Freely you have received, freely give

Freely you have received, freely give Matthew 10: 8

I have just been reading something from Joyce Meyer who was saying that she had great difficulty in the past from being merciful because she had never truly received God’s mercy for herself. She had no mercy from God to give others.

We can never give to others what we have not already received or have access to.  I cannot give you a glass of water if I have neither a glass nor access to fresh water. In the same way I cannot give you grace if I have not received God’s grace for myself. I was a very graceless person because I was hard and legalistic to myself and therefore to others. If I made a mistake I beat myself up about it so if others also made mistakes, even if I did not say anything, mentally I was criticising them for their mistakes. God had to show me how ‘bad’ I was and how much grace he had shown me, so that I too could show that same grace to others. It was a bit of a revelation to realise how graceless I was.

This difficulty can infiltrate all sorts of areas of our lives. If we feel guilty, we want to make everyone else feel guilty; if we feel shame, we want to blame others; if we feel rejected, we reject others and so on.  What we have, we give to others. The great news though is that as we get revelation of this, we do not have to sit in a pond of despair but realise that God is holding out his hand to lift us out. Jesus suffered to take all our sin, guilt, shame, rejection, sickness and every work of the enemy from our lives.  It takes time but God is patient and as we let him work in our lives, he will bring us to wonderful places of freedom.

So as we have been shown grace, we will be very gracious; as we have been shown mercy, we will be merciful; as God has set us free from sin and shame, we will walk confident in God’s goodness and love and show that to others. Where God has healed us, we will have great faith for healing for others. The very areas of greatest weakness and shame in my life have been turned around by God to bring freedom to others in those very same areas. As a teenager, I made quite a mess of my life – I was insecure, rejected and behaved very badly. As God has healed me, he has given me such a heart for teenagers not to have to walk through the things I put myself through. It is such an honour to help them find God’s love and walk through those tricky teenage years holding his hand and not walk through hopeless and helpless, trying all sorts of useless things to fill the void in their hearts.

So freely give what God has given you and if you are still struggling with some areas in your life, give them over to God, stop struggling and trust him to bring wonderful freedom that will bring great glory to him and help others. My old life honoured nobody; my new life I live for him to honour him as best I can.

A guilty conscience cleansed

How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death,  so that we may serve the living God! Hebrews 9: 14

When Joseph’s brothers went down to Egypt to buy food, as Canaan was also suffering in the famine, they unknowingly met Joseph who was in charge of selling food. Joseph recognised them and demanded that to prove they were not spies one of them must be left and they must bring their youngest brother Benjamin, Joseph’s only true brother, to Egypt. Benjamin had been left behind at the insistence of their father Jacob who did not want to lose the only other son of his beloved wife Rachel.

When the brothers heard Joseph’s demands they immediately saw it as a punishment for what they had done to him 20 years before (Genesis 42: 21 – 22). Reuben quickly tries to distance himself from their wrong actions and adds blame to their very guilty consciences.  It is amazing how much the guilt of what they had done to Joseph and the grief they had caused their father still weighed heavily on them after all these years.

This is what a guilty conscience does. It weighs us down and is never far from our thoughts. When things go wrong we immediately go back to that wrong act or decision we made and decide that is to blame and the reason why we are now experiencing difficulties.  

When Jesus died on the cross he not only took our sins but also our guilt and shame. Jesus doesn’t forgive our sins but leave us with a guilty conscience about them. He took the guilt as well and he has no desire for us to live under the weight of it. Nor are our past bad actions or poor decisions causing punishment that leads to difficulties now. As Jesus said as he died, ‘It is finished.’  The grip of sin, death, guilt and shame is broken. The blood of Jesus cleanses our guilty consciences declaring us not guilty in the eyes of everyone including ourselves.

The devil loves to play the blame game and remind us of our past. He wants us drowning in guilt and shame but we must let God renew our minds and wash away every trace of guilt and shame. It does not make us more humble to be reminded of our past failures – instead it paralyses us from moving on. We always have the ball and chain of guilt dragging along behind us.

Cut the chain and decide today to resist every thought that takes us back to those failures. Ask Jesus to cleanse your conscience with his precious blood and declare ‘Today I have the mind of Christ. My conscience is clear. My guilt and shame have been taken away and I am free to live and serve the living God to the fullness of my being.’