The Patriarch Lesson

So I am on this reading plan - one of my goals for 2013 - to read thru the whole Bible in a year. I am doing really good, in that I am ahead of schedule in reading it, but I haven't yet reached Deuteronomy and Numbers yet, which I expect to slow me down, just a bit.

Anyhow, reading about Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses, has been so interesting for me. For sure, I have read these stories before, but the Word is living and breathing. The Lord shines fresh revelation on scriptures, even if we have read then a hundred times.

Right now, the lesson the Lord is highlighting, is how bad these Patriarchs of our faith messed up. They were so flawed. They had some big time tests that they failed, or just bad character flaws in general, etc.

The point that stands out to me is, not only did they have these big failures, but that these failures were recorded in the scriptures, to be remembered for all time. They were considered righteous men, and they were, but not because they were any more prefect than me or you. They were considered righteous men because they believed and fellowshipped with God. They even got it right a good portion of the time, and obeyed the Lord's commands and followed thru for the long haul. Yet it was their faith in God, in the bad, and even in the good times that made them righteous.

It brought me back to a statistic I heard somewhere once, that the Lord focuses on the 85% that we get right (that is an overly generous percentage I know, that is like for a saint or monk or something, not me personally)

Yet I find myself almost constantly focusing on the 15% that I get wrong. Or that other people get wrong. Why do you think the Lord has no problem forgiving our sins and seeing the goodness in us?

Because He is looking for the goodness, the good stuff. He sees us and He sees our potential as well as our hearts, and He smiles because He doesn't make junk, and He made us. He can see our beginning from our end, and everything else in between. So when He does comes across the bad in us, He is never surprised by our failures. He just picks us up, and dusts us off, and tells us what else He sees! There is a whole lot more to us than our failures, so lets start focusing on the good in us.  Especially what makes us really good, which is Christ in us, our hope of Glory!!!!