A Sobering Reminder

Work has been incredibly busy these last several weeks. It is such a blessing to be able to come home and not have any of that work to worry about and then to go in the next morning refreshed and ready to get back on it. I have been enjoying it greatly and the Lord has been blessing. There are always challenges of some sort, but I am continually amazed by how God gets me through each of them and teaches me more about waht it means to trust Him. I ought not go into specifics, but I had been praying regarding a difficult circumstance and was just floored by how God did what I truly didn't feel was possible in order to resolve it. He didn't need to do that. He could have let me continue to battle... but He completely took care of it. I can't thank Him enough. It is pathetic that I doubt Him so much. I have so far to go. He is so good!

I was thinking about this situation and reading in Jude this evening and verse 5 stuck out to me:

Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe.

This isn't your normal verse for encouagement, but I feel that I need to hear words like these just like I need to be encouraged by His goodness to pursue Christ. There is so much focus on eternal security, God's grace, God's love, God's mercy, God's compassion, etc. that I sense in my own heart that I don't reverence Him how I ought to. I don't have the godly fear that I ought to have for God. I need to see Him as holy and just. If God destroyed so many of His chosen people when they didn't believe, who am I to think that God is just so gracious now that I don't need to worry about it? God is gracious--very very gracious. I am not trying to make light of all those things that I mentioned above... those truths about God are absolutely vital to our understanding of Him. At the same time, I need that reminder that He is perfectly holy and perfectly just in order to have a true perspective on who God is. Without His holiness and justice, I would have no reason to be so thankful for His unending grace. It is the reality of my sin in light of His holiness and the guilty sentence placed on me by His perfect justice that points me to my need of Christ.

This reality brings so much joy to the end of Jude:

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

God, make me to know all of You so that I love and obey You as I ought to. Make me to know my end! I am no more than dust. I cannot stand on my own. It is only by Your grace that I can do anything but stumble. I long for the day when I stand before You blameleess and with great joy because of Christ. Thank You for dying in my place.