The Weight of Guilt, the Need of a Savior

The Reagan family on Blue Bloods are my people, my almost-family. When Jamie worked undercover, I worried like a big sister. I celebrated when he and Edie got engaged, and I’m still mad at the writers for the tragic death of Danny’s wife, Linda.

And the daughter’s name is Erin, so that makes us practically family, right?

Now,they are very different from my real family. We live in Mississippi, they live in New York. We have relatively safe jobs, they are in law enforcement. But the bond between them reminds me of my family, the way the siblings are all so different, and the way they love each other deep down, even when they don’t agree.

I also love how this show uses the power of story to show both sides of real situations that can’t always be solved before the end credits.

In Season 8, episode 9, a man was released after serving his time in jail. He moved into an apartment building, ready to re-start his life, but no one wanted him there.

You see, he had been in prison for molesting children, and the apartment building he moved into had many children. He ends up being severely beaten by one of the dads in the building, and at the end of the episode he tells Erin and Danny, “I did my time, but I’m still guilty. There’s no absolution for what I’ve done.”

The years he spent in jail fulfilled the consequences the justice system deemed appropriate. But those years did not replace what he had taken from those children. It didn’t free him from guilt in other people’s eyes, or even his own. The court said he was free, but he was more trapped outside of jail than he had ever been inside.

The law uses the words guilty and free, but our hearts carry the weight of those words. In reality, the world offered him no hope, no solution. He was ruined, stuck, and helpless to change that status.

And this is exactlywhere the enemy of our soul wants us. He dangles temptation in front of us, promises that we will be liked, respected, found worthy if we listen to him. He is called the deceiver of the whole world because he gets us to this stuck place and offers no way out from the weight of our sin.

Satan deceives us, traps us, and leaves us there.

There is a weight to sin. Guilt feels heavy on our shoulders and in our gut. We want to feel clean again. We want to erase the guilt, to undo the things we’ve done. But we can’t. We are like a kid with muddy hands trying to wipe mud off of a clean sheet. No matter how hard we try, we just keep spreading the mud around.

We need a refuge from the weight, we need a safe place, protection from our accuser.

The world can’t offer us refuge.

But God can because He is our refuge.

The world can’t offer us a way to erase our guilt.

But God can, because He sent a Person to remove our guilt.

The world can’t offer forgiveness or redemption.

But God can, because he sent a Redeemer.

The character in Blue Bloods was right. There is no absolution apart from Christ. In Christ there is forgiveness, there is absolution, there is moving forward.

The Gospel is called the Good News because it breaks the sin cycle we are stuck in. The only action that offers forgiveness and accomplishes absolution is the work of Jesus – His perfect life, His death on the cross that paid for our sins. The Gospel is the answer to our entrapment. It is Good News because it sets us free – the way we were meant to live.

“Jesus Christ was born into this world, not from it. He came into history from the outside of history; He did not evolve out of history. Our Lord’s birth was an advent; He did not come from the human race, He came into it from above. Jesus Christ is not the best human being; He is a Being Who cannot be accounted for by the human race at all. He is God incarnate; not man becoming God, but God coming into human flesh, coming into it from the outside. ” – – Oswald Chambers, The Psychology of Redemption

Who Needs Jesus?

So who in this broken world needed Jesus to come?
The hurting, the broken, the running, the far away, the pretenders, the wounded, the helpless, the guilty, the trapped, the ones needing to be rescued. The baby in the manger makes it possible for every heart to have peace with God.

Stefani Carmichael got me thinking about the world Jesus stepped into on that first Christmas in her post The World Jesus Enters.

It was a broken world, like ours.

What about the people? What were they like?  Did they need Jesus to come?

They were a lot like you and me, like the people we see at Walmart, in the line at the bank, and the ones we work out next to in the gym.  People looking to rules, religion,  or relationships for purpose.

This broken world has been filled with hurting, broken people for a very long time.

Let’s scoot back to the beginning where the story really begins.

The backdrop of the manger scene is the Garden of Eden. That is where our need for a Savior began.

God created this beautiful world, and created man and woman in His image.  As part of His image, He wove into our DNA a need for relationship, connection, belonging.

Satan didn’t bring an army in and confront God head-on. Instead, he slithered in and convinced Eve that the face-to-face relationship she had with God wasn’t enough. His words cast a shadow in her mind about the goodness, love, and intention of God.

O how he must have celebrated as she and Adam bit into that fruit.  The precious souls God created and loved had rejected Him.  With that bite the beautiful world God spoke into being became enemy territory.

“The serpent told the human race that disobeying God was the only way to realize their fullest happiness and potential, and this delusion has sunk deep into every human heart.” – TIm Keller

The world God made grew dark, the people He loved grew blind. His people became deaf to His words and the enemy’s hold on them grew stronger and stronger.

The people made in God’s image, made for connection, belonging, and love,  knew, even while sitting in the darkness that something was missing.

They yearned deeply for what they were made for, even though they had been in the darkness for so long that they didn’t know what to call it. They only knew something was missing and they couldn’t find it in themselves.

Some turned to worshipping idols, literally turning pieces of wood and stone into objects of worship. Some turned to worshipping life in this world, living in the moment, keeping busy, or filling their lives with pleasure. Some turned to worshipping control with rigid rule keeping.

All this worship was an effort to stop the yearning and longing. But only one Person could fulfill that longing for connection, belonging, and love.

Because God is the only one who can answer this longing, He is the only one who can set His people free.

That freedom began with a baby.  Jesus, who takes away the sins of the world.

He saves us from our sins. Not just the ones we think are really bad, but our daily sins, our daily hurts, our daily messes.  He is with us.

The baby in the manger makes it possible for every heart to have peace with God.

So who in this broken world needed Jesus to come?

The hurting, the broken, the running, the far away, the pretenders, the wounded, the helpless, the guilty, the trapped, the ones needing to be rescued.

We need Jesus. And we are the reason He came.

Jesus Is With Us In Our Joy and Our Pain

God’s desire from the beginning has been fellowship. To be with us.

God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Face to face.  When sin entered the world, that relationship was broken, but God’s desire did not change. Throughout the Old Testament His heart cry is repeated, “I will be their God and they will be my people.”

This desire is also found in the language surrounding the reason God offers us salvation through relationship with Him, “They shall see him face to face.”

That’s the goal. Connection. Intimacy. God created each one of us with the need for connection, the need to know and be known by Him.

And then he opened the folds of time and stepped into our world as one of us. Jesus, Immanuel, which means God with us.

With us. Not watching from a distance. Not a kind but powerless force hovering around us. With us, experiencing life in this broken world.

Jesus knows the pull of this world on our heart. He experienced every emotion that we have felt or will ever feel. And he has experienced one emotion that we will never experience – abandonment by God.

We often feel alone, I’m not discounting that. But the reality is that God has promised to be with us and to never forsake us.  Jesus willingly experienced complete abandonment on the cross in order to offer us peace with God.

 

Why is God being with us important? What difference does it make?

We have an enemy that works overtime to make us feel isolated, misunderstood, abandoned. He knows that when we feel alone and vulnerable, we are more apt to listen to his lies. We were made for connection and intimacy, so when we feel alone it is easy for our hearts to make this false conclusion: I am not known, therefore I am not loved.

Jesus is with us, out of love for us, to draw us into relationship with Him. In Jesus we are known, loved, connected – the very things we were created to experience.

Because Jesus experienced life in our skin, He is with us in our joy and in our pain.

Pain is part of living in this broken world. We feel pain on many different levels, and we usually work hard to avoid pain on every level. We avoid it by staying busy, numbing out on Netflix, eating, not eating, drinking alcohol, shopping, working, working out, the list is endless. We want to avoid pain so much that we even take good things and twist them to keep numb instead of stopping and looking our pain in the eye.

And the main problem with all the numbing that we do is this truth: We were not made to live life numb. We were made to push through the fear, look our pain square in the eye, and live life in full.

Does that sound scary? You bet.

But we don’t do it alone.

Jesus stands with us when we face our pain. He guides us into healthy ways of living and thinking and acting. His resources are not limited, and He will provide what we need to face our pain.

On the podcast This Good Word With Steve Wiens, Seth Haines says this on the episode called Inner Sobriety.

“The foundational question is, Can I sit in my pain and feel it without needing to eat, drink, do whatever, look at porn? Can I sit in that pain, can I invite Christ into that pain and then can I cultivate a prayerful imagination of what it looks like for Christ to walk in that pain with me?”

What is your pain? Can you imagine Jesus speaking into your pain? What do you think He would say?

We are not alone in our pain. Jesus stepped from the perfection of heaven into the broken chaos of this world to walk with us. Our God is with us every step of the way.

And what a difference that makes!

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Please join me on my writer’s Facebook page, Erin Ulerich, on Wednesdays in December as we explore the question “What difference does Jesus make?” I’ll be on live (and attempting to speak in complete sentences) at 6:00 a.m. CST, but the video will be available to watch whenever you can. My prayer is that in those moments our hearts will lean toward Jesus in adoration and praise. My hope is that we will enter our day stronger and more peaceful.

O come let us adore Him.

What Difference Does Jesus Make?

Fighting for hope is my all-time favorite subject to write about. Hope is talked about a lot at Christmas, so I could probably back off on the talk of battle, right? Come on, lighten up. Do we have to keep fighting for hope, even during the most wonderful time of the year?

Most definitely.

I have found that holidays seem to amplify daily struggles. It may be that we are busier than usual, but I think it’s also because we have these expectations of happiness, peace, and perfection – standards that we don’t require our every-day lives to meet.

We have these hopes that just for a moment life will balance in perfect peace and harmony, you know, like they do in the Hallmark Christmas movies. We want our meals to look Instagram perfect, and our Christmas craft projects to make it on Pintrest, and not on the Pintrest fail website.

So with all this pressure, it’s not surprising that we struggle during the holidays.

What’s your top holiday struggle?

My biggest struggle at Christmas is remembering why we are celebrating and how that connects to my every-day life. To be honest, it gets lost under the mad dash of secret Santa presents, real presents, school programs, parties, decorating, luncheons, get-togethers, and the pressure to somehow stay in budget.

My joy gets lost in the busyness and I have trouble remembering that Christmas is really about Jesus coming to earth, experiencing life in this broken world, and making a way for us to be in relationship with God.

God opened the folds of time and stepped into our world as one of us.  It’s unheard of. It’s mind-blowing. And yet, even as I’m writing this, it feels far away.

I want things to be different this year.

So my Christmas gift to myself (and you) is a few moments on Facebook Live in the early morning of each Wednesday of December. Let’s grab a cup of coffee (if you’d like) and focus for just a little bit on this question: “What difference does Jesus make?” My prayer is that in those moments our hearts will lean toward Jesus in adoration and praise. My hope is that we will enter our day stronger and more peaceful.

Please join me on my writer’s Facebook page, Erin Ulerich, on Wednesdays in December. I’ll be live at 6:00 a.m. CST, but the video will be available to watch whenever you can. I am looking forward to connecting with you in these few moments of sanity during December.

O come let us adore Him.