Our huffing and puffing to impress God, our scrambling for brownie points, our thrashing about trying to fix ourselves while hiding our pettiness and wallowing in guilt are nauseating to God and are a flat out denial of the gospel of grace.
~ Brennan Manning
If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ Who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator. Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in Colossians 3
Oh beloved, it is true. We have been told that we should not hide things in our life. And true this is. For, for us to hide something is only to set the timer for it to emerge from us. And once it does emerge, what will erupt from us will be fetid and hot and deadly.
And hiding anything from G_d is impossible anyway. Why do we even try?
There is, however, something we do indeed want to hide. It is the most reasonable thing for us to do. For when we hide this, we will be found good as gold on That Day. What do we hide? Us. Actually, us, in Him.
And as simple as this simple act of faith seems, it is a place that’s completely different than we were used to going. In the past, our lives were all about us. And as we went about doing our thing, we were trying to pick bits of life off the deadness upon which we gorged.
We filled ourselves with things that could not fill us. But, even though we were not satisfied, our stomachs and souls were stuffed with an achy swollen mass. We were ashamed that we had consumed so much of the world, but we felt we needed to hide this from others. But even as we tried to hide, it never worked.
However, thankfully, one day Jesus came and truly killed us before the other death we were consuming could take us out in another direction. And in this moment, His death became ours – and our’s became His. But this exchange did not result in mutual destruction. Rather, it resulted in us being truly alive in Him for the first time ever, and also forever.
But this moment also exchanged something else for us. We were no longer the ones needing to hide something. We ourselves had been hidden away into the very heart and life and Love of the One who had just saved us. So, instead of us doing the impossible (hiding our failures), Christ did the impossible for us (He set us free from them entirely).
Can we see it? There is no way for us to hide our sins. The only way for us to be totally free from them is for Christ to hide us from them, within His very Self. However, once we allow this to happen, the freedom is certain. There is nothing that can get to us when we hide within the inapproachable light of His presence.
So brothers, are you trying to hide away a secret sin; or fight one off? It won’t work. Never has. Never will. Run and hide. But now, run and hide within the place you already are: In Christ. Tonight is your night beloved. Time to believe where you are in Him.
