The Bible doesn’t teach you to follow rules. It is a picture of Jesus.
- While words may tell you what God is like and even what He may want from you, you cannot do any of it on your own.
- Life and living are in Him and in no other. You didn’t think you could live the righteousness of God on your own, did you?”
Relationships are a whole lot messier than rules, but rules will never give you answers to the deep questions of the heart, and they will never love you.
- Religion is about having the right answers, and some of its answers are right.
- But God is about the process that takes you to the living answer, and once you get to Him, He will change you from the inside.
- There are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brains because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don’t know God at all.
- So even though they are right, they may still be wrong.”
You might see a piece of art, or music, or silence, or through people, or in creation, or in your joy and sorrow.
- God’s ability to communicate is limitless, living and transforming, and it will always be tuned to His goodness and love.
- You will hear and see God in the Bible in fresh ways. Just don’t look for rules and principles; look for relationship – a way of coming to be with God.
- You cannot see in your mind’s eye something you cannot experience – “Spirit”
It should be very freeing to know that you can offer God nothing, at least not anything that can add or take away from who God is…That should alleviate any pressure to perform.
- Humans have the tendency to restructure language according to their independence and need to perform.
- God came up with the Ten Commandments for us to give up trying to be righteous on our own. It was a mirror to reveal just how filthy our face gets when we live independently.
There is no mercy or grace in rules, not even for one mistake. That’s why Jesus fulfilled all of it for us – so that it no longer has jurisdiction over us.
- And the Law that once contained impossible demands – ‘Thou shall not…’ – actually becomes a promise we fulfill in you.”
- But keep in mind that if you live your life alone and independently, the promise is empty.
- Jesus laid the demand of the Law to rest; it no longer has any power to accuse or command.
- Jesus is both the promise and its fulfillment.
Re-source: Revelation
used to emphasize the surprising or remarkable quality of someone or something
In Jesus we are not under any law. All things are lawful.
- Those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust God to live in them.
- Trying to keep the Law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control.
- It grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them.
- You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge.
- Enforcing rules, especially in more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vein attempt to create certainty out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, God has a great fondness for uncertainty.
- Rules cannot bring freedom; they have only the power to accuse.
- Responsibility and expectation are just another form of rules we are no longer under.
God am a verb. “I am that I am.”
- God is alive, dynamic, ever active, and moving. God is a being verb.
- God’s very essence is a verb, He’s more attuned to verbs than nouns.
- Verbs such as confessing, repenting, living, loving, responding, growing, reaping, changing, sowing, running, dancing, singing, and so on.
- Humans, on the other hand, have a knack for taking a verb that is alive and full of grace and turning it into a dead noun or principle that reeks of rules – then something growing and alive dies.
- Nouns exist because there is a created universe and physical reality, but if the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead.
- Unless ‘I AM,’ there are no verbs, and verbs are what makes the universe alive.
- For something to move from death to life, you must introduce something living and moving into the mix.
- To move from something that is only a noun to something dynamic and unpredictable, to something living and present tense, is to move from Law to grace.
craving and resource from “The Shack” by WM. Paul Young
