DAILY MEDITATION

The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death. God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.

Romans 8:2-8

The transformation of our life in the midst of life and life’s challenges requires a blowing of the wind, the movement of the Spirit that leads and guides us into God’s intentions, His ordered steps for our lives. God in His creation of us and the world developed a masterplan in which He is glorified, revealed for His love and power. We as instruments of God’s intentions must be sensible, discern, and act in what He is up to in order to reveal Him and what should be for our lives. What should be for our lives is the well-lived and joy filled life that is life and life more abundantly promised. The blowing of the wind, the Spirit serves as our GPS, assisting and supporting us to Live By The Spirit. God is so invested in His original intent for our life and life more abundantly that He willingly gave His Son to show us that if we would Live By The Spirit we would engage life and life’s challenges but from a position of power that sets us free and all things right so that our attention is set on Him and His will, not ourselves or our circumstances, and as a result we LIVE. The love and power of resurrection is the evidence of God’s willingness to reward us in and through all things so would LIVE and manifest the glory of God evidenced in a well-lived and joy filled life!