Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!

O Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive

to the voice of my pleas for mercy!

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,

O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness,

that you may be feared. – Psalm 130:1-4

We all fail. We fall short, mess up, and yes, even sin. It doesn’t sound encouraging, or very much like good news, but wait, we’ll get there.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by faults and failures, and to let our focus on them make them seem even larger and more numerous. It is no wonder that we work so hard to ignore and dismiss them. We create cute sayings that make them seem less important. We try to redefine the rules of life so that it appears no one fails. Though we try to make it seem insignificant , somewhere inside, we still feel the weight of it. The good news is, God has a better plan.

The Psalmist recognized his brokenness, and rather than running from it, trying to hide it, or embracing it, he cries out to God to heal it. In an honest moment with the Creator, he declares the weight and pain of sin, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?”

The temptation is to believe that God sees us the way we see ourselves. We envision God, scorecard and red pen in hand, keeping a record of our failures. The further we go, the longer the list seems to become, until the weight is so great we cannot bear up under it, but God’s thoughts and ways are not our thoughts and ways. Once again, God has a better plan.

I know there are times in my journey when it feels like my choices change God’s thoughts of me. I’ve even bought into the lie that my failures, my sin, create such a separation between us that God probably doesn’t want to even talk with me. Those are precisely the times that I need to remember that all of Scripture declares God’s love, that the lens through which God looks at me is compassion and forgiveness.

With God, there is always forgiveness, there is always healing, there is always hope. Jesus did not come into the world and offer himself, so that we could learn to be at peace with our brokenness. He came to heal that brokenness, forgive our sin, and give us new life. As Jesus’ words in John 10:10 close, he says, “I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly.”

Like the Psalmist, we can see the weight of our brokenness, but we can allow that knowledge to bring us to a place of awe and wonder because, “With you (God) there is forgiveness.” Rather than being crushed by the weight of our failures, we can we can experience the freedom of forgiveness. God did not wait for you to awaken this morning so that you could be reminded of your failures and hide. Instead, heaven was waiting for you to arise in the love of God and be free.

So, today is a good day, to accept God’s perspective, God’s truth, and love in the forgiveness and freedom Jesus gives us. We can release the weight of our own failure, walk in the joy of freedom, and go into the world to offer God’s compassion, forgiveness, and freedom to all who will receive it.

The post The Freedom of Forgiveness appeared first on Thinking Faith Cafe.

Yesterday, we considered the challenge of overcoming negative sources of spiritual gravity holding us back from living an adventurous life with Jesus. In order to break free from the pull of these strongholds, we must first identify them. While the list could be quite long, here are seven common sources of negative spiritual gravity:

1. Familiarity

This is the one, as a pastor, I encounter most frequently. It usually expresses itself in one of two ways, either, “We’ve never done it that way before,” or “We’ve always done it this way.” Both are ways of articulating the deeper meaning, “This is what I know, and I am afraid of change.” This is understandable. With all of its challenges and problems, what we know is familiar. We know what to expect. Making changes may lead to something better, but how can we be sure? What if the change turns out to be bad? Staying with what we already know, feels much more secure, therefore, we resist letting go.

2. Past Failure

Maybe we tried something new in the past and it didn’t work, or maybe we saw someone else fail when they tried to break free, but the fear of failure is powerful, especially when we’ve experienced it before. Someone breaks our trust and we easily pull back from trusting in the future. We try a new business venture and it doesn’t work out so we squelch our entrepreneurial spirit. An attempt to live by faith seems to come with more struggles, making it easier to settle for a more “reasonable” understanding of faith. When things go bad, we become far less likely to try new things in the future.

3. Past Success

Ironically, when things go well in our past, it can also inhibit stepping out in faith. Why fix something that isn’t broken, or, why not just do what worked before? I often hear it expressed this way, “The church I went to when I was younger did it this way and it worked.” That is probably very true, and it may even be the right choice for us today, but the assumption is, it worked well enough in the past, it should still work in the future. So, instead of asking God how we should move forward, we take our direction from past success. It happens in churches, but it also happens in our personal lives as we keep trying to do what worked well the last time we tried, often leaving us stuck in the past instead of moving into our future.

4. Perceived Safety

Sometimes, we believe that we are safer where we are, than we would be doing something new. Certainly, this can be the case, but many times we convince ourselves that we are safer inside our sinking ship than we would be risking the open water in a life raft. We insulate ourselves from the realities of our circumstances to reinforce that belief, but the situation is actually no different. We feel safe, but we can be more at risk than we know.

5. Negativity

“That will never work!” Many of us are conditioned to think negatively. We start our evaluations looking for, and accentuating, all the possible concerns. When asked to list the “pros” and “cons” of an action or decision, we begin with the “cons,” and easily find more items for that list. Instead of seeing possibilities, we see problems, and we let that worldview shape our decision. One of the great dangers of this source of negative gravity is the more we feed it, the more dominant it becomes. As we search for, and speak, negativity, we train our minds and our spirits to think this way and thus, it becomes easier to find and say even more discouraging things, sapping our strength to move forward. Like adding weight and resistance to the rocket we are trying to launch, we sabotage ourselves at the outset.

6. Lack of Faith

I know, saying, “you don’t have enough faith,” is often used as a tool to beat people up, but Jesus spoke it frequently, not as a condemnation, but as an honest assessment and an invitation to think differently. Without faith, it is outrageously difficult to embrace new things, or to step into a new stage of our destiny. In many ways, faith is the fuel we burn to create the energy for upward momentum. The more faith we have in our tank, the easier it is for us to achieve liftoff and begin to soar where Christ has led.

7. A Controlling Spirit

Admit it, sometimes life feel wildly out of control. The more chaotic things feel, the more we try to control them. I recently discovered this was a growing problem for me. Over the last year, a number of things happened to reinforce the lack of control I actually possessed over many circumstances. During some recent prayer and reflection, I became aware at how much I was trying to find order through my own ability to control my circumstances. Of course, this control was just an illusion, and all I managed to do was create large amounts of stress in my life. Yes, things are often in chaos, but the good news is that God does some of the greatest work in chaos, and speaks order in the midst of it. Attempting to control things only restricts us from releasing our circumstances to God and embracing God’s power to walk through the storm together.

Maybe you find yourself wrestling with some of these issues, and maybe, they point to some other strong sources of gravity holding you back in your personal journey. Take heart, Jesus overcame the world, and he can help you overcome every stronghold that is holding you back.

In my next post, we will discover how to break free and soar. To do that, we need to know what is holding us back, and trust the One who is calling us forward.

The post 7 Sources of Negative Spiritual Gravity appeared first on Thinking Faith Cafe.