AMOS 5:12a – For I know how many are your transgressions and how great are your sins . . .

THEME OF THE DAY. AND HE LOVES US STILL. It is the most glorious truth a person will ever know. It is the most soul-satisfying experience a person will ever have. It is the most hope-filled power a person will ever embrace. It is the truth that in light of today’s scripture, our God still loves us. He really does. A lot and all the time. Believe that, rest in that, cast all our cares on that truth – God is love, and despite all our many sins and failures, He remains the God of love who loves us – constantly and steadfastly. But . . . and here is the big “but” . . . do we believe He does? Let’s think about this a little.

We live in a performance-based world. Advancements on our jobs is performance-based. Achievements in various competitions are obtained by performance. Educational accolades come from our classroom performance. Even our relationships may be performance-based. And to a certain extent, healthy relationships are performance-based. In our marriages, in our families, in our churches, and in social circles, performance matters, but only in the context of what we are giving in the relationships, not what we expect from the relationships. For instance, how many relationships go south and sour over unmet expectations due to poor or neglected performance in the relationships? A lot. And what happens is we easily get bitter over the “lack of performance” and the relationship fractures or worse, severs.

Let’s take that into our relationship with God. We won’t for a second say, “My relationship with God is based on my performance.” However, we have a devil and conscience that whisper, “Really?” And we are prone to listen to both of them. Consider this . . . when we are “doing right” in our Bible reading, praying, serving, faithful to church, fighting sin, and basically “performing well” as a Christian, we tend to think things between God and us are good. Now, what about those “bad Christian performance” times? We fly off the handle with unkind words to a family member, our Bible reading is hit and miss, mostly miss, and prayer is a mechanical sentence or two over a meal. Here is where the devil and conscience come full force and try to get us to doubt God’s love for us based on our “bad performance” in the things that please Him. But we can quickly silence and defeat those attacks by remembering two things.

First, Christianity is performance-based – Christ’s performance not ours. Everything about the Christian life is an outflow of what our Lord Jesus has done, not what we do. Don’t interpret that as ‘Let go and let God’. We are called to a life of diligent and passionate obedience not to gain God’s favor and love but out of the grateful reality we have God’s favor and love based on the performance of Jesus.

The second way we defeat the performance-based accusations of the devil and conscience is to remember our God never changes. Our performance does. His character does not. He is love and He cannot alter His being. He loved us from eternity past and He will continue to love us now and into eternity future. This silences our accusers and propels us to more diligence in our “Christian performance”, not out of “have to”, but “get to” out of love and gratitude to and for our God’s incredible love to us in the Lord Jesus Christ.

PRAYER: “Father, I praise You for loving me based on who You are, not what I do or don’t do”

QUOTE: “The unchanging nature of God’s love is the strongest motivator to love Him back”