Toe Jam

I stumped my toe last night on the chair leg. It hurt. I didn't curse but I did say a few unintelligble things to express the pain.

My family was watching the Olympics and I got up from the couch to go to the kitchen for a snack. My wife had set some couch pillows on the floor between it and a chair and I stumped my next-to-the-last little toe when I stepped around them. It throbbed all through the night and I thought I might have broken it. This morning it appears that I just jammed it badly. It's bruised, but I'm going to live.

As believers we often jam our little toes and sometimes our biggest ones. In our attitudes and even in our behaviors we show that we're still bumping into issues we've struggled with our whole lives. Like Paul in Romans 7:19 we can say, "For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing."

We will all struggle with sin from time to time, no one is immune. Some sins are "worse" to us than others, but all sin was consumed by Christ on the cross and dealt with there once and for all in a spiritual sense. I was thinking about that during the night when my toe was hurting and the Spirit whispered to me a verse from 2 Corinthians 5:21 that says, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." I hadn't thought about that verse in a long time and it hit me with a ton of joy!

Our view of sin, grace, and forgiveness is often clouded by ignorance and our brokenness. We project onto God how He must feel about us based on how we feel about ourselves. But when we stumble or crack our little toe on the chair we must run like the prodigal to the Father's arms again and see ourselves as He sees us: totally forgiven, cleansed, whole, precious, redeemed, and perfectly at home with Him because Jesus took all sin, past, present, and future to His cross for us.

Seeing ourselves as He sees us is the key to authentic praise and worship, healing, and living the kind of life that is fully connected with God.

Praise Him!