Like Adam and Eve after their fall, we strive to hide our nakedness from each other. We dress ourselves up and put on a happy face, and when people ask us how we are, we cheerfully answer “fine!”

When God looks at us, however, He sees right through our facade… straight into our sinful hearts. Before God, we are wretched condemned criminals. Thankfully, as Joe Stowell reminds us in this devotional, God has extended an amazing grace to us:

If we were to look at ourselves the way God sees us even when we have it all together, we would see something totally different. He sees through all of our efforts to be lookin good. His vision probes far deeper than the all-too-cool clothes we wear, our makeup, our rippling abs and our great tan. He strips away the layers of self-delusion and penetrates deep into our hearts where each of us is a desperately lost sinner. And, no matter how good you think you are, its not until we know that we are like condemned criminals before Him that we can begin to understand how amazing His grace really is. When you can honestly say that His grace saved a wretch like you, you can begin to stand in amazement at the greatness of His grace. In fact, His grace is only a sweet sound when you know how deep it had to go to clean you up!

What is Gods amazing grace? Its the outstretched love of Jesus whose agonizing death and victorious resurrection saves us from who we really arenot from who we think we are. Romans 5:8 says: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He died the worst kind of death imaginable, because it needed to cover the wretchedness of our desperately lost souls. We werent lookin good when He died for us. If we were as cool as we think we are, He could have stayed in heaven. But like hopeless beggars trapped in the sludge of sin, we needed Him. And so He came and died in our place. Now thats what I call amazing!

Do you feel like a wretch before God? How does knowing that God doesn’t care about your outward appearance change how you live?

By: Chris. This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 4:27 pm and is filed under Devotional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.