Is God Mad At You?
I would like to assure and encourage you that not only is God not mad at you but He is passionatly in love with you.
Let's look at 3 words: Grace, Faith & Justification
Grace = "I receive from God what I do not deserve."
Faith = "I believe in what I cannot see as if I can see it."
Justification = "Jesus paid my spiritual debt & I am now righteous in the eyes of God."
There is one passage of Scripture that uses all 3 of these elements - Ephesians 2:8-9
“For it is by GRACE you have been saved, through FAITH — and this is not from yourselves, it is the GIFT (JUSTIFICATION) of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.
Yes, because of our sin we all deserve death (Romans 6:23). But the above passage explains that our sin debt has been paid in full!
Have you ever owed a debt? Most of us are all too familiar with being in debt, whether it's maxed out credit cards, a truck payment, or a mortgage.
Jesus told a story of a servant who was in debt to a king (Matthew 18:23-27). The servant owed the king 10,000 talents. When I first read this I had no idea how much 10,000 talents translated to in today's money. So I looked it up.
1 talents = 6,000 denarii. A denarii = an average day's wage for that time. Assuming a servant worked full time (40 hrs./wk.) and didn't make a large amount of money, I chose to use $8/hr. to translate his accumulated debt.
10,000 talents; 1 talents = 6,000 denarii; At $8/hour… = $19,200,000,000
Yep. Billions. This servant owed the king billions of dollars.
The servant knew he could never pay off this debt. The king knew the servant could never pay off this debt. But as the story goes, the kind had compasion for the servant, let him go, and forgave the debt.
The King in the story is God. The sevant is the story is each of us. We all stand indebted before God. We can never pay off this sin debt. We know we can't. God know's we can't. But God loved the world (that includes YOU!) soooooo much that God sent Jesus to pay the debt we could not ever repay.
So, no, God is not mad at you. No, you can't do enough to make God love you. He already loves you and He has wiped your debt away because of Jesus.
Being a follower of Jesus give you a new identity. Part of this new identity involves going from being spiritually billions in debt to being a joint heir with Jesus Christ (Romans 8:17). You went from oweing more than you could ever pay back to having everything you need because of Jesus!
