God This Week
I found a wonderful verse this week while I was studying the Divinity of Christ in scripture. I was typing out various verses into a document for myself and re-read one that I had found this summer. It was almost like a purpose statement for the Messiah and speaks beautifully of who we are to Jesus.
Titus 2:13-14–“while we wait for the blessed hope–the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.”
Redeemed from wickedness. In our culture, we tend to run after wickedness, to surround ourselves with what we want when we want it and in the quantities that we think will ease our souls. But there comes a point, if one lives long enough, when one realizes that the wickedness that has been so delightful now clings and holds and traps and drowns. It is difficult to get away when you have sought wickedness with such a fervent ardor. The beers downed weekend after weekend, become hang overs and pot bellies and an insistent voice from the refrigerator telling one that there is another bottle, alone and waiting in the very back, you really shouldn’t go to bed until that last one is gone. The gossipy phone calls become hurt feelings and feuds and friends who won’t meet your eye in the grocery store. The few puffs of pot you have only at parties, becomes a weary lack of energy and drive, it slowly changes your emotional age, freezing your social development so that you are forever sixteen and don’t grow beyond that turbulent age in your relationships. The gym membership that kept your young body strong and supple, becomes a terrible weight and a struggle. You can be healthy, but you cannot get younger, once the years begin to creep by. A losing battle that will suck you dry if you let it. For anything can become wickedness. Those things that consume us, that take the place of God. And they are ravenous for our time and hearts.
But Christ came to redeem us from the trap that we have forged.
He redeemed us so that He could have a people that are His very own, a people who are eager to do what is good.
It is an honor to have been rescued for such a noble purpose. Eager to do what is good. Am I eager to do what is good? That is His hope for me. Somehow, just knowing this desire of His, it makes me want to be what Christ hoped I would become.
Another verse to underline, another verse to cherish, another verse to try and live.
