discipled living

Perhaps we don’t want to reveal the deeper truth about the thoughts and intents of our hearts.   Hebrew 4:12d in The New Living Translation tells us,

“It exposes us for what we really are.”  Verse 13 picks up and says, “Nothing in all creation can hide from Him.  Everything is Naked and exposed before His eyes.  This is the God to whom we must explain all that we have done.”  

We are already exposed.  We don’t have to hide behind our masks and become less than we really are in Christ Jesus.  The illusion of righteousness through good behavior must be replaced and supplanted through righteous submission to the truth about Jesus and by the Grace of God that leads us to Love and serve more completely.  We are already exposed for who we are and none of us can hide. 

This is true even though we won’t openly admit our depravity and our sickness, and many of us wear an illusory mask of righteousness that only shrouds our conflicted spirit from the casual glance of the fellow disciples.  God sees the real, true you, the conflicted deeply troubled you, who at some levels hates yourself, and other levels doesn't know what to do with this God-thing that you feel so drawn to. 

The Good News Is …

The truly good news is We have a High Priest in Jesus Christ.  God clarifies verses 12 &13 with the verses that follow and close out this chapter.  

14 “That is why we have a great High Priest who has gone to heaven, Jesus the Son of God. Let us cling to him and never stop trusting him. 15 This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same temptations we do, yet he did not sin. 16 So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it.”

We languish in spiritual poverty because we don’t want to submit to the surgery performed by the Living Word of God upon our lives.  We try to become righteous by "living right," "attending church" and "paying" our Tithes and Offerings.  The reality is that we cannot become righteous by any means other than acknowledging, who we are under the penetrating light of God’s Life-Giving Word and trusting in Jesus Christ to intercede on our behalf.  Trusting Jesus is the source of our Righteousness.  Embodied in our trust is a mandate to be obedient and to follow the model of behavior and to adopt the attitude of meekness and humbleness we see in Jesus.

We are called to do this not because we will appear righteous, but because of our Love and Trust in Jesus.  Our Love of Christ and Trust in Christ are the pure Intents of the Heart that the Scripture penetrates our hearts to find. In the final analysis we must answer the question of ourselves, what were and what are the intents of my Heart?  Only then can we begin the wholesale destruction of the illusion of our personal righteousness.