New Life

I've said it before: g&h is all about celebration, and especially about celebrating the grace of God. I'm sitting here this morning wondering what to write. Wondering what matters most today. What one thing should I put down? Well, how about this: "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him." 1 John 4:9

So said a man named John, long ago. And he was, after all, in a position to know. And really the question we must ask ourselves from day to day is simply this: Am I too in a position to know this new life that Christ made possible? Nominal Christianity, Christianity without new life, life in Him and through Him, is really a stunted and pitiful thing.

Another man, Paul, used this phrase: "Christ in you, the hope of glory." [Col 1:27] We live a Christ-life or we live not at all. We never graduate to self-sufficiency. Our lives, instead, are simply characterized by grace upon grace, and thereby our hope of glory grows brighter and surer, and all this serves as a testimony and an affirmation. This is new life. This is life in Christ. This is all of grace. Wherever we are in our Christian walk, we must never feel that we are so mature in our faith that we need no longer "repair to the throne of grace" and be renewed. Only in Him, only in Him, only in Him, do we find, and then live, new life.