Your salvation is in Christ.
Your right standing with God is in Christ.
Your total and complete acceptance is in Christ. 
Your merit is all in Christ.
Your wholeness is in Christ.
So what does this mean to you?
It means your imperfect obedience, lukewarm love, and stumblings are swallowed up in Christ’s perfect life of obedience.
Remember, his perfect record is yours.
God loves you because of him.
As believers, our default position is now the full and complete life of Jesus.
That’s pure joy!
In the middle of a grueling week of work, a friend of mine stopped by and asked, “How’s it going?”
“Things could be better,” I said. I hurt all over from hours of standing on my feet. My head throbbed from lack of sleep. And I was fighting a cold.
“Listen,” he said looking at me. “This is as good as it gets. Things don’t get any better.” 
Most people would have thought my friend was way off-base. Negative. Cynical even.
For me, what he said was just what I needed to be reminded of.
Living in the wilderness is just that – journeying through a dry and thirsty land where there is no water, no oasis, and no rest.
Think Abraham.
Think the Israelites in their 40 years of desert wandering.
Even Jesus, when he was here in the flesh, lived his life in the wilderness.
He died in the wilderness, just like Abraham did, just like the first generation of Israelites did, just like you and me.
The wilderness is a pilgrimage, where we are not at rest. In fact, it’s a place of hardship and testing.
Wilderness and rest structures the life of the Church.
The First Coming of Jesus accomplished redemption by his death and resurrection.
His Second Coming brings in the Sabbath rest for all God’s people.
In between those two events, is the wilderness journey, in which we all pass through.
No one is exempt.
Not even Jesus.
He experienced the journey for us. He lived it perfectly for us. And that record is put to our account.
So then how are we to live our lives in the wilderness?
First, by not expecting it to be a life of comfort and rest. Just the opposite.
Second, it’s our time to do good works out of gratitude to God for saving us and giving us a future Sabbath rest that is as certain as God himself.
This is the time we tell others the good news of the gospel, where we love one another as the body of Christ, where preaching and teaching and training in righteousness is a daily and weekly habit.
Our happiness is not here.
It’s in a future rest in heaven with our God.
Are you someone who has grown up in church where performance defined who you were?
Where most days you were a miserable failure?
And love and acceptance were foreign concepts?
I have good news for you.
You didn’t grow up with the gospel.
You grew up with moralism (law).
The law is harsh. It beats you up. It tells you what you must do in order to please God (and others), but has no power to help you get there.
So you looked at your life and said, “I can’t do this,” and got depressed.
Or you admitted your failure, got furious, and walked away.
Here’s what happened to you.
You came into the church by faith in Jesus. He loved you so much he died for you. And you accepted his gift of salvation with gladness.
Then week after week you listened to preaching about moral behavior and living, and in a flash you plunged into despair because you didn’t measure up.
Your joy in Jesus went up in a puff of smoke. You even went so far to say that this Christian thing doesn’t work.
If you can relate to this, then here’s a question to ask yourself:
Is the cross and blood of Jesus sufficient to save you even while you are still sinful? Even while you continue to fail at living the Christian life?
You know what?
Heaven is filled with Christian failures! There aren’t any other kind of people there!
Jesus’ death on the cross and his shed blood for you is all you need.
Jesus himself will welcome and embrace you!
How’s that possible? It’s because God has given you the gift of the righteousness of Jesus. You had it the moment you came to faith.
It’s the only performance that counts!
Grab a hold of it and never let it go!
Who is responsible for your maturity in Christ? Is it all about you and your obedience or is all the Holy Spirit’s doing?
Do you have days when you feel you’ve done nothing but blow it as a Christian? You haven’t loved well, you ran out of patience, you didn’t think about God for an instant.
What does God think of you when you’re in that condition?
“Return to your baptism everyday,” Luther said. Remember you died in Christ, were buried in him, and were resurrected in him. All your sins are forgiven and washed away. God sees them no more.
Paul would say,
“For if we have been united together in the likeness of His death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.” – Romans 6: 5-7
You have been set free to live as a believer in Christ.
Before faith, you were a slave to sin. You couldn’t love or serve God. The only things you could do were to:
1) live in darkness
2) provoke God’s wrath
3) heap judgment on yourself
But God, who in his mercy called you from death to life, who gave you the gift of faith to believe in Christ and him crucified, now enables you to freely love and serve him.
You are a freed slave learning to live as a free man or woman in union to Christ.
How does this work out in daily living?
Justifying faith is God acting upon you – you are a passive recipient. He changed your heart, he made you capable of believing the gospel. You didn’t produce that yourself. You had no power.
Sanctifying faith is accomplished by the Holy Spirit who causes you to desire God and enables you to obey God. This new action will result in your good works.
You will produce fruit.
So if you’re worried about how you’re doing, don’t be. Looking inside your heart will demoralize you. It’s not pretty in there.
The solution is to keep looking to Jesus.
He’s the author of your faith, and to God who will give you everything you need to keep loving and serving him.
You’ve heard stories about the underground church in China. You’ve also read stories about Christians who have risked their lives for the gospel in foreign countries.
This is a true story that is a little closer to home. It’s from a man who teaches a bible study in a federal prison in Northern California.
“We had six baptisms today. We have a tank outside the church and they fill it up when we do baptisms. One white man and two black men and three Latino men were baptized. One of the inmates told me that these men’s faith was genuine. I asked him, ‘How do you know?’ He said, ‘Because they were all baptized in the same tank.’
“You see, in this prison, everything is segregated by race. Each race has its own shower and toilet, sink and place to eat. You never eat or shower at the other race’s area. It can get you stabbed or killed. These men, of different races, were being baptized in the same tank. That can get them in trouble with their own race group. All they really have now is the church body.
“In our day, and in our country, I never thought that a baptism could get you killed.”
Here is risk for the sake of the gospel.
Here is also a beautiful picture of how Christ tears down the separation of the races and creates one new race in himself.
Those who belong to Jesus Christ are now brothers with the same Father, who share in the same inheritance, and look forward to the same eternal destiny.
Do you know that Christ is happy in his exalted state in heaven?
Every day, if that is how time is measured in heaven, he looks around and sees the results of his death on the cross for his people.
First, he sees the conversion and the salvation of sinners.
Second, he looks over the amazing expanse of heaven and sees it populated with the people he died and shed his blood for.
Third, he looks down on our world and sees so many coming into faith, taking baby steps in grace, others advancing in their faith, and still others strong as warriors in their faith, and this brings pleasure to his soul.
Fourth, he sees those arriving in heaven, having finished the race, and he rejoices!
Jesus is fully satisfied with his own sacrifice!
And if he’s satisfied, so is God the Father, and the Holy Spirit.
They rejoice together!
There is joy in heaven over you!
Messy Christians 