I know my redeemer lives.

As of late, I have been thinking a lot about:

1. the redemptive nature of God, and

2. how Christ is the Resurrection and the Life (John 11:25)

And that is something to be hopeful about. I can’t totally wrap my head around the concept that we serve a living God. I mean, I get it… but really, thinking about the fact that God is the living God, that he is the life-giver, it’s huge.  I think this concept is key to understanding hope.  God gives life, and gives life abundantly. He takes dead things and resurrects them. But as this song asks, what are the deaths that I still dwell in?  What are the things in our lives that are dead?  Things that we dwell in, having for so long accepted death as reality, that we stopped (or never started) asking for God to breathe live into it?  Think about the possibilities.

Far to often I forget that God is right here with me. Living with me, in this moment. Far too often, I forget that He makes all things new. Isaiah 43:18-19 speaks of this:

¹⁸ “Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.

¹⁹ See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the desert
and streams in the wasteland.

God is not limited to how things used to be. Have you experienced a death of sorts? Are you in a place of situational or relational hopelessness? Are you experiencing something  that is so far gone, there is not earthly hope of revival?  God is the Resurrection and the Life… He is the God who breathes new life into dead things.

Now it springs up, do [we] not perceive it?

What would our lives look like if we really believed this, prayed for this, expected to see and experience the resurrection power in our lives, in the seemingly hopeless situations? God does the impossible.  Are you in the wilderness?  He is making a way for you. Keep walking.  Are you in a wasteland? He chooses to create streams of water in the very place where it seems least likely to occur.

This also relates to the redemptive nature of God. There is nothing He cannot use.  I recently heard a snippet of a sermon about how God works all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.  That is not to say all things ARE good, but God is good. Everything we surrender to Him can be redeemed.

Again, back to the subject of surrender.  I was thinking about this again, specifically as it relates to the topic of resurrection  (See Matthew 10:38-40). Whoever loses his life  for the sake of Christ, will find true life. I’ve often heard that we have to “die to our own flesh”,  suffocate the sinful desires of the flesh…and I agree with that…although I don’t really want to. It doesn’t take long to discover that death for the sake of death is highly unmotivating.  Who would want in on that?!  But death for the sake of LIFE, now that is completely different. In the painful process of making our flesh submit to the Spirit, let us remember that Christ does not call us to die to ourselves just because. He calls us to die to ourselves, so that we can find true, abundant, eternal life in Him. He calls us to die to ourselves and our sinfulness, so that He can resurrect us to look  and act like Him, in this life and in the life to come.  He wants us to surrender, so He can give us a BETTER life. He is the living God and He specializes in bringing dead things back to life.