Seamless and Smooth

03.16.13

Deuteronomy 30.6 6 And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live. (ESV)

One of the great lessons of the Old Testament is the lesson of redemption: our God is a God of grace and forgiveness. Our God is a God who makes a way. The danger of reading the Old Testament is forgetting about the New Testament where God has made a way: the Person of Jesus Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

God knew their hearts and the depth of their fallenness and the chasm that has separated them from His love. He knew they would love His blessings but turn them into curses by forgetting Him and ultimately despising Him. Wow. That sounds like us…

Their problem, and ours, has always been hanging on; we have a hard time hanging on and remembering Who God is and what He has done for us. Things get good and we forget we need God. Things go bad and we can’t get enough of Him. And the cycle cycles.

The greatest gift God gives us is Himself. He gives us Himself even though He knows we can’t handle it. He gives us Himself even though we’re miserably fickle, horribly frail, and ferociously forgetful. It is God Himself who circumcises our hearts. I think this happens as we experience Him and begin to understand His benefits. (Man, this sounds so lame!)

But the bottom line is this: God means business. He’s serious about our knowing Him and knowing Him completely. He’s serious about wiping away every sin and stain and making us whole in a way we cannot yet comprehend. Throughout eternity we may never understand the magnitude of this wholeness. But God is buying us (or has bought us) back from the tragedy of never knowing Him at all. And we need to be fitted for that kind of life.

I’m not sure I can go where I need to go in this blog entry tonight, but I do know this: in Christ is my only Hope of knowing God at all. Despite my forgetfulness and my dissing of the Holy Spirit on an almost momentary basis, God has given me in Christ what I need to know Him. In Christ my heart has been circumcised from the pull of the world and its lies to meet my needs. In Christ I am redeemed from an eternity of not knowing and in Christ I am grateful for every second, third, fourth, fifth – and bazzillionth chance.

And the ultimate goal for me is this: to love Him with all – every stinking square particle – of my heart and with all of my soul, not one ounce saved aside for anything else.

So, with that: Come Lord Jesus, come. Help me in this life to be prepared for the next and may the threshold be seamless and smooth – I pray in your Name. Amen.