"You deserve to be happy," I heard many times in recent years. "You deserve to get a little spoiled every now and then" or "you deserve a break." It is meant well. Those who said it know I was a single mom. I raised my daughter without any child support, and I worked hard to pay all our bills. Thank God, I had enough strength to do it all before my autoimmune disease decided to cripple my ability to work full-time. Also, thank God my daughter is now an adult, and she is about to become a mom. She will pretty soon discover that the idea of having a break or deserving to be happy is not relevant when you are responsible for your child's well-being and life. But there is an even bigger reason why a life with the expectation to be happy and the belief that we deserve it is false. Even when in a moment everything goes well in life and we are happy because we made a series of great choices, even then it would be ridiculous to think that we deserved that happiness. And the closer we are to Easter, the more I see that all the happiness in our life is what we didn't deserve, yet God blessed us. He blessed us so richly.
I don't deserve those beautiful twin grandchildren that we are expecting to welcome into this world in just a few weeks. I don't deserve my loving and kind husband who works hard and leads us towards God even harder. I don't deserve my friends who bring the right Word of God to me at just the right time. And I definitely do not deserve the gift of creativity and art that God shared with me and gently taught me to use for Him through WholeheartedArts. I don't deserve any of those wonderful blessings in life. Why do I say that? Because I see the condition of my wretched heart and how, without Christ, it was capable of only sin. Why am I having these reflections now? We are approaching the most wonderful day of the year. Tomorrow, we praise the resurrected Christ. It is a time of celebration and victory in the battle over sin and death. It is not our own personal victory. We lost the battle. We lost our freedom and life, but Christ won, and He won for us.
We celebrate what we didn’t and couldn't deserve but have been freely given - our partaking in Christ's victory and the hope of eternal life we have in our precious Savior. We know we have this undeserved peace and forgiveness because God loved us when we were His enemies. He didn't wait for us to change, but He died for us, and that changed everything. It changed those who believe in Christ. We look at the cross as the place of undeserved grace and love. Those who don't believe see it as foolishness and failure. What has changed in us? Did we suddenly become good people and deserve salvation? I often laugh when my new non-believing friends say that it is not important which god we believe in, as long as we are good people. To that, I say that those who believe in our God know that there were no good people. We are far from good and can never be good enough to go to heaven. That opens up a completely different conversation, one that not everyone is ready for.So then… what changes in us? Out hardened hearts became soft flesh, and we realized that we must humble ourselves before God and repent. We also see our incapability of repentance without Christ. We want to repent and be faithful, but the flesh is weak, and our hearts condition is shameful. The more mature in faith we are the more we see the sin in us and our eternal need for Christ. If we could be better, Jesus would live with us on earth for few years and just told everyone to do better. There would be no need for him to die on that cursed cross in place of us, because we would do better. But we cannot do better. Dead people cannot better themselves into life. Darkness cannot light up itself and become day. It needs light. We couldn’t better ourselves into salvation, we needed Savior.
The walk with Christ often starts on a very painful note. One sees how corrupt and wicked one is and how, even with the best intentions, one ends up in sin. Sin is everywhere and it feels like a prison. We are lost to it. I don't mean murder or stealing, or what we call bigger sins, I mean the small stuff that makes us sin every minute. We want to do better and be better; we write inspiring Instagram posts, but we keep on sinning without even realizing it. We envy, we want things, we covet, we gossip, we pretend to like someone just to get a promotion, we watch things that degrade someone, we laugh at someone's misfortune, we want to sleep in and come up with an excuse to not go to work, we agree with lies to get ahead, we curse in traffic, we eat without limits, we indulge our wants and needs. There are also the thoughts. By the time we have our morning coffee, we probably wished we didn't have to deal with something or someone, even hoping some people were not born. In Jesus' standards, that last one is murder. In that moment, we also feel disgusted with our sin. We feel like murderers, thieves, robbers, tricksters, and the worst of the worst. We see that we deserve punishment and death, and yet we are forgiven. The Savior Christ came to redeem us. God sent His own only Son to die for us on the cross because He loved us and His creation, and He provided redemption for all, even us - the worst of the worst. And in that bitter moment, there is the biggest joy. Christ won over death and sin, and we now belong to Him. What a relief! We deserved death but we were given love. Nobody could deserve God's love. And to look at it in human terms - we cannot even deserve the love of our neighbor or our own child.
This gives us a new perspective on everything. The way we looked at the world is falling apart. The sin becomes clear because there is now light that shines into darkness, and we can see what has been hiding in the corner of our soul. We no longer rely on our senses and wants to guide us, but the truth of God becomes our precious guidance. Every good and bad thing is from God. And even suffering doesn't break us because we know we deserved much worse. We deserved not only death but eternal condemnation. Hell. However cruel and awful a place filled with suffering you could imagine - multiply it by thousands - that is what we all deserved. Because none was righteous. Not even one, as the Holy Spirit told us through the letters of Paul.
So why did we get life and forgiveness instead of the death penalty? Because God is faithful and good. Because He loves purely and completely and provided a way for us to know His Love in Christ and to love Him back. Our hearts - no longer stones but made of flesh - are now being circumcised every day into the shape of the cross. Holy Lamb of God slain for our sins - once and for all who believe - our Christ Jesus - the One who not only bore our punishment but also came back from death, is restored to His glory and is sharing His victory with us.
So, was this justice? Is being given a victory and being restored into the glory of God's children justice? Is it still justice when you are forgiven with grace? It is! And it is absolute justice, the way God established it. The verdict was just. Sin is paid by death. Every crime deserves punishment, and this crime has been paid for by Christ. The order has been restored. Justice has been satisfied.
We have been judged, and I hope that your name has been in this verdict as the defendant - next to my name. We have all been found guilty. I hope you see that we have been sentenced to die for all our sins. I hope you see how we deserved that. I also hope you see how Christ took your place and my place and bore the death sentence for each of us. And most importantly, I hope you celebrate it tomorrow. We deserved to die, and yet we will live because of Christ. Next time someone says, "You deserved to be happy," tell them, "I deserved death, but I have life in Christ."
"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God."— John 3:16-21 (ESV)
Happy Celebration of Christ Resurection.
