"A 'Dogged' Audacity"

I was sitting in my living room relaxing when all of a sudden, Scooter (my family's pet dog) came running towards me with its tail wagging incessantly, circled around the chair i was slumped upon, looked up at me, and then, as if out of great familarity, leapt onto my lap and made himself comfortable (see picture above taken by my sister). Oh, the audacity of this little thing - making himself comfortable on my lap!!! :)

This very simple audacious act of Scooter provoked a question in my heart as i reflected on the incident. The question that came to my mind was this - "How confident are we, as Christians, in our approach to our heavenly Father?" Do we come to Him with absolute confidence (like little Scooter did to me) and, may i use the term, "reverential audacity"? Do we make ourselves comfortable in His awesome presence, snuggling up beside Him and into His embrace (albeit with reverence)? Or are we approaching God from a distance and with tremendous caution?

Then the revelation came ... Oh, what a privilege that the way has been made for us Christians to access the very presence of our heavenly Father, the Creator of the universe, without fear or apprehension, but with absolute confidence and full assurance of faith!!! All this only made possible by the finished work of our Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross of Calvary, Golgotha, and our faith in Him and His great redemptive work.

Indeed, through Jesus, the way has been miraculously paved for us sinners to approach a holy, righteous and just God - something quite unthinkable apart from our divine Mediator and His great redemptive and reconciliatory work!!! His very words, "It is finished", as He hung on the Cross, giving up His Spirit, and the historical event of the immediate tearing of the curtain in the Temple from top to bottom signalled the acceptance of the one and only (and once-and-for-all) perfect sacrifice of the perfect God-man Jesus Christ by God the Father for our sins - and, more than that, depicted the free access to God now granted to us because of the atoning work of our Lord Jesus Christ for our sins. No longer do we need a priest to go behind the curtain to the Holy of Holies to approach God on our behalf; we ourselves have been made priests!!! Talk about spell-bounding miracles and endless grace!!! We now have free access to God on the basis of what Christ has done for us - His great substitutionary work on the Cross (to me, the most significant event in all of human history). By His obedient and substitutionary work on the Cross, we sinners have now been declared righteous (and made clean) by faith in His blood - and, as such, we can now boldly approach our heavenly Father - personally, intimately, and confidently. Simply awesome!!! Simply amazing!!!

Oh, let us thank God for His amazing grace in that while we were still undeserving sinners, He initiated this great redemptive plan to reconcile us to Himself through faith in the blood of His Son Jesus Christ. Oh, what love this is!!! How amazing, how divine!!! Let us take heart and understand, at a deeper level, the signifincance of this central historical event - namely, the atoning work of Christ on the Cross - and approach God with a holy and reverential confidence and in full assurance of faith - for the way has been paved for us by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!!! Blessed be the name of our Lord!!! :)

"Therefore, brothers,

since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place

by the blood of Jesus,

by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body,

and since we have a great priest over the house of God,

let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith,

having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience

and having our bodies washed with pure water.

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess,

for he who promised is faithful."

- Hebrews 10: 19-23