Living life in light of the Gospel

Part of our training at CIT is called HOM (Heart of the Missionary). It is geared as a devotional on how to not only have the head knowledge that Jesus is my Lord in Savior, but how to have it in your heart and live your life out of that. I can definitely identify with this. My whole life I have said with my lips that Jesus has set me free from my sin and that’s all that I need to do. But my life was very much lived out of how good I can be. I realized this week (as indeed God has been trying to grab my attention on this matter for quite sometime, but I have ignored it) that I am guilty of making excuses for my sin and for trying to make up for that sin by doing something good in return. I also realized that I’m not alone in this – in fact, Paul wrote a book of the Bible on this subject. He says in Galatians 3:3 “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?”

So what grabbed my attention on this matter? It was a simple illustration. I’m a visual learner so this is what I needed to see. I’m going to attempt to recreate the illustration here.

This illustration depicts the timeline of a believer’s life. Above the center line depicts God’s Holiness and below is My Sinfulness. All that is grey above and below the line is what is Unknown to Me and all that is white is what is Known to me. The line is wavy to show that during our life, we have ups and downs as we learn more about God’s holiness and our own sinfulness. So at the moment of accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior of my sins, I know very little of my own sin and God’s holiness, but I acknowledge that the cross of Jesus is sufficient to bridge that gap. So that my sin no longer separates me from the holiness of God.

Simply put, the Gospel is “You are more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, yet you can be more loved than you ever dared hope, at the same time, because Jesus lived and died in your place (Tim Keller)”. The above illustration shows this.

Later in life, we start learning more about our own sinfulness and God’s holiness, but we keep the cross the same size in our lives leaving gaps between our sinfulness and God’s holiness. We no longer make the cross large enough to bridge. Instead, we fill the gaps with excuses for our sins and try to make up for that by doing more good works. If we continue in this habit, the gap gets larger and pretty soon our excuses and works cloud over the cross completely and we lose sight of it. If we continue this way, the weight of our sin and our own guiltiness will get too much for us and the constantly trying to do good all the time will break us.

So if we live a life in light of the Gospel, our lives should look like:

As we learn more about our sin and more about God’s holiness, our response should be to focus more closely on the cross so that it becomes larger to bridge the gap. Our sin should always point us back that we are more loved than we hoped because Jesus died in my place.

To me, this is what living our lives in light of the Gospel means. I pray that we may all live lives worthy of the Gospel so that we may stand firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel (Philippians 1:27).

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