Jesus is Unconditionally Committed to Me

June 26, 2007 at 11:22 pm · Filed under Personal, Quotes

“The gospel gives you psychological freedom to handle the wrong things that you will do. You won’t have to deny, spin, or repress the truth about yourself. These things don’t make it impossible to know who you are. Only with the support of hearing Jesus say, ‘You are capable of terrible things, but I am absolutely, unconditionally committed to you,’ will you be able to be honest with yourself.” – Tim Keller

I found this quote in an article on one of the blogs I read, and I starred the article to save for later because what Keller says here resonates with me so well. I have a serious psychological problem handling the wrong things that I’ve done or that I’m afraid of doing. There are things I say that are unkind. There are things I do that are unnecessary. There are things I don’t do that were needful at the time. And I am constantly thinking thoughts that should never enter into my head.

And in order to handle myself, if I forget about Jesus, my only option is to pretend that I didn’t really do or say those things, because the truth is too great to bear. And so I ignore the sin in my life, and I become someone whom I am not. I know longer know who I am anymore.

Last night in an email to Christian I told him that sometimes it’s hard for me to pray to God when I’m really hurting, because I know that when God begins to deal with my heart He will get all the way to the deepest part, and that might hurt more than anything else. But it is only through that immense pain of God dealing with us that we can have pure hearts; it is only when Christ scrapes away all the filth that we are clean.

And Jesus can honestly say that we are capable of terrible things. Some of us do those terrible things. But in light of His grace and knowing that He is unconditionally committed to us, we have the freedom to see our sin for what it is. And what it is is something that does not have victory over us.

Praise the Lord.

Permalink