The Real Root of Resentment: Condemnation

This revelation just opens to me more wonders than ever before, and I am just blessed.

Indeed, "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8: 32)

I did not know this Truth that sets me free. I did not believe that believing is what it is all about:

"Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent." (John 6: 29)

Yet to believe on Him whom God the Father has sent means that we take in the entire message:

"My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous:

"And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." (1 John 2: 1-2)

He is the mercy seat for the sins of the entire world!

I did not know that. I never thought about it.

I knew that He died on the Cross, but like many believers I did not think much about it. For years, I was convinced that my life on this earth was up to me.

A sense of inadequacy plagued me for many years. I often wondered if God was on my side. I would look at myself, look at my feelings. If I kept thinking about God, for example, then I believed that I was safe. If I watched my thoughts, to make sure that they never strayed, then I was OK.

A lot of this mixed-up, messed-up thinking stemmed from an extensive AA background when I was growing up. I was told that my thoughts and feelings could block God from living and working in my life.

The New Covenant, though, has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with what Jesus did at the Cross for me.

Still, I felt a sting of pain in my life from previous circumstances which I had endured. In a way, I did not trust God because I had endured some heavy and unpleasant circumstances in my life, like the distorted upbringing of AA.

Yet the grace of God is so great, so grand, so good, that He is in the business of taking our pains and turning them into gains.

In fact, the Cross itself is the most powerful proof of this! Imagine --- human beings putting their Creator and Savior on the Cross because He told them that He was the Messiah. He came among his own, and they did not receive Him! Yet in the darkest moment in human history, God as man crucified in open shame and then rejected by His own Father, this moment is the greatest moment in all eternity, for at the Cross God the Father reconciled all of humanity by turning His Son into the Sin Offering, the Propitiation for all of our sins!

If we would only believe on Him whom He has sent, then we would receive power and life and all that we need yet so lack in this life.

It is so simple, yet the world has made it complicated or distorted. AA is one of those distortions. Men and women full of pain and despair fall into drinking, only to find something that takes away life and gives them death. I am not suprised that there are many "white knucklers" in many AA meeting rooms, for the program of Twelve Steps does not give to man what he really needs: righteousness: the standing of complete acceptance and justification before God; Peace: that the hostility between God and us has ceased, and that every need is met in Him; Joy: the strength of living life with greatest joy and intensity and rest, with no fears or worries.

Yet the biggest problem for man, then, is not a drinking problem or his money problems or his sex issues or his self-esteem problems. The biggest need, man's greatest burden, is that he is dead in trespasses, assaulted with a sin conscience which attacks us in our flesh, in our spirit that is separate from God, that falls upon us in a fallen world. All of man's shocks and hurts, including "the number one offender" resentment.

What causes us a sense of resentment? That someone has done something to wrong or harm us, and either we have to retaliate or take it in to ourselves.

I would also submit that those who walk around feeling down, depressed, sad, filled with guilt and shame -- in short, with a sin conscience -- are more sensitive because who they are rests on themselves: what they do, what they think, how they feel. I know that I struggled with this. I always felt pressured with fear when pressed by someone, afraid to do something wrong.

Yet in Christ, all of my sins are forgiven, a river of Emmanuel's pure and perfect blood which washes me from all my guilty stains. This is more than any God "as I understand him".

Jesus Christ came down not just to change our lives, but to exchange His life for our sin and death and loss. He came to give us everything:

"What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?

"He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8: 31-32)

Do we believe it or not?