Have you ever noticed when God is talking to you that He brings the message to you again and again? God has been washing me with a truth as steady and relentless as the waves of the ocean rush upon the shore. Be careful that you don’t dismiss this. The blood of Christ is the only total and complete payment required for forgiveness. His blood payment has taken us from one place to another place, from death to life.
And because He did that, there is nothing I can do to get More forgiveness and nothing I can do to get Less forgiveness. I know we all heard this upon salvation. But between God’s revelation in the Bible, recent songs, and this amazing book, The Naked Gospel, I am realizing I have been seduced by a partial gospel, even a false one.
Forgiveness ONLY comes by a blood payment. Only blood makes the way for payment of sin. So when I ask for forgiveness from others, am I offering to cut my skin so that blood drips out? When I demand or want others to seek forgiveness from me, do I really want them to rip their flesh to satisfy my offense? Heaven forbid.
And when we, in our half-gospel state, go to the Everlasting Father and “ask for forgiveness,” do we really want Jesus to go back on the cross and suffer for us yet again as if somehow His agony was not enough the first time? Was the blood payment made by Christ too impotent to pay for my sin, or your sin? Again, Heaven forbid.
So forgiveness is a done deal. It is THE blood payment that we stand on again and again for our own offenses and for the offenses of others. His blood paid for the sins of the world. There is truly that kind of power in the Blood.
But WHY did Jesus make this total and complete blood payment? What bill was He paying? He paid for our inability to keep the law — any part of the law — even the good parts we like to measure ourselves by. Let me say that again: Jesus paid for the sin that came when we lived under the law. And now we no longer live under the law because He has fully paid for our inability to keep it AND He has ushered in a new system, a new covenant.
If there is now no law, something must have taken its place. Christ in you. Not in a religious way. Not in a philosophical way, but in a living, breathing way. In the same way that we learn to bank our whole relationship on the blood of Christ, NOW we bank our whole living experience on the presence of the Spirit inside us. We once were dead. But now we live because His Holy Heartbeat is within us.
Does anyone else need to go run around the building naked and screaming??? I have lived too many years trying to keep some laws and being free from others. I have lived too many years trying to do the right thing according to someone else’s standard. And now with greater and greater intensity, I see that the Holy Spirit is leading my every step because His goal is to walk me into more and more freedom. Yes, I fail. Blood payment. Yes, I will sin. Blood payment. But I am no longer dead because of my sin. He has taken me from death to life, His life in me.
Let the word of God speak to you:
He Tore Down the Wall
1-6It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.7-10Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing. Ephesians 2, The Message.
Friends, there is more, so so much more. Listen to this song and Rejoice. We are free indeed.