Plan For Our Freedom

[chosenbyone]

God intended for us to live in active, moment-by-moment relationship with Him, with the source of love. That means being loved by God every minute and knowing it. Sounds good doesn't it?

Well, somehow human beings didn't value that relationship sufficiently. We chose instead to live independently of God, which means choosing not to love and be loved.

And each of us also has chosen to ignore God, frequently or even entirely. We have chosen instead to try to advance ourselves — or simply survive — at the expense of being loving, at the expense of our relationship with God.

We think we can do better on our own than we can with God. Experience shows us that we're wrong about that, but we don't seem to learn the lesson.

God is working to restore mankind to the life He intended for us: the good life — really good!

He started out by giving us rules to live by, rules that He knew we couldn't keep. That sounds unfair doesn't it? Actually, that was part of the reason for the rules.

God gave us rules to teach us the difference between right and wrong. At this point in history we don't see the necessity of that, but there was a time when mankind had pretty thoroughly lost track of what was right.

God also gave us rules, in part, to show us that what we needed was not rules but God Himself.

The rules remain with us, but they aren't sufficient and never have been. We disobey both the letter and the spirit of the law — even when we're trying to be good.

We don't do the good things that we want to do, and we do the things that we know are wrong, things that we've decided in advance we're not going to do. Sometimes our determination isn't enough; something else in us just takes over.

The law tells us what a good life would look like, but it doesn't enable us to live that life.

To change man into a creature who could, some day, live a thoroughly good life, a completely loving and truthful life, Christians believe that God intervened in the affairs of man more directly. We believe that He came to earth Himself in the form of a man, the man Jesus.

God came to be an example for us —- an example of humility, love, mercy, and self-sacrifice.

He also came to restore our relationship with Him so that we could be empowered to do right — empowered from the inside, not ruled from the outside.

Our reconciliation with God begins when we say yes to Him, to the sacrifice that He made for us, when we say yes to the reality of Jesus as God with us, loving us, giving Himself for us.

You can come to God and begin the process of being restored to the life that He intended for you.

All you really need to be clear on, at the start, is that God is real, that He came to us to give us forgiveness, and that we all need forgiveness.

With that correct perspective, you're in a position to hear what God has to say, and not try to have things your way. That's a good beginning.