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And here I am. Writing another blog post. It's been quite a while, but I think that should be ok.

Galatians 5:4-6
4You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. 6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Last Sunday night I went to a concert in Southern Florida. Jimmy Needham was the artist, a singer whom I had only recently discovered.
I'm not here to write a concert review, but I will mention a few things about it. Jimmy Needham is pretty well-known around the country, so I assumed there would be a lot more people than there were. It was just a tiny conference-style room. We were there 45 minutes early and had the closest seats, right behind the reserved chairs. So we got the full experience. They started out with some worship by the home church's band. It was incredible, not because they were stunnily talented (they were, but I only half noticed it), but because it had been a long time since I had been in that kind of environment, live music, in a crowd, all of us singing to Jesus. A few months back I had thought about how truly amazing it is, just to have so many people using their energy to sing to God. And there's a difference, singing to God and for God and because of God. All three happened.

And then Jimmy came and sang/spoke for an hour and a half. What particularily stayed with me was his explanation of his song "Forgiven and Loved." He explained that it started out as a journal entry. "Tell me I'm forgiven and loved." Jimmy spoke of the God of his earlier years, the God with a "disappointed" sign plastered across his face.
I have been struggling this probably my entire life. It is my flesh and my insecurities that claim God is not pleased, that God's wrath remains against my sin, that I do not deserve love and that I cannot please God.
There is a lot of Truth in those feelings. That is probably why I feel that way---there is something broken in my communion with God, there is something broken about me, something actually ISN'T right.
But Jesus makes it right. He made it right and is making it right. Romans 8:1 says, "Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." None. At all. Jimmy kept repeating that that is the craziest verse in the Bible. It really is. It goes against my instinct. I want to work for it, but God says I absolutely, never ever can.
See it like this:
All of us have become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;
we all shrivel up like a leaf,
and like the wind our sins sweep us away.
Isaiah 64:6

And then:

...in all these things we are more than conquerers through him who loved us.
Romans 8:37

How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
1 John 3:1


"We cannot trade empty for empty, we must go to the waterfall, for there’s a break in the cup that holds love, inside us all."
David Wilcox

"But how much more could we enjoy each other if instead of trying to get them to fill us we walked with each other toward the waterfall?"
Mike Donehey

I need the waterfall.