When I woke up to the truth in who God says I am, I began to start living in a way like never before. I began to start loving unconditionally, forgiving excessively, and walking in truth and light.

Waking up to the reality of who God says we as people are, things change, lives changes, communities change, we change. So who does god say i am anyway??

God says we are forgiven, not put up with, not tolerated but truly wiped clean. But what makes this even better and the part we as Christians always seem to miss is that it is free. We didn’t earn it, we actually could never earn it, But rather God himself has earned it for us. He even thinks we are wonderful despite what we have done. Psalm 139:14 says it best ” I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”  The fine folks over at Merriam- Webster defined wonderful like this- “exciting wonder : marvelous, astonishing or unusually good.” Wonderful is a loosely used word now but what the writer of this text is getting at is that we are not just good we are awesome because God says we are.

Ecclesiastes 3:11  “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.”

Many times we loose our true sense of identity, therefore forgetting who god says i am. We become unknown. We create this longing in our hearts to become known. This is a road to destruction, this is when sin creeps in and begins to have a hold on our hearts and makes us do things we swore we would never do, or become the person we swore we would never be. Then when that little voice of whats right and wrong creeps back into our head we start going back to church reading our bibles to make up for our sin and we create what I like to call the “false appearance of doing okay”. When asked “How are you?” or “Is anything i can pray about for you?” we sharply respond some churchy artificial response such as “Yep! I am doing great! Never Better! How are you?”  But inside we are not okay we are actually the farthest thing from okay, Consumed by guilt and shame, But realize that no one is “doing great” we all need just as much as grace.

I think we say this for one of two reasons 1- We fear what others or God will think, and 2- Fear of not living up to the high unreachable standard we have set for ourselves. 

A book I read named The Cure (Great Book Buy it on Amazon) describes this idea as wearing a mask. The ones closest to us only know the version of you that lives like you are wearing a mask. When you wear a mask you bottle up all the problems and pain you have and keep it to yourself. We believe the foolish impression that your sin makes us loved less by God and the people around us. But its the opposite! God hasn’t left you nor has he gone anywhere hes just waiting for you to realize the freedom in grace. When you become known to the people that love you and can have an honest conversation with you about your struggles you will become free to live under the waterfall of grace. 

“You are enough”