Daily Grace
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
Still Choosing
I left one place broken and came to another still carrying the breaking.
"For I am sure that neither death nor life ... will be able to separate us from the love of God." (Romans 8:38-39)
A person can leave one place broken and carry the breaking into the next. There can be a season when he does not think he can continue, and, if he is honest, does not want to. And then he chooses to continue anyway. Not because he is strong, and not because he has it figured out, but because he believes, some days more than others, that this faithfulness matters, that wounds borne in love mean something, that the long obedience, costly as it is, produces something worth the cost.
Some days more than others. That is the honest sentence, and it is not worth trading for a better-sounding one. Because that is what faith actually is for most people most of the time. Not certainty. Not a settled and shining confidence that never wavers. Just a person who woke up again, who is still here, and who has decided one more time that he is not going to put it down today.
You do not have to feel it. You only have to stay. And the thing that makes staying possible is not the strength of your grip but the strength of his, the love that Paul says nothing in all creation can cut you off from, not death, not life, not the worst of what you have carried out of the worst place you have been. Tomorrow you will get to choose again. That is not a burden. That is the mercy. He has already decided he will not let go; you are only being asked to wake up, and stay, one more day.
Union and Identity
Two words have been working on me and I cannot get free of them.
"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:1)
Two words carry the whole of the Christian life: union, and identity. Union is where sanctification begins. You come to know Jesus Christ as Lord, the Holy Spirit becomes an intimate part of your life, and you are bound to him. Paul reaches for one phrase again and again across all his letters, well over a hundred times, and the phrase is in Christ. In him. Inside him. Joined. That is the union, and for the believer it is already a settled fact.
Out of the union comes the identity, and this is where most of us stall, because a union can be entirely real while the identity is still old. The wild branch has been grafted in. That happened. It is finished, it is true. But the branch still has to stop trying to fruit like a wild tree. It has to draw from the trunk it is now attached to rather than the roots it used to have. And that shift is not automatic.
This is the quiet struggle underneath most of our frustration with ourselves. We were bound to Christ the day we came to him, and we have been arguing with our own old sap ever since, trying in our strength to be what we already are by grace. So do not labor to earn a union you already possess. Labor instead to believe it, and to let the new trunk, and not the old root, decide what grows.