side of the card, write the words of Romans 5:1 and Colossians 1:21-22.
Carry this card with you for the next 28 days. Every time you get something to drink or do some other routine activity, look at it and remind yourself of what Christ has done for you. This exercise will help you develop a habit of reflecting on these liberating truths.
As you read and memorize these statements and passages, think about how they apply to you. Memorization and application of these truths will have a profound effect in your life as your mind is slowly transformed by God’s Word!
How have you dealt with failure in your life and in the lives of others?
***** This is a synopsis of a sermon that I preached at Port Hardy Baptist Church. It is part 3 in a series called Who do you think you are?
***** This series has been greatly influenced by Robert S. McGee’s book “The Search For Significance: Seeing Your True Worth Through God’s Eyes
Those who fail (including myself) are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished and God’s solution to it.
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