Greater Than Our Hearts (part 2)

This is how we know that we belong to the truth and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence: If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God… 1 John 3:19-22

He knows my future possibilities and how to get me there

He knows everything about how I performed in the past and why, and about the power of Jesus’ sacrifice to overcome my failures, and how he plans to convert them into a better future. The scope of his big picture vision is amazing. There’s no doubt that sin is a setback, a delay of God’s preferred vision for us. But since he’s been working with Plan B since the beginning, he who knows everything, knows how to make beautiful things out of broken pieces.

The great Fixer of failures knows that the Son’s sacrifice was more than enough to cancel the debt and overcome the deficit of our dark deeds and include them into his beautiful picture. He knows it, and in order to “put our hearts at rest in his presence” we have to be convinced of it too.

He sees the past with clarity, but more than that, he looks ahead to where he’s taking us from here. He has the big picture in his mind at all times, his grand plan for our beautification and our value to his glory. He knows everything; how each puzzle piece, even the most disfigured ones, fits together with other pieces in his grand plan and how they add up to an amazing future for his glory and our good.

He has infinite peripheral vision to see the past, present, and future without having to turn his head. He sees what our heart doesn’t see, where we’ve been, where are, and where we’re going. With our limited vision all we can see is our latest face plant. Humiliated once again, we assume that we’ll be benched indefinitely. But while he might call for a brief hospital stay to fix what we fractured in our fall, a round of rehab for our sake, his super vision points toward the future he sees in us.

He knows everything – our failures and our futures! He sees them both at the same time. The past and future frames may appear to us to be galaxies apart but he sees them connected by the cross that pays for our past and promotes us into his preferred future. Jesus’ blood does more than erase our past; it rewrites our future. He sees them both at once.

In some sovereign way he works our failures into our future. “He works in all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son…” He carefully chisels us into a resemblance of Jesus and – among other things – uses even our flaws and failures to do it.

Next: a case study…