Not perfect, but loved

We are not sinless, but we are loved.  Imperfect though we are, we still have access to the heart of God.  We are the beloved; He sees in us only the image of His only Son, and He must love what He sees in us. 

Last week, I started teaching a new class of 11th grade students.  In the exchange during class and in their journals, I got a glimpse into their hearts.  This week, I find their faces always before me as I pray and think about them, and I find that I already love them dearly---not because I think they are perfect, but because I see the beauty of their hearts.  And I would do anything to preserve the beauty I see in them.

With our faces and inner beauty always before Him, Jesus took on our sin, bearing in His own body the destruction and burden of sin in the world, taking the effects of our hard hearts to death on the cross, and rising as a new man, cleansed and perfect.  What parent does not bear in his/her own body and mind the effects of the sins of the children---the rebellion, the hardness of heart, the drugs and alcohol addiction, the turning toward evil friends and influence?  What parent does not continue to hope for a resurrection of a child who is dying from sin?

We cannot cleanse ourselves of sin and its effects-- it is permanent; even the cells of our bodies remember pain and carry the memory long after we have consciously buried it.  We can only turn to Jesus who has suffered the death our sins were leading to and who rose again as a "new man."  In Him, we bury our "old man," in Paul's words, who tended toward sin and death.  In place of the old man, we receive a "new birth," more responsive to the Spirit of life than to the influence of evil. 

In Romans 7 & 8, Paul describes the man of sin; he says he does not understand himself at all---the very things he has determined not to do, he ends up doing, and the good things he has decided to do, he does not do.  He says that he finds within himself a "law" stronger than he is---the law of sin and death. "Unhappy man that I am," he cries; "who will deliver me from this law of sin living within me?"

"Thanks be to God," he says, "for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed [us] from the law of sin and death."  God has placed within us a new law that overcomes the "second thermodynamic law "-- the universal principle of entropy, or decay in nature.  Thanks to the Spirit poured out in us, while our bodies continue to decay, our spirit continues to move "from glory to glory" as we allow the Spirit of God to cleanse us from sin and to make us more and more like God.

"You shall be as gods," tempted Satan; how little he knew that he was saying exactly what God had planned from the beginning.  We shall be as God, after all.