gospel

LIE: Christ’s Perfect Sacrifice Was Not Enough For Me or The Whole World!

If you are wired at all like us, you will have a very hard time “Living Fully Alive” without settling eternity in your heart!  Understanding God, the Bible, humanity, and the gospel seemed to be vitally important in our lives as we began this journey and it is now what fuels our passion.  We actually discovered that the gospel is actually “good news” and is better than we thought.  (Don’t panic – we are not doing an alter call here or trying to get you saved or re-saved; we are simply trying to share with you what we have discovered.)

Growing up, we both learned that God initially loved us, but because of sin and our “flesh” (humanness), we would spend the rest of our lives trying to perfect, change, prove, earn, and strive to keep that love flowing.  We were taught to look through the lens of “positional righteousness.” We were told that our spirits were made righteous when we accepted Christ into our hearts but the rest of us was on a life long soul cleansing journey that determined how connected we would be to God. What this looked like in our lives was “The better I behave, the more time I spend doing holy things, the more I become perfect in every way determines how much of God I have in my life and where I will end up for eternity.” Just like the first original sin in the garden, we were trying to be Christ-like through our own efforts; trying to obtain the free gift of grace through works is a sure fire way to wind up on the hamster wheel of hopelessness. But we have great news for you – that is not the gospel!  Jesus is the totality of the gospel.  Let us explain:

Salvation created our identity and nothing is greater than what Jesus did for us on the cross. He secured our righteousness, holiness, relationship with the Father, and our eternity when He stepped into our place and gave His life for us. Because of Jesus we now stand securely in God’s pleasure. We have actually been crucified with Christ, we are now dead to sin, and we are a living breathing new creation that was resurrected when He was resurrected. It’s all a gift, an unmerited one, given to us through Christ’s perfect sacrifice. Nothing we did gave us righteousness and salvation and nothing we do can take it away. Now, not only are we saved and made righteous, but the fullness of God dwells within us. What we could not do, work through the law to obtain righteousness, holiness, God’s pleasure, and a secure eternity with the Godhead, Jesus did for all humanity when He became flesh, took on the sin of the world, gave His life on the cross, and was resurrected into glory.

That’s it! It’s really that simple! Jesus is enough! He finished His work and what He did was enough for every human being that ever has been and ever will be on this planet.

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By MissionCOLE, ago

LIE: There are “Dark Places” within us that WE have to fix!

Welcome to Week #1 of our Journey to Living Fully Alive

The Lie: There are dark places within us that WE have to fix or clean up

If you had a chance to read our stories, you will have discovered that the journey to ‘Living Fully Alive’ for us was really all about our hearts. We tend to believe that this is also true for every human being on the planet. Our hearts or our spirit (words that are often used interchangeably), were designed from the beginning to be known and to be loved.

Our greatest desire is to be known and to be loved by God first. We want to know that He is pleased with us and desires to have a relationship with us. But when the things that we are taught and the experiences that we have, seem to speak the opposite (that He can not be pleased with us unless we are perfect and He can not be with us if we make a mistake) – our hearts are crushed.

We spent most of our lives hating ourselves because we did not feel like we could ever be good enough to be loved by God or that for some reason He had not chosen us or did not want us, or maybe we had too many dark places inside of us to be accepted or worthy of love.

If you too, are like us, you may feel like you have some “dark places” that prevent you from receiving love. The most common examples of “dark places” are:

  • Failures – mistakes, poor choices, bad behavior, addictions
  • Imperfections – lack of motivation, natural desires, appearance, lack of giftings or talent, not being enough, not being able to measure up
  • Priorities – lack of diligence in spiritual disciplines, putting relationships & money before God, not loving others well, not being able to accomplish dreams or tasks
  • Body – negative emotions, unhealthy lifestyle, bad cravings, shape & size of your body, hormones, sexual desires, PMS, sickness
  • Mind – destructive thinking, crazy thoughts, imagination

It is sad to realize that we have actually been taught to believe that God is not present in these so called darkened areas of our existence. If we believe God is not present in these areas of our life, and God is Love, then we will keep love from these areas of ourselves that need it the most. It is even sadder when we realize that the result of starving ourselves of love is living with disunity within ourselves, shame, guilt, condemnation, pain, and exhaustion. And how were we taught to deal with this pain? If you are like us, you were taught to find a way to fix yourself, hide your real self while keeping it all together, or deny the pain altogether by throwing a scripture at it – until one day you eventually explode and break down.    (more…)

By MissionCOLE, ago