My Birthday: Here’s to the first of many more…

Somewhat of strange title, I know :) Yes, it is my birthday… no I’m not turning one year old… hehe, (also not turning 21…don’t get any ideas!) But this birthday IS a big first for me.

This is the first time I’ve ever been happy to see my birthday come. Sounds silly, sounds weird. But every birthday in the past has only served as a reminder of how much I didn’t do that year. How much I should have done better, how many people I could have gotten to know better, etc. A birthday only meant, “analyze how bad you failed this year...”

Many, MANY a birthday night did I lay in bed crying, truly broken that I wasted another year. Every year asking God to change me, to fix me, yet never grasping that the way I was viewing myself was completely wrong. I looked in the mirror and saw “Failure”, so intuitively I assumed God looked at me and also saw “Failure” or even more likely that he saw “Super-Mega-Gigantic-Failure”.

With that view of God’s love, it’s true I am a failure.

LUCKILY, I was dead-wrong. I’ve spent the vast, immense part of my life seeing God apart from his grace. Seeing verses like Ephesians 2:4-5:
“But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions- it is by grace you have been saved…”

I read it more like “because of his great love for us, now that we’ve cleaned ourselves up and left behind all the ‘bad things’ we did, NOW he can have mercy on us, NOW he can give us his grace.”
WRONG.
No matter how many people I heard say grace covers everything you’ve ever done and are doing, I never heard it right. I had this image of God waiting until you turned completely away from your sin, then He would love you. But only then. Now I know that’s not who our God is.

I always skipped a part of this verse:
“(He) made us alive with Christ EVEN when we were dead in transgressions”.

He made us alive with Christ EVEN before we knew of Him.
EVEN when we were caught up in our sin and loving every bit of it.
EVEN when we were cursing His existence, or not even believing it at all.
EVEN when we were doing everything we could to hurt Him.
EVEN when we were nailing Him to a cross.

EVEN still, He made us alive, gave us a chance at new life by grace through Christ’s death on the cross!
Yeah! That’s what I’ve been missing, this grace that truly is grace.
The word grace doesn’t mean “something you’re given, once you earn it”, it means “something you get that you do not deserve in any way”. Never is grace earned.
Galatians 2:21:

“I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die.”

Basically saying, that fully accepting the grace that God offers us is the only way to be satisfied. If there was something we could do or not do to earn God’s love, then Christ would not have had to die on the cross. But Christ DID die on the cross, so why would we push away God’s incredible gift to us? Why would I want to spend another birthday crying myself to sleep, wishing I had done better the past year?
God knows I’m not perfect, and I DEFINITELY know that I’m not perfect, but the difference is that because of Christ’s death- God sees me as perfect.

The cross wasn’t just Jesus dying for our sins. It was an exchange, an exchange where Christ died and took all of our sins- every single bit of it, and in turn we received all of His righteousness- we were covered with His blood, in the most beautiful way, such that God sees the perfection of Jesus when He sees us. Incredible, right?

My prayer in writing this is that you would see this truth, the truth of God’s grace. And know that God’s grace is not something you have to work your way up to, it’s there waiting on you right now. Really, it is. It’s so easy it doesn’t seem real, but it is. I’ve experienced it. I know it’s more real than I’ll ever be able to understand. Just because you don’t understand something completely, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe it.
Romans 8:24:
“But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?”

I think someone that reads this- maybe it’s you- has felt the same way I do, like you’ve failed, like you can’t do anything right, like you’re all alone, like you’re the worst of the worst, like you’ve wasted every opportunity to finally get it right and turn your life back around onto the right course. Well, I’m here speaking as an ambassador for God, to say:

It’s not too late. Now is the time, right now is the moment, to give into His love that has been pulling at you. To accept His grace in its fullness, and live a life that reflects your love for all He’s freely given to you.
So, I’m begging you, pleading with you, open your heart. Stop living life thinking of yourself as a failure, because God sees you as His beloved treasure.

God delights in you.

YOU are not a failure, You are a treasure.



I’m praying for YOU… whoever you are, I know that I wrote this right now for a reason, for a specific person and I really am praying for YOU. Let God in.