“For we are consumed by Your anger; we are terrified by Your wrath. You have set our unjust ways before You, our secret sins in the light of Your presence.” – Psalm 90:7-8 (HCSB)

I believe we have often seen our attempts to share the Good News of Jesus Christ fall short because we have neglected to share the whole story. We have basically recreated the Gospel and preached Jesus as something that will make your life better. If that is the case, Jesus simply falls into the same category as CrossFit or the latest iPhone. A.W. Tozer once said, “No one can know the true grace of God who has not first known the fear of God.” In an effort to make the Gospel inoffensive to modern sensitivities, we have preached the Grace of God without the Wrath of God. To truly understand Grace, we must first understand Judgement. As humans, we judge one another on a sliding scale; if you are better than most people, or if you do more good things than bad things, we consider you a good person. However, God is Holy and Righteous, and in Him there is NO sin. As Psalm 90 points out, then, when we stand in the presence of God, every single sinful deed and thought is paraded before us as evidence for why we deserve to be separated from God for all eternity. Any one of those sins would convict us, but we see there are millions of them! That is why, when we read about men entering the presence of God in Scripture, they cry out “Woe is me!,” cover their face, and fall lifeless to the ground. Jesus did not come to make our life better, He came to rescue us from the most fearful thing known to sinful man: the Judgment of God. That is why verses like “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” (Romans 8:1) are beautiful music to our ears. The truth of the Gospel, then, creates a cycle of ever-increasing intimacy with God: being clothed with Christ allows us to stand in God’s presence, which allows us to see more of His Holiness, which makes us realize more fully our unworthiness, which gives a whole new love for the Salvation of Jesus, which once again shows us more of the Father. With that thought in mind, let’s take a moment and compare Psalm 90:7-8, which is quoted above, with Hebrews 4:16; “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” What a stark contrast between the one who stands before God all alone, and the one who stands clothed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ!

Heavenly Father, help us more fully understand our retched sinfulness, so that we can more fully bask in the beautiful Grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.