It would be heresy to claim that God loves sin, yet Paul writes that “God commanded His love towards us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The fact is that God loves us, even though we are sinners, not for ourselves but for the possibilities that He sees in us; we are made in His image and while sin has ruined us and condemned us to death forever unless we are redeemed by the Blood of Christ Jesus, God looks at us and sees what we can be, what we were made to be. Indeed, it was for this purpose of recovering what mankind had lost through sin, that the Son of God became man and revealed to us the path of righteousness leading to reconciliation with God.
Man suffers from the cancer of sin, and its poison infects his whole life, making him spiritually sick unto eternal death; yet, take that sin out of him and he will be like the image of God again! Jesus was such a man; without sin; man as man was meant to be. We can look at Jesus and see what God sees, His sinlessness and perfection, not in His divinity, but in His humanity. That is what we are called to!
Peter writes that the great and precious promises of God were given to us “..that by these you might become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).
God doesn’t call us to repair us, but to replace our own sinful nature with that of Christ, the only begotten Son. Paul was called by the grace of God “..to reveal His Son in me”: (Galatians 1:16); every believer is the same; we are vessels in which the indwelling Son can be revealed.
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