God's Sufficient Grace

Nothing can for sin atone...

It's been another week of amazing conversations with my students while discussing the hymn "Nothing But the Blood of Jesus." This week I taught most groups verse 2 which begins by talking about Christ as our atonement. What a hard concept to explain to kids! Even after looking up various definitions in dictionaries and study Bibles, I still stumbled around a lot in my words. I realized that the idea of "atonement" needed some background, so we also talked about God's just wrath, our need of punishment, and Christ's perfections. Again, I was amazed that so many classes listened so intently - some students even with tears in their eyes. One particular class (one of my most difficult!) had a lot of questions, most of which came from a boy named "Pow". He seemed really concerned about God being angry at unbelievers and of his own connected God's punishment with what he had heard about hell (although I didn't really talk about hell originally). He really seemed to be sorting through everything I said, but continued to have a heaviness on his heart. Please pray for him and the rest of his 2nd grade class. His teacher from last year was amazed when I told her about our conversation. Apparently he spent most of last year telling the other students not to listen to the Bible lesson and not to believe in Yahweh because He was not true (Pow comes from a staunch Buddhist home), but slowly throughout the last year has begun to open his heart to God's word - even to the point of memorizing class and Good News Club memory verses! But I think it's still a great battle for him. Like many others, he has completely different teachings being thrown at him that he has to sort through (as a 7 year old!), and should he choose to follow Christ, it would be at a great cost.

Today my friend Jaime read something to me as we shared our hearts over coffee at a cute, Thai-style Starbucks. It was such an encouragement to me in my weakness as a bearer (or explainer!) of the gospel, I wanted to post it...

"This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God's way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities.

And so here I am, preaching and writing about things that are way over my head, the inexhaustible riches and generosity of Christ. My task is to bring out in the open and make plain what God, who created all this in the first place, has been doing in secret and behind the scenes all along. Through followers of Jesus like yourselves gathered in churches, this extraordinary plan of God is becoming known and talked about even among the angels!

All this is proceeding along lines planned all along by God and then executed in Christ Jesus. When we trust in him, we're free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go. So don't let my present trouble on your behalf get you down. Be proud!

My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.

God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us."

from Ephesians 3, The Message

posted by Catherine Rogers @ 4:26 AM