The Gospel Revealed In Me

The Gospel Revealed In Me
The Pieces of the Puzzle

Why a puzzle?  I hate puzzles, all of them.  Crossword, Suduko, Rubik’s-Cube, word puzzles, picture puzzles (no matter how beautiful the picture might be), big puzzles, little puzzles – I hate them all.

Guess that is just the way I am wired.  I don’t need the frustration – I’m too uptight as it is.  I don’t covet the challenge – I can think of a hundred better ways of challenging myself.  Writing is certainly one of them.  How do I best convey the thoughts and images that come to me in such a seemingly random fashion?  One of the challenges is remembering the thought just recently revealed to me.

It seems that I often receive my best and most provocative thoughts minutes after I turn off my bedside light and begin to pray.  “Oh Heavenly Father, I love you so much.  I worship and adore You...” and often something, a verse I’ve read or a phrase I happen upon, a snippet of a song from long ago, something triggers me and I begin to meditate.  I find that if I don’t write it down immediately, I often forget by the next morning exactly what I saw in such detail and inspiration the night before.

For example:  It is about 12:05 AM, I closed a book I was reading, and I used a slip of paper that I had written upon as a bookmark.  On it I had written, during one of those minutes of revelation, “The Gospel Revealed In Me – Galatians 1:16, But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb and called me through His grace, to reveal His Son in me…”  God calls me to salvation when He chooses, reveals Himself to me and through me as He gives me the life, the Light, and the faith to believe in Him.”  He does it all from beginning to end, choosing me, regenerating me, giving me the faith to believe, sustaining my faith through sanctification, and completing the work at the end through glorification.

The verse is not talking about Paul being physically born and physically separated from his mother, but being separated or set apart to God for service from the time of his birth.  This phrase refers to God’s election of Paul without regard for his personal merit or effort.  “Called me through His grace,” – This refers to God’s effectual call (called to be saints) – Rom. 1:7, “ To reveal His Son in me,” – Not only was Christ revealed to Paul, but in him as God gave him the grace to believe in Him.  His specific call was to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.

This was another of those random thoughts that often become so important to me.  I realized at that moment that this verse was another crucial revelation that I find cementing the theology, that God continues to unfold for me.

I’ve been a Christian, Born Again, for 30 plus years now, and I find myself amazed at how much I don’t know, but awed at how much God has revealed to me.  The theology isn’t anything new and I am no prophet, yet God continuously reveals to me in awesome ways what this marvelous thing called Christianity is all about.

Tonight, as I meditated on this verse, the thought that came to me through this verse was that, once again, the Lord was showing me my real purpose in life.  He is using me, just an ordinary man with no exceptional talents or skills, to show the world a living picture of who His Son, the Lord Jesus is.

It is through His grace that He works, not because of who I am, what I’ve accomplished, how much I have, or what I’m worth.  He does it because He chooses to!  That is the key to the entire Bible, the key to understanding God as best we can, the truth that my God is the One and Only Sovereign God, that He has a perfect plan for His called ones, that He will do what He will do, and that in the most wonderful and perfect way.  Can we even begin to understand this?  I cannot, but repeatedly, He has shown me in the most amazing ways that He continues to work out His perfect plan in me.

Why would God choose to reveal Jesus in me?  I am not a Paul!  I have sinned the worst types of sins.  I have broken each of His commandments.  I have turned my back on Him and have fallen more than once.  Yet, each time I fall, He continues to love me, continues to bestow on me His mercy and grace, and to restore me to fellowship with Him.

It certainly was not because I was such a great guy, such a powerful and devoted Christian.  No, He chose to love me before the foundation of the world, before I was even a twinkle in my parents’ eyes.  God loved me so much that He wrote my name in the “Book of the Saved –The Lamb’s Book of Life,” from before the foundation of the world.  Psalm 139:16 says that “In Your book they were all written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.”

He continues to love me in spite of the wretched man that I am!  Oh Paul, I can relate to you as you cried out in anguish, “For what I am doing, I do not understand.  For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do…For I know that in me, that is, in the flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find.  For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.  Oh wretched man that I am!  Who will deliver me from this body of death?”  (Rom.7: 15-24).

I continually fail in my Christian walk and deny Him.  I am amazed at how capable I am of committing the most grievous of sins, but I am even more amazed at the grace He continues to shower on me.

Tonight I turned to my wife as I often do and interrupt her reading.  “Just give me a minute please honey, I need to tell you what God has revealed to me just now.”  She calmly sets her book aside and listens as I try hard to explain my thoughts.  They tumble from my mouth in a torrent as I excitedly, but frustratedly, try to explain, but the thoughts I try to articulate don’t seem to have the same impact as they had on me.

You see, back eight years ago, my wife and I were going through the most amazing healing process.  I had left her for another woman – just got up and left everything I had; my incredible wife, my job, my church, my Sunday school class, my small group, my friends – my everything.

Somehow, I couldn’t completely turn my back on God although, on the surface, it appeared I had.  It wasn’t so much that I still loved Him, in that deep, private place inside that I so conveniently reserved for Him when I sinned.  No, He loved me so much more!

After almost a year, I returned to my wife, but it was with confusion and reluctance.  I had completely lost myself.  I no longer knew whom I was and I am not sure that I ever really did know.  I only knew that I could no longer continue in my sin.  I desperately needed to repent; yet, I stubbornly refused to do so.  How could I give up what I had worked so hard to gain - my freedom, my independence?

God spoke to me that cold, late November morning.  He chose to use a well-known evangelist, Greg Laurie, to deliver a very clear message to me – “I must repent of my sins.”  It was like a lightning bolt hit me, although I had heard the message many times before.  I fell on my face, broken, sobbing, repenting of everything, every sin I had chosen to commit and God immediately began to restore me.  He could have chosen to eliminate me (I would have!) or turn His back on me, but instead He chose to love me.

During our healing process, my wife and I spent countless hours talking and praying, often while listening to Christian music.  On the CD “Experiencing God” playing one evening, Kyle Matthews sang about finding a piece of a puzzle under the table on the floor.  It wasn’t anything special, just some colored cardboard, in shades of blue with a few gold strings.

Suddenly I saw in my mind’s eye, a vision of a man, only from the neck down.  He wore a leather apron over a work tunic, as a carpenter might have during Christ’s stay on earth.

In His left hand He held what appeared to be a block of some sort and in His right, various tools that he interchanged as He worked on the block.  As I watched in fascination, He whittled away at the piece, sometimes removing just minute amounts and often times, He dug deep and removed a surprising amount.  Occasionally, He attempted to fit the block into what appeared to be a large assortment of like pieces on the table before Him.  He worked and fitted, worked some more with infinite patience until, at last, the piece somehow fit perfectly into the assembly of the other pieces.  He stood back and I moved closer to see what He had been working on.

I was amazed to see that the block was a representation of me, an exact likeness.  As I peered at His work, I noticed that not only was it a picture of me, but was also made up of all the pieces of my life; my successes, my failures, my sins, my Christian walk – every part of me was imprinted on that block.

With even more amazement, I looked down at the surrounding pieces and noticed that they too were representations of other Christians I knew.  Here was my wife, here my daughters, my grandchildren, there my sister, there my best friend.  Every block was made in the perfect likeness of someone- and they were all believers in Christ.  I say “likeness, because, while the representation of the person was perfect in detail, each block took on the radiance of Christ revealed in that person.

As I stood in awe, my eyes brought into focus what the Master Craftsman was creating and I realized that he was Father God.  I was stunned that the completed work was a picture of Jesus!  What He revealed to me that evening was that Jesus could not be complete until each block was fitted perfectly in place as designed by the Builder.

I understood then what he wrote in Eph. 1:10, “…That in the dispensation of the fullness of the times, He might gather together in One all things in Christ…” Here at the completion of history, God will gather everything to Himself, the new universe totally unified under Christ.  God’s perfect plan is unfolded in Eph. 2:4-10, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and He raised us up together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.”  Verse 10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”

And this, of course, comes full circle to the verse I read tonight, Gal. 1:16, “…And He called me through His grace to reveal Christ in me.”  I cannot be complete without Christ in me.  He is everything.  It is the purpose for which the Father, through Christ Jesus and the Spirit, created me; for good works, prepared from before the beginning of time for me to do.  The amazing thing is, I can’t do them, not in and of myself.  It is God who works in me for good, through the power of His Spirit.

This glorious puzzle revealed to me of the Son, incomplete without me, without each believer created for His purpose.  “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places IN Christ, just as He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined (set apart for His purpose) us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved (Jesus Christ).” (Eph. 1: 3-6).  God not only chose by Himself, but for Himself to the praise of His own glory.  Through God’s sovereign will, before the creation of the world and, therefore, obviously free of any human power and apart from any human worth, those who are saved have become eternally united with Christ Jesus.

God chose us through His grace and set us apart so that we would be holy and blameless in Christ.  The puzzle could never be complete if each one of His called ones (believers), the pieces of the puzzle, were not holy and blameless.  The puzzle will be complete one day, at the end of time, when all who were chosen as pieces of the puzzle are completed and united in Christ Jesus.

The Father, through His Spirit, continues to refine me, one of His chosen puzzle pieces.  He uses me to reveal His gospel, exclaiming the finished work of Christ on the Cross-and the doctrine of salvation through faith alone.  He created me for His purpose, gives me the power and gifts to continue His work on earth, once again, to do the works He already prepared beforehand for me to do.  Whether it is to teach, to witness, to write, or simply to love as He loves and to be the Light as He is the Light, I continue to serve Him, His gospel revealed through me.

**God has a wonderful way of confirming what He reveals, making His truth evident.  While studying Dr, Lewis Sperry Chafer's wonderful thesis on Soteriology (the study of Salvation), the chapter involving the Calvanistic Doctrine of Security, I read these words, "It is reasonable to believe that each individual ever to be saved by the grace of God through the Savior, Jesus Christ, was in ages past individually presented as a particular love gift from the Father to the Son; and that each individual represents a thought that could never be duplicated; and that if one of these jewels should be missing from the whole company, the Lord would be deprived as only infinity could be injured by imperfections."  In words more eloquent than mine could ever be, Dr. Chafer reaffirms my vision of the predestination of each believer, from before the foundation of the world, and that each one has been set apart as a perfect love gift from Father to Son, the gift not being complete until each one called to come, receives Christ by faith.  Praise to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!

I will have to revisit my first statement about “hating all puzzles”!