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I love it when totally independent events align in a way that reveal something really important. One Sunday morning a friend sent me a text with the following Bible verse.
But as for me, afflicted and in pain—
may your salvation, God, protect me. Psalm 69:29 (NIV)
She said that she saw something that she never thought of before in this verse. It's in the last line of what we just read. She said that she had always seen salvation as being hers. It was a gift that God gave but it was given to her. Today, she thought something differently. Our reading today made her realize that salvation is God's. Though it is a gift from God, it is His. It is uniquely and unquestionably His. She really had my attention with this statement. I had to ask her to explain why that perspective was so important to her. The answer she gave made me realize how, even with salvation, the wrong focus can make it so easy to slip into victim thinking.
My friend told me that thinking of salvation as being hers mad her focus on the gift this amazing thing salvation is. That's not necessarily a bad thing, please note. She went on to point out that focusing on the gift isn't always the best thing for us in our lives. It was when my friend realized that salvation was God's that she started to focus more clearly on the giver of the gift. Now, that's a victor's perspective if I've ever heard one.
That's a pretty interesting piece of knowledge that would have kept me ruminating on what my friend learned for a while. It didn't stop there. I then went to church and, wouldn't you know it, the message tied in perfectly to this concept.
This particular Sunday service had Pastor Aaron Jayne speaking on how we are to walk in line with the truth of the gospel. He told us that Christianity isn't about behavior modification. Christianity is all about heart transformation. He went on to say that we are stuck in behaviors that aren't best for us because we aren't able to walk in line with the truth of the gospel. It is when we can't live a life of Jesus plus nothing that our behavior is something that the Bible might call sin. Stay with me a bit. I'm going to show you how this all connects in just a moment.
You see, our coping mechanisms are nothing more than our adding to the good news of Jesus. It is when the pain of this life causes us to lean on coping mechanisms to dull the pain we feel that we are living out the fact that Jesus isn't sufficient in our lives. Amazing thing is that God still loves us when we fall short in this way. He doesn't condemn us. He forgives us. That forgiveness comes with love that is unexplainable and often times not able to be duplicated in this world.
God has us on a process of transformation. That transformation happens as we let God do what He does in a process called sanctification. It isn't that God is working to change our behaviors. It is that our behaviors reveal the need to be completely transformed. That's a universal condition for human beings. Jesus is the only human that wasn't in need of transformation. We aren't falling short when we live a life of Jesus plus some coping mechanism. We are being loved as God works miracles in our lives to make Jesus be enough for us all.
This made me think of my friend's revelation this morning. It's God's salvation, not ours. If it were our salvation, we would be working harder and harder to make behavior modification a goal we might achieve. We don't have a behavior problem. We are being challenged by salvation.
God's salvation is a gift that really only pays off when we keep our focus on Him. It's the same with our identity. Working to prove who we are is just as useless an endeavor as working to make salvation be proven by how good our behavior has become. Focusing on behavior modification makes it way to easy to live a Jesus plus something kind of life. That kind of salvation isn't God's salvation. That kind of identity isn't God's gift to us either.
Sanctification is what makes it possible for things to get weeded out of the Jesus plus nothing equation. The more we live in that place where Jesus is more and more sufficient in our lives, the more we see the giver of the gift of salvation. God's salvation is a perspective that takes the victor to new heights of heart transformation.
Behavior modification is a works based approach to the free gift of salvation. When we focus solely on our ability to live a godly life, we cheapen the gift of salvation. We make the focus be something other than the giver of the gift. Focus is shifted to us. Our efforts become the most important thing in our life. Isn't that place of prominence suppose to be reserved for God alone? I think shifting our view of salvation from something that is ours to a gift that belongs only to the giver of that gift helps us shift focus. God is the focus. We are the benefactor of that focus. Transformation is the result of having our eyes on the right thing when it comes to salvation.
This doesn't mean that a walk with God will be effort free. There is a lot of work to this thing called sanctification. There is a lot of change that will happen in our lives as our hearts are transformed. The thing is that we aren't to be the focus. When we make our effort the focus we feel victimized when our efforts don't result in the kinds of transformation salvation should make happen. Behavior modification objectives have the potential to let us slip into victim thinking. Heart transformation takes God's salvation and makes it so that we can be loved into change in ways our efforts just can't duplicate.
My friend made me think differently about this gift of salvation. It is God's. As I stay focused on the giver of the gift, I change in ways that make this life so much more powerful to live out. My victor status is made possible through the gift of salvation. My identity is completed in the process of sanctification. Allow who you are to be driven by the fact that God is your focus. Let that focus make it more and more possible to live a Jesus Plus Nothing kind of life. In doing so you will find that the less than godly things that use to have such impact in your life will begin to fade in importance. That's the freedom God promises. Live in that freedom as you enjoy the power of God's salvation in your life today.
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