What do you focus on with your best friend? How about with your spouse or significant other? Your family?
Do you concentrate on what you have in common? Do you remember how they have wronged you?
Are you confident in how good things are, or are your thoughts consumed with how they just don’t measure up to your standards?
Do you tell others the positive things about them? Or do you feel justified in telling others about what you see as negative qualities?
Does how you treat them, how you talk about them to others, have any impact on that relationship?
How do they treat you, or talk about you? Does that affect how close you feel to them?
What does a healthy relationship even look like?
What about Jesus?
Do we focus on how Jesus has wronged us? How He just doesn’t meet (or mete) our standards? Do we tell everyone negative things about Jesus?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no to the last 3 questions. How do you even measure against His perfection?
So, let’s flip it around.
Does Jesus focus on how we have wronged Him? I think some people really believe He does, but Scripture tells us He throws our sins as far as the east is from the west. That there is no record of wrong.
Is He disappointed that we just don’t measure up to Him? I mean– who can, right? Scripture reminds us that Jesus is our strength, the Holy Spirit is both our Teacher and our Comforter, and that God is our Father. We have been adopted by Him, grafted into the vine of His family tree!
Does Jesus tell everyone the negative things He knows about us? No. Instead, He is our Mediator. He prays for us– He prayed for us all in the Garden of Gethsemane. He felt so much love and compassion, burdened so deeply for us then, that it caused Him to sweat His blood as He prayed! Who else has ever done that for even one of us?
And then– then He willingly died to become the final sacrifice to God, to pay for our failings, our inability to do right by God.
He became our Mediator– standing between God and the punishment for rebelling against God in our actions and in our hearts. He became our covering, the lens God now views us through.
If this is how much we are worth to Jesus, how much should we practice love, kindness, generosity– forgiveness– with our friends, spouses and loved ones?
The saying is, “You can’t pick your family.”
Jesus didn’t pick us– and yet He did! Our sins, our rebellion, against our Creator were the cause for Jesus to be abused and nailed to a cross to be murdered. There was no justification for Jesus to be killed, He did nothing wrong. We did! Jesus could have hated us all, instead. He could have focused on all we did wrong, and turned away with hatred and anger at us. He could have– but He did not. And God accepted His willingness to die the eternal death every one of us deserves. And because there was no sin found in Jesus, God raised Him back to life, and took Him up to sit next to Himself, at and as His righteous right hand. Jesus is God’s Right Hand man.
And Jesus, having done all of that for us, does not focus on what we did to cause Him to be murdered. No. Instead He has given His life to God, to help us be better. To strengthen us. To give us confidence. To free us from the death traps that have been set out for us by the enemy of God, the enemy of our souls. He sets us free as we trust in all He is, all He has done, and all that will come to pass.
Jesus has forgiven us. Jesus has forgotten our sins, all of our sins.
Shouldn’t we?
It’s no longer about sin– it’s about our relationship with Jesus.
Jesus paid it all!
All to Him I owe!
Sin had left a crimson stain,
He washed it white as snow!
Jemtree's Heart 