Letter No. 5

Hey Kid,

We left off in chapter 4 with Paul making it clear that God’s thumbs-up only comes from trusting
Him in what He’s said. That’s how we get into God’s family—by trusting Him that He meant it when He said He would count Jesus’ death as payment for my sin.  But what does life look like after that?  Do I just trust God and then move on? 

Obviously, you have kind of a heads up from my last letter that the answer to that second question is a fat no. Chapter 5 starts to deal with those questions, with what being in God’s family actually looks like.  The chapter starts out by telling us exactly what we get when we join God’s family: peace with
God (because when we were out of His family, we were always going to be hostile with Him, but now things are different), grace (that’s God’s thumbs-up to me, because Jesus deserves God’s thumbs-up and gives it to me), confidently and joyfully looking forward to looking good with God because He changes me to be like Him, the ability to be joyful when life gets tough, and the assurance that I will never be disappointed that I joined God’s family.

A little further on, Paul talks about our fickle feelings. We get worried (or at least I know I have) that God might decide to get rid of us.  But, Kid!  He sent Jesus to die for everyone WHILE everyone hated Him, while people were His enemies.  Now that I’m in His family, there’s no way He’ll get rid of me!  Imagine the amazing things He’ll do for His family when He did incredible things for His enemies!  Just wow.

Pretty soon after that, Paul reaches a transition point in the letter.  He moves on to talk about Christian living.   He recaps a lot of what we talked about in chapter 1, with the main point that Adam’s original sin (taking from the tree in the Garden of Eden to try to be like God) affected everyone, making everyone die, BUT Jesus made one payment for everyone’s sin to make joining God’s family available to everyone. And that, my dear sister, is what we’ll talk about in Chapter 6.


So what do I do with what we’ve talked about in the last chapter?  One of the things that struck
me the most was how Paul deals with our feelings of fear about God possibly deciding He doesn’t want us anymore.  You know from my last two letters that I for sure struggled with those thoughts for a long time, and I love the way Paul smacks those thoughts into the garbage.  He’s all like, “Listen, God sent the Person He loves most to die for you while you still hated Him.  He wanted you then.  What makes you think that, now that you love Him and accept His love, He’ll decide He doesn’t want you anymore?  THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS!”  And it just makes my mind rest easy, you know? 

I love you, Kiddo.

Viv