MEDITATE FOR SUCCESS FOR 3/1/19
Meditate On
God Is Satisfied with You. He made us
accepted in the Beloved.
Ephesians 1:6
When I was a teenager, I used to belong to a Christian
fellowship group. We would sing this song which you may be familiar with. It
went like this: “Is He satisfied, is He satisfied, is He satisfied with me?
Have I done my best? Have I stood the test? Is He satisfied with me?” Let me
just say that 10 out of 10 times when we sang this song, I would always believe
that God was not satisfied with me. When we look to ourselves, all there is to
see is the inadequacy and futility of our ability and performance. In and of
ourselves, we will never meet God’s standard for Him to be satisfied with us.
We will always fall short!
You can imagine how condemned we felt each time we sang
this song. After all, we had never been taught that God was satisfied with His
Son’s sacrifice at the cross, and we did not understand what the new covenant
of grace was all about. We were young and zealous for God, but defeated by our
lack of knowledge.
With all due respect to the songwriter, whom I believe
had the best intentions when he wrote the song, this song is not based on the
new covenant of God’s unmerited favor. It negates the cross and places the
emphasis back on you—what you must do, what you must perform and what you must
achieve for God to be satisfied with you. But the question to ask today is not
if God is satisfied with you. The question that we need to ask is this: Is God
satisfied with the cross of Jesus? And the answer is this: He is completely
satisfied!
At the cross, our acceptance is found. There, Jesus cried
out with His last breath, “It is finished!” (John 19:30) The work is complete.
The full punishment for all our sins was exacted on Jesus at the cross. God
will not punish the believer again, not because He has gone soft on sin, but
because all our sins have already been punished in the body of Jesus. God’s
holiness and His justice are now on your side! Today, God is not assessing you
based on what you have or have not done. He is assessing you based on what
Jesus has done. Is God satisfied with Jesus today? Yes, of course He is! Then,
to the same extent that God is satisfied with Jesus, He is satisfied with you.
God’s own Son had to be crushed at Calvary for this
blessing to become a reality in your life. The gift of His unmerited favor and
His righteousness is only a free gift for you today because the full payment
for this gift was exacted upon Jesus’ body. The cross made all the difference!
Don’t let anyone hoodwink you into thinking that you need to pay for your own
sins. Don’t let anyone deceive you with the lie that your eternal salvation in
Christ is uncertain and shakable!
BLESSINGS
JOSEPH PRINCE
