Speaking Words and Breathing Life

Your truth pursued me yesterday and Your grace gave me the strength to hold on.  Despite the noises that threatened to steal the slow peace I’m finding in You.  Noises that taunted my aloneness and alienation.  I stay in this place where Your arms have encircled around me and keeping my eyes stayed on You.  

You found me through the book of Romans.  The fourth and fifth chapters were words I read out loud to myself and how their sound just moved and tugged at my heart.  

God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.  How much more then, since we are now justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath. (Rom 5:8-9)

These words of St. Paul broke through the dismal fog that clouded my mind and kept it cluttered for days.  I said it to myself again and again.  God proves His love.  God proves His love.  

What kind of God proves His love to His creation?  

I realized, this is how much He wanted to pursue me.  This is how deep His passion goes.  And turning it over in my mind again and again opened up the spaces where doubt and fear was.  

How much more more then, since we are now justified by His blood, will we be saved from the wrath.  How much more then!  

The Lord in His great love has wanted to pursue us ever since sin has caused the great divide. His pursuit is not just of a Savior who fights the battle and frees the captive.  That’s a pursuit of duty.  But His pursuit goes beyond duty and awakens the very core of His heart to choose and pursue us like a Lover who can be rejected and turned down and yet keep pursuing us anyway. 

He knows that because we have free will, we won’t always choose Him.  And yet even then, HE chose US.  He chose to pay the price to keep us away from what could break our hopes and our lives forever.  

This is what saves us.  This is what gives us security.  This is what frees us from whatever has enslaved us.  This is what lifts our eyes to the heavens where our true help comes from.  This radical and scandalous pursuit of Christ whose love has come down to hold us and give us all.

I pondered on these things yesterday and stood against what battled with my peace.  I read the words out loud again to myself.  Now justified by His blood.  I am now justified by His blood.  

Justified a word that means: 

Having, done for, or marked by a good or legitimate reason.  In theology means, declared or made righteous in the sight of God.

Because of Christ’s cross, I am now marked by good and made righteous in the sight of God.How much more now can Jesus save me from  anxiety.  How much more now can Jesus save me from rejection.  How much more now can Jesus save me from abandonment.  How much more now can Jesus save me from loneliness.  How much more now!

I was hungry to receive more of Him and read all the way to middle of the book.  I read out loud silently, carefully and deliberately.  I found how the words can hold so much power if I take the time to just slow down and not read it like a novel.  I realized that reading it reflectively and hearing the words come out of my own mouth is what allows Jesus’ life to incarnate into mine. It’s what makes it take root.  

Perhaps everytime I say a word, speaking it forth allows it to be carried by my breath that exhales from deep within me.  Perhaps when my breath carries these precious words, God’s breath is stirred and moved to embrace mine.  

For  His words called me out into existence and it is His Breath that gave me life. He is the Breath that gave me life.  

Reading Scripture this way then becomes a necessity.  For don’t I always need to breathe?