But I just feel ugly!

Paul makes a couple of awesome statements in Roman 5:6-8 that just refreshes the soul and breathes life into the spirit! I have been talking about the wrath of God and how Jesus satisfied wrath ON OUR BEHALF while on the cross, but Paul expands on that now and says that it was "while we were still weak" and "while we were still sinners." Then sums it up in verse 10 by saying that we were in fact enemies of God! How awesome is that!

Paul tells us all about what it means to be "counted" as the righteousness of Christ in chapter 4, then launches into faith, grace, hope, etc. in the beginning of 5 and then makes the big exclamation point by reminding us that it is ALL God! Verse 5 tells us that God has poured His very love into our hearts by His Holy Spirit and that He did it while we were at our weakest and most sinful! I did not have to clean my heart up before God would pour out His love into it, as a matter of fact, I am totally incapable of cleaning myself up at all!

There is so much here that I will camp out on Romans 5:6-10 for a while. I am seeing the incredible truth once again in verse 9 that we have been "saved by him from the wrath of God." I mean, I have to "get it". I have to let it sink into my hard head and heart that Jesus did not die on the cross for me just so I could go to heaven, so much more! He died on the cross for me to satisfy God's wrath and He did it when I was most wretched! I can take zero credit for that!

So that I don't get all crazy redundant here in this one blog, I am gonna camp on these verses until I feel like I have scratched the surface of doing them justice. I am going talk about how ugly I feel, how ugly I once was and how righteous Jesus is! Think about the word "wrath", that is what we deserve, and ONLY because of Jesus Christ are we not consummed by it! While we were the ugliest, the most beautiful of all beauties became ugliness on behalf of those "uglies" who believe! Amazing! Awesome! To be continued!