THOUGHTS ON JONAH 2a

Part 2a: Just as I Am …

Just as I am, without one plea,
     but that thy blood was shed for me,
     and that thou bidst me come to thee,
     O Lamb of God, I come, I come.


Whenever I think back upon the times over the years when I watched the Billy Graham crusades on TV, the one thing that ALWAYS comes to mind is the singing of “Just as I Am” during the invitation and seeing hundreds of people come forward to give their lives to Jesus! There was something about the message conveyed in the preaching and in this song that caused people to believe that they REALLY COULD come “just as they were,” and that they would find acceptance and forgiveness in the presence of the Lord. And that’s exactly what they found! And they discovered that being in His presence was a good thing! In reality, all of us experienced that same open-armed acceptance when we gave our hearts to the Lord … and we discovered that His presence was good!


So, what changed? What causes us, at times, to believe that instead of finding love, acceptance, and forgiveness in His presence, we will encounter judgment, rejection, and punishment? It’s usually because we have become convinced that, in His presence, all those areas of sin and weakness that we still struggle with will be exposed, and He will then find ample reason to judge, reject, and punish us; so we avoid His presence because we cannot stand the thought of being rejected by Him!


This is nothing less than the great deception of condemnation! Deception takes a little bit of truth (we really DO still struggle with some things), then adds a lot of lies to that truth. This is where condemnation comes in. Condemnation points the finger at US and convinces us to believe lies such as these: that God couldn’t POSSIBLY love us because we CONTINUALLY blow it; that we will ALWAYS let Him down; that we will NEVER fully overcome the things we struggle with; that we will NEVER amount to anything useful to God; that we might as well GIVE UP; and on and on ad nauseum! Romans 8:1 tells us the truth about all this --- that there is no longer any condemnation for those of us who are in Christ Jesus! So, then, let us reject those thoughts and feelings of condemnation and come into His presence, not by way of any special merit that we have to earn somehow, but by the blood of Jesus that made it possible in the first place!


But, you may ask, isn’t there something about His presence that DOES reveal our sins and failures? Yes. Why else would Isaiah say, when he found himself in the Lord’s presence, "’Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty’" (Isa.6:5)? However, what we MUST understand is that God does not expose our sin in order to condemn us; He exposes our sin in order to reveal His grace to us! The next two verses of Isaiah 6 give us the rest of the story: “Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’" What happens in His presence is that He exposes our sin in order to set us free from it!


This amazing love that drew us to Him in the first place is the same amazing love that keeps on inviting us into His presence over and over again, even now! Hebrews 4:16 encourages us to “approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (NIV). Let us not AVOID His presence because we still struggle with things, let us SEEK His presence because we still struggle with things!


Just as I am, without one plea,
     but that thy blood was shed for me,
     and that thou bidst me come to thee,
     O Lamb of God, I come, I come.






Next, Part 2b: I Shall Not be, I Shall Not be Moved!