"A Debtor Redeemed - How I Love To Proclaim It!"

Our family is memorizing Romans Chapter 8 together as part of our family worship... it's going slower than I first expected, but God is REALLY teaching us all some awesome truths from it as a result.

I try to study and stay ahead of everyone so I'll be able to teach the deep Truth of this rich passage and as I was studying this morning... still in bed with one leg hanging our from under the covers... half awake but having an awesome time in the Word... you get the picture. As I was there, in that moment, God was overwhelming me with His Goodness of how we DO NOT deserve to be loved, in any way, by Him... yet He chose to love us anyway. He doesn't need us, but we must have Him to even exist. He is "completely complete" without us, but we are a "walking corpse" without Him. He sees the disgusting depths of our hearts (a.k.a. all our hidden deceitful feelings and motives, our hidden hate, our slothful spirit, having a "quenchable thirst" for the Word when we should actually never be able to get enough... He sees it all... He sees it all and still chooses to love us... how truly ungraspable this is to me!

Romans 8:12-17 tells us how we should be living - AS DEBTORS TO GOD! We are more than conquerors through Christ, but it's not because we have done something to merit that victory, that peace, that life - no! It is because God chose, God saved, GOD REDEEMED US!!! NOT because He owed it to us, but because He loved us... He still loves us, His sheep, His children.

We have no right to boast (Eph. 2:8-9) because it is God that saved us - not us impressing God enough that we "became saved". No, He has saved us because of love, not our works, not our craftiness... and certainly not because of our blogging skills :0-).

I ask myself if I'm living as a grateful debtor...I wish I could tell you I was. I wish I could tell you that I've never missed an opportunity to praise Him for redeeming me, that I've always been faithful to give Him the credit for the blessing in my day to day life... I wish I could say that I truly understood how great of a cost our Great God paid in order to set me/us free from sin... to redeem us, to save us.

I pray God continues to help me grow closer to living as more of a debtor to Him each and every day. How? I think the best way for me is to continue to realize how depraved my flesh really is and that I need to continually crucify it every day (several times at that).

Let us walk together in the Spirit brothers and sisters and grow in knowing more and more how much of a debtor we really are to Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior!

PT