The Counter-Intuitive Truth of the Gospel

My late friend Mike Wells said, “People don’t normally understand how to live Christ's life until they are in their 50s. It takes that long to fail enough to learn dependence on Christ.” Failure, disappointments, and pain are the tools God uses to bring us to the end of ourselves so that we can learn to fully trust him. It’s really the only way we learn, and it normally takes a long time.

We may read about God’s faithfulness in the Bible and agree with it in our minds, but it is only through experiencing God’s faithfulness in times of struggle and failure does that truth move from our heads down into our hearts. God strategically and consistently uses circumstances to teach us deep truths about Himself—and about us. As I look back on my life, I find that I learned more about Jesus and His Life in me through my struggles than through the successes of my life. It took multiple lessons over many years for me to finally begin to get it. The ministry of Forgiving Forward would not exist were it not for the betrayals and sufferings we endured throughout decades of serving in churches. Only God could have taken our misery and turned it into a ministry masterpiece.

Genesis 1:27 tells us, “God created man in His image. In the image of God, He created him, male and female He created them.” Genesis 2 expands on that by explaining that God created Adam, placed him in the Garden of Eden, and gave him an assignment. Adam’s assignment was to walk intimately with God and, out of his relationship with God, govern the earth. The only thing God prohibited from Adam was eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Why? Because Adam didn’t need it. We weren’t designed to concern ourselves with right and wrong. We were designed to know God. You see, if everything we do is out of our relationship with God, whatever we do will always be right and will never be wrong. Then God fashioned Eve out of Adam’s side and gave her back to him as his wife.

In Genesis 3, the Serpent enters the scene to tempt Eve. When Eve pushes back, the Serpent says, “You won’t die. God knows the day you eat of that tree, you will be like Him, knowing good from evil.” What were they already? Like God! They were made in the image of God. The temptation then was for Adam and Eve to do something to become what God had already declared them to be—like Him. When they chose to believe the lie and ate from the forbidden tree, immediately their relationship with God was broken. From that point, they begin trying to make life work on their own. But it didn’t work! And it still doesn’t. If history shows us anything, it’s that we cannot, on our own, return to the righteousness God designed us to be. That’s why we need a Savior.

The Gospel message is that only through faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus can we be restored to a righteous relationship with God. We don’t earn it, we don’t deserve it, and we don’t maintain it. It’s all Jesus! Period!! “He (God the Father) made Him (Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin for us that we might become the righteous of God in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:21.) In Christ, we are righteous! In Christ, we have been made holy.

What Satan lacks in creativity, he makes up for with persistence. He keeps rehearsing the same deceptive temptation, and we keep falling for it. He continues to tempt us to “do something to become what God has already declared us to be.” If he can get us to try to work to become righteous in our own strength, then he can get us disconnected from the power of the Spirit and keep us defeated. But we don’t have to do something to be made righteous. We don’t do good works to become righteous. We are righteous; therefore, we do good works.

In one of our darkest moments, God gave us a new friend disguised as a counselor. Dr. James Hicks’ counseling model was pretty simple. We would share our struggles and complaints and James would tell us stories which always ended up pointing us to Jesus. If, for some reason, we didn’t get the connection, James would explain the first story with another story which, in turn, pointed us to Jesus. When we finally got our eyes off our problems, died to ourselves and began to see Jesus in our suffering, God taught us how to forgive and birthed in us the ministry of Forgiving Forward.

James grew up in a small town in South Texas called Cut N Shoot. Really, that is the name. It’s just outside of Conroe, Texas and is named for how they used to settle conflicts in the oil fields. When James was growing up, the town of Cut N Shoot, Texas consisted of a four-way stop sign, a post office, and Pat’s lounge, which is a double wide trailer on the highway going through town. That’s it. Yet, James told us that his tiny hometown had the most spiritually accurate town motto of any town, anywhere. The Cut N Shoot town motto is, “There’s nothing wrong with any of us that a good killing won’t fix!” James is right. Spiritually speaking, there’s nothing wrong with any of us that a good dying to self won’t fix.

The vital secret that the Scriptures screams for us to embrace is the counter-intuitive truth that life follows death. Only when we die to self— when we give up trying to make life work on our own—can we truly find the life God designed us to live in Him. The key to all of this is Faith. It’s believing you are who God has declared you to be and, in the power of the Holy Spirit, choosing to live out of that truth.

STORE