By Marni Montanez
Ezekiel 16:6
New King James Version (NKJV)
6. “And when I passed by you and saw you struggling in your own blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’
In our own strength we are indeed weak and bloody. There is nothing that makes us spiritually acceptable. Our hearts are dark and empty and we are dead in our sin, focused on carnal things. God sees the real us and His love extends into our mess.
No one else can go into our deepest pain or our most vile attributes and want to help us. In spite of the truth about us God wants us close to Him. In this passage He is speaking of seeing us for who we are and yet His love reaches into the muck and the mire and filth of the lives we created for ourselves. He restores, renews and re-creates what we only destroy. Yes, someone can appear successful in their lives, but in their hearts there is a dissatisfaction; a hunger for something that no job or person can satisfy. Without God their heart is sick and dying a slow spiritual dead.
God finds us in our darkest and most vulnerable times, lying in our own puddle of bloody wounds and wrong decisions and He doesn’t just walk by ignoring our pain. He looks at us with great compassion and picks us up. Then with tender care and mercy He washes us off. Our God of holiness and purity has every right to leave us where we are; drowning in our own filthy righteousness, but His love won’t allow Him to pass by. His love is active and relentless. He is a God who nurtures us back to life and heals our brokenness. He strengthens us in His righteousness and power and involves us in His glorious plans.
We need to cling onto the God of life for everything. We must admit that we are spiritually dead without Him. God said this to Adam in the Garden of Eden. When He told Adam “if you eat of the fruit of good and evil, you will surely die, He wasn’t talking of a physical death. Obviously Adam didn’t die the way we know death. God was speaking of a spiritual death. This is more serious than physical death since our eternal life is in the spiritual kingdom of God. We will have new bodies and live with God in heaven or stay in spiritual death and be subject to hellfire for eternity.
Challenge: Think about what God has done in your life and how you were spiritually dead until He breathed pure life into your spirit and revived you. Then be very thankful.
God bless
Marni
The purpose of this series is to encourage people to live as loving,
compassionate, and peacemaking children of God: Jesus tells us to pray, "Thy
kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10) God
tells us through Micah (6:8), "He has told you, O man, what is good; And what
does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk
humbly with your God." And we know from Revelation 21:4 that there will be no
more mourning, or crying, or pain, or death. Thus, Christian living requires us
to set the standards of these conditions here on earth for our fellow human
beings, and for the other animals, as a witness to the rest of the world. To do
otherwise is not Christian.
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