God Sees All That You Are (#577)

Is the fact that God knows you to the core of your being good news or bad news? The answer will tell you a lot of what you believe about him, you, and the possibility of relationship with him. If you know his love then you want him to know everything about you, even the broken places so that he can work there to transform us into his glory. For those truly growing to know him, repentance and confession are not the horrible, scary words religious performance turned them into, nor something to be avoided. In fact, you can't truly repent until his love wins its way into your heart. Knowing him, however, make repentance and confession a delightful part of our engagement with him as his love seeks to win us out of all the places that sin seeks to destroy us. Inside his love, both the fear of hell and the joy of sin goes away and we get to be the people he really created us to be.

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13 Comments

  1. 2000 years ago Jesus told us that there is a difference between knowing about God like the Pharisees and knowing the God who indwells us. He said, “The kingdom is within” us. If God knows us and is actually intimate with our innermost being, shouldn’t we be as well? If we want to know Him we must interact with him. If He is in us that is where this must happen. Then and only then can we be aware of Him, actually conscious of His presence. Why are we so afraid to venture into the reality of true faith; faith that says I can know God for real? Why is this so hard for the religious community? Could it be that our doctrinal stance has tied us to outdated belief systems that effectively prevent our appreciation of real faith? Are we so afraid of getting it wrong that we don’t get it at all? The entirety of the experience of a real relationship with God is within us. Awareness of God is inside, in our deepest personhood. Knowledge of God is in our minds. Knowledge can be completely wrong and we can still have a real relationship with the God who is within. And vice versa! Yet it is our knowledge about which we argue, isn’t it?

    I would rather know Jesus personally than be studied enough to be able to write a treatise on the trinity relationships for analysis by some august body of “scholars of religion.”

    As you folks have said, practicing the process of repentance, and equally important, actually accepting and applying God’s forgiveness is what moves our being closer to God, not our understanding of the path. First we forgive ourselves then we accept that God has as well, then we take the faith step to appropriate His abundant acceptance of our ever increasing commitment to Him and His process. By this we actually prove our faith. That is what this crazy world is longing to see for real.

    • Wow! I have read and reread your comments. “Could it be that our doctrinal stance has tied us to outdated belief systems that effectively prevent our appreciation of real faith? Are we so afraid of getting it wrong that we don’t get it at all?” It is so freeing to simply respond to his love by loving him, ourselves and others.

  2. Hey Guys,
    In answer to Brad’s question “Where does it say that God can’t look on sin?”… Habakkuk 1:13 “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil: you cannot tolerate wrong?” The problem comes because people do not keep reading down to the second part of the verse where it says, “Why then do you tolerate the treacherous? Why are you silent while the wicked swallow up those more righteous than themselves?” I think Habakkuk was just incredulous to imagine that God would or does look on sin.
    If God could not look on sin, He couldn’t have come as God in the flesh and dwelt among us. 😉

    Thanks

  3. Hi Wayne and Brad

    Always love listening to the conversations you two have. As I listened this time I heard talk about change and the different thoughts on religious requirements and behaviour modification vs a relationship with Papa that moves us towards change. It is a subject that I have been dealing with for decades, because I found myself often in a place where I do not do the things I want to do and do those things that I do not want to do. While I can relate to what Paul is saying, it still did not really help me. It is only in recent years that I am beginning to understand things more clearly.

    I am currently reading a book called “Stop Trying to Fix Yourself” (Snipes) that provides a really good summary of thought thoughts and understandings I have come to over the past number of years about the challenge we have in struggling with sin even though we are new creations in Christ. It is one of the best books I have read recently and highly recommend it as study on living by the flesh or living in the Spirit without being religious or feeling condemned.

    A big realization in the past few years is that the “flesh” is always at war with God. And since we are still living here in this life, our flesh – while “dead” because of Christ – is still nonetheless with us. I think a lot of Christians, myself included, have thought that a new creation equals no struggle with the flesh. or that we our flesh will be changed or can be corrected. As a result, when the flesh comes at us with choices to sin, we think we are failures and not lining up to God’s will. But we have failed to recognize that we cannot redeem the flesh or fleshly thinking. We can choose to not agree with it, and we can choose to follow the Spirit, but we cannot “save” the flesh. God has saved us, but he has not saved our flesh. That is being put to death.

    If we think that we should somehow be able to reach a point where fleshly thinking no longer occurs, then we are going to be very disappointed and we will live with a constant sense of failure and inadequacy.

    I believe that as we grow in Papa’s love for us and learn more about His character and goodness, when the flesh pops up in our lives, we will begin to recognize it for what it is and begin choosing to agree with God’s way rather than the flesh. We see his way as better than the flesh. We begin to make choices empowered by faith in His goodness.

    I have heard it said that the soul chooses to mirror the flesh or the Spirit. The flesh brings “death” (sin is its own punishment) but the Spirit is life (freedom). Repentance is choosing to agree with God and not the flesh. When I change my mind and start agreeing with God’s way, then the Spirit beings to work in me to be able to choose actions that follow the Spirit and not the flesh. But when I am not in agreement, then there cannot be any change.

    I am asking God to help me to see truth, to renew my mind, to choose his way, but not to save my fleshly thinking. I choose not to live in condemnation when I inadvertently choose the flesh. It does not separate me from His love, it does not unsafe me. It just means I do not yet see clearly that God’s way is better than my own. I rest in His ability to work in me to will and to do.

  4. You know, I know a lot of people have a hard time with the brokenness language and I’m convinced a lot of it has to do with being around those who did not do a good job of explaining it. How do you explain it to people who’ve endured a lot of hardship or trauma in a way that helps them to understand while at the same time not getting pulled under more condemnation and shame about their condition?

    • Pat,
      Perhaps those who failed to explain brokenness before did not see Papa’s true nature, or , perhaps this answer did not match up with the viewer’s expectations. Either way, there isn’t a standard answer which could do justice to all that God is…and explaining his loving nature to those who view Him through their individual pain is really something only He can accomplish. For the great majority of us, what we believe must first fail in order for there to be enough room for the other. (Think ” old wine skins”) Most faulted beliefs about God lie within the good vs evil nature we inherited upon the fall; a road He warned us not to walk down in the garden. It seems His love powered concept is something we find hard to accept… Within a relationship, a love exchange occurs, where both parties walk together; the result is left within the realm of His spiritually organic nature. And this is where I have come to leave “explaining” pretty much anything. I hope those people will get what they truly need; and you may be the one walking with them when they do, but you probably won’t even know you spoke what the Spirit needed said to a heart which was listening. And that’s even funner to discover when you have further conversations in the future.

  5. Loved listening to this today! It is so simple! ‘Love opens to you the truth’. ‘ We love him because he first loved us’ It’s the ‘goodness of God leads us to repentance’. Oh, that we can love others in the same way!

  6. Repentance and confession are wonderful blessings of liberation as Abba works in those still broken places.

  7. God knowing me fully…I tend to look at it as a bad thing. Maybe it was the way I was conditioned by family, friends, the IC, pastors, teachers, and scholars over the years. But primarily I think it is, I simply like my sin, more than I like getting well.

    The Bible says sin is fun, for a season. It seems for me that season may not be up as yet. Maybe it will take something catastrophic. Hopefully just a tweak here, a nudge there, a change in direction another place. I didn’t arrive in my sinful state overnight, neither will I be transformed overnight. But I hope to be transformed, and eventually sanctified, in God’s timing, and God’s way.

  8. “If you can’t see how God loves you at your most broken, you will have no idea how to love the world where they’re broken.”
    Wow! We were talking about this very thing – just this morning – with the group of men that I get together with. I was saying that if God does not show up in all my darkness and frailty and wounds and sin and…, then how will I/we know that He really loves me/us no matter what! If you can’t show up and love me at my lowest and most vulnerable, than I don’ t think You are love. I am not in this reality yet; and don’t know if I ever will be. However, I do not want a God who will only show up when I am doing “right.” I need you to go the pit of hell and back to come get me, because I can not rescue myself.

  9. Just a comment on the ” God can’t look on sin” people.
    The other one is ” God does not listen to sinners”.
    If both were true then we would no be able to come to him as having sin in us He would not listen or look at us.

    A loving father always looks for and listen to His children.

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