147. He's Wooing You

2 Corinthians 3:17

There is a danger inherent in a life with Jesus that’s hard to see and even harder to avoid. I would venture to guess that everyone who knows and walks with Christ has had to deal with this, and if you’ve spent any time at all in ministry, I know for sure that you’ve dealt with it, and it goes something like this: “Am I doing enough? Is God disappointed in my effort? Am I having a big enough impact on the kingdom? Are the people that I’m ministering to changing enough? Am I any good at this? Does God think I suck?” If any of those questions look familiar, you’ve fallen into a subtle trap, and you’re not the first. You see, it’s so easy to think like this: Salvation is free and it’s by grace, but once you’ve got that settled, God is measuring everything. It’s like, you get in by mercy, but then the rest of your life is judged on performance. That way of thinking feels so practical. We think, “If I do these things, I can expect God to feel this way about me and I can expect people to respond in this way.” Paul says that this doesn’t work and is a ministry of death. The alternative - which feels crazy and scary and wild - can be described by one word: Freedom. That means that you’re free to simply just love Jesus, and let Him change people (including you) in His own way in His own time. Jesus wants this relationship to be about love. As Paul says, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” That means that Jesus doesn’t want to force us. He wants to woo us into loving Him.