Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
What do you do if you realize that helping other people, telling others about Christ, etc., is just no fun for you? It's boring. You're not even sure you want to go to heaven if that's what it's going to be like. Some people will say, "The problem is you're not converted!" That could discourage you even more. Jesus has never told you that you must convert yourself. That's His work (one is "born of the Spirit," John 3:6). You can stop resisting His on-going work on your heart.
The way Jesus tells it in John 3, someone has to tell you the Good News of the gospel; God employs human agents in His work. Someone has said something to you that is like a ray of sunshine bringing hope into your dark soul. Now welcome that ray of light, and stop resisting it; the dear Lord has already begun to work on your heart: Let Him go on working.
Jesus made it clear that the Good News you must see (you've got to begin seeing it before you can begin believing it!) is Christ uplifted on His cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. That's in John 3:14-16: He must be "lifted up" before you as Moses "lifted up the serpent in the wilderness."
No psychology or pep talks can take the place of understanding the content of the Gospel, which is: (1) that Christ died the second death for your sins (1 Cor. 15:3); (2) He has redeemed you; (3) He has "exhausted" the penalty of the broken law for you; (4) He has "adopted" you into His family by virtue of His sacrifice for you as the second Adam, (5) He has set His table with a placemat for you; and (6) sinful and selfish as you may know yourself to be, He treats you as though you had never sinned. (By the way, that is called "grace.") All this was done before you were born.
In John 3, Jesus does not get the "cart before the horse"; He tells of conversion in true order: When your heart appreciates what He has already done for you, the cold hardness of your heart begins to melt. Maybe even a tear will trickle down your cheek as you think of the horror of that second death from which He has already delivered you. All the decency in your inmost soul begins to assert itself and you are "reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5:18-20; Rom. 5:11).
With the cart behind the horse in proper order, the moment you are "reconciled to God," you find yourself reconciled to His holy law, which is His will for you; and what you once found boring and distasteful begins to become for you what it was for Jesus--He said "What's pleasure for Me is to do My Father's will and to finish His work!" (see John 4:34).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: October 3, 1999.
Copyright © 2014 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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