Rabbi Schneider — Up The Mountain
Beloved, sometimes we'd like to run from the mountains but the truth is, we all got mountains to climb. Join me for this important episode in today's Discovering the Jewish Jesus.
I'm in a series now, beloved ones, called A Baptism of Love. This is a short, condensed teaching on the main themes in the Song of Songs. I'm gonna move forward right now and pick up where I left off last week. You can get the entire series, A Baptism of Love, through our website (http://sermons.love).
I'm going right now to chapter number 2. She had become so confident in who she was before the Lord. You know the Bible tells us in the Book of Ephesians that in Jesus, get this now, we stand before God, get this now, Church, holy and blameless.
Do you know that you stand before God right now, I'm talking about this minute, you stand before God because of what Jesus has done for you? And because you're in Jesus, you are presently standing before God, get this now, holy and blameless.
In other words, when God looks at you and looks at me, he doesn't see any blemish in us. He doesn't see any sin because Jesus took our sin in his own body on the tree. He removed it. There's no sin between you and God. You are holy and blameless before God right now. And Abba Father, God and Jesus, get this now, see you as beautiful.
Let me tell you why God sees you as beautiful and why you are in fact and indeed beautiful, and why God wants you to agree with him about this fact so that you yourself will know that you're beautiful and feel beautiful, and experience the beauty of the beautiful God on your life.
Number one, beloved ones, you're beautiful, get this now, because God is beautiful, and the eye of the beloved one who's God sees you through his own eyes. In other words, God is beautiful, and beauty comes through the eyes of the beholder. And because God, who is beautiful, loves you, he sees you as beautiful. Not only that, he made you and I in his own image. So if God the Creator is beautiful and you were made in his own image, that means that his beauty is in you; that the beauty of the Creator is in you and through you, 'cause you're made, beloved ones, in his very own image.
Thirdly, you're beautiful, beloved ones, because Jesus took away your sin. Lastly, you're beautiful, beloved one, because the presence of God is literally on your life. You and I are beautiful to God. God wants us to affirm this about ourselves.