“Your Love sets me free from the weight of both, failure and success.”

Before God laid the foundations of the world, He had you and me in mind. He had great plans for us, great thoughts towards us and loved us with an everlasting love. He still does because The Word says,

“For I am the Lord, I change not…” (Malachi 3:6 KJV)

He is steadfast in His Love towards us so much so that He gave us His one and only Son – Jesus through whom we have an explicit demonstration of the unconditional love of God towards us, a love that knew us before the beginning of time and longs to see us in life everlasting. One of my most favorite verses of Scripture is as follows,

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you;
Before you were born I sanctified you;
I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5 NKJV)

There is undoubtedly a lot to unpack from this, but what is the most comforting is that even before God formed us in the womb, He knew us. He knew us intimately and completely. He knew every tiny detail of our lives. He knew every mistake we would ever make and every detour we would ever take. He knew everything we would think would disqualify us and He STILL loved us, chose us, called us.

It is a revelation of this Perfect Love of The Father that sets us free to be ourselves and to flourish in the calling that we have received in our lifetime. This love reassures us that it keeps no record of wrongs, but instead delights in our attempts. This love not only accepts us wholeheartedly; but cherishes, treasures, adores and esteems us. This love separates our “do” from our “who.” This love does not see who we are not, it is focused on who we are becoming – the righteousness of God in Christ. This love understands all our struggles and frailties, but boldly declares that when we are weak, we are strong for Christ’s power rests on us. This love does not depend on our behavior or performance, but is solely contingent on the character of God, because God is Love.

I really thank God for Jesus. He nailed not only our sin and shame, but also the lie of performance, perfectionism, legalism and religion to The Cross and set us free. Instead, He gave us relationship with The Father. I perhaps have lost count of the number of times I have recited the following verse to myself (and my guess and hope is that perhaps you have too!),

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1, NIV)

So, the question really isn’t if we are loved or not, because we are and one hundred percent at that. The question is, “how do we reciprocate this love?”

I believe the best way to reciprocate this kind of love is to receive it. Fully and abundantly; thereby allowing it it shape all of our life’s responses, choices and decisions. When The Father’s Love has begun to wash over us, like tidal waves, taking us from one dimension of glory to another, a transformation begins. We feel different : light and free. We recognize that we do not have to be perfect, we do not have to perform for acceptance and we do not have to be validated by man. We simply need to receive the Love that first loved us and let it flow organically, spontaneously, freely and horizontally – into the world that is around and about us, till all that are connected to us have a glimpse of the freedom and love The Father has lavishly bestowed upon each and every one of us.

Friends, when we live like that, we begin to live like Jesus. He knew He was thoroughly loved by The Father and from the abundance of that revelation, He was able to stand in the Truth of and thereby, manifest His Identity as The Son of God, which empowered Him to withstand all that He did and accomplish His Purpose. Opposition, rejection, betrayal; nothing deterred Him because He was fully validated by Love.

And the same is true for us too.

However, in our process of learning to live like Jesus, we are going to have times where we fail, we stumble, we fall short. But that is precisely when the strength of our relationship kicks in and we recognize that even though we may have made a mistake or perhaps, dished up a mess; we are STILL covered by Grace and the constancy of our Father’s Agape Love.

THAT is what gives us strength in the face of failure. We are still who He says we are and we are still able to do what He has called us to. Nothing disqualifies that which has been birthed and cultivated by Love. Hence, we continue to remain steadfast and press on towards the mark of the high calling that we have received.

But what happens when we succeed?

I was reading The Bible today, and came across a verse that seems apt to be mentioned here,

“for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” (Philippians 2:13, NIV)

Since it is God who works in us through His Spirit what is pleasing to Him, since it is God who gives us the grace we need in our time of need, since it is God who is an ever present help in times of trouble, since it is God who through radical revelations of His Love enables and empowers us to be all that we were created to be and do all that we have been called to do; who gets The Glory?

He does, and that is the purpose of any measure of success that we attain in our lifetime. We have the absolute delight and pleasure of reciprocating God’s Love in times like these by casting our crowns at His Feet and letting it all bring praise, honor and glory to His Highest Name!

All designed in order to help us live life the way God wants us to – light and free. We neither have to be burdened by the guilt of failure nor crushed under the pressure of success; simply because our Identity is tied to neither. Birthed in and redeemed by Love, our Identity transcends this temporal world and finds its origin in and its way back into Eternity. No longer bound to the constraints of the world, we have indeed been set free to blaze trails for generations to come in order that they too may know who they are and whose they are, a beautiful journey of passing on the baton of faith; all made possible because of a Trailblazer who nearly two thousand years ago, descended from Eternity into Earth, to pave a way laced with Grace, Truth and Mercy, a way that is The Only Way and is etched out in the Power and Triumph of His Blood that runs in our veins till today.

So be it.

Amen.