Gospel Thoughts Journal #2: IT'S NOT YOU BUT JESUS

Our pattern of thinking is "We should open our hearts to God..." "We should accept Jesus..." expecting that we can by ourselves. We need not lose the Great Controversy background in our story.

We needed to identify that it is not us who can open our eyes, it is not us who can accept Jesus in our hearts. We give so much credit to the ability of man to do certain acts of goodness when we are evil from birth (Genesis 8:21), our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked (Jeremiah 17:9).

How can this kind of heart and life be able to accept and choose God, if not for Jesus, if not for his victory over the dominion of sin at the cross, his victory over the curse of sin at the resurrection, and his victory over evil's supremacy in his exaltation?

The blindness and the deafness that sin caused man have been broken down and torn down.

Because of Jesus' works, now man is free from evil's dominion (yes, evil can still affect man's life but not to the extent of dominating over without man's permission, when man is able to hear god's voice the dominion of Satan is already shaken) and his eyes are now free again to see, his mind free to perceive, and his ears free to hear the persuasion and introduction of the holy spirit about who god truly is. This is the freedom given to us by the works of Jesus.

The message is "Friends, good news! We can now choose God! We are not blind anymore! We are not slaves of the dominion of sin anymore, so now we can choose god for ourselves. We can now choose to look at God's love and listen to the hope, love, and new life we have in him."

Because of Jesus, our free will has been restored.

Our life is actually a celebration of our freedom in Jesus.

Moment by moment, God is already helping us open our hearts and minds to him.

We don't need a beg God to open our hearts to accept Him because He has already been doing the work before we were born.