Jan 2 - Joel 2:11-12

Truly the day of the Lord is great;

terrible indeed—who can endure it?

Yet even now, says the Lord,

return to me with all your heart.

Joel 2:11,12

I was talking to two of our college students recently. Spiritually, they were very discouraged.

Their faith is strong. What they are discouraged by are the constant compromises of their classmates who say they are Christians.

One said, “We need to kneel. We need to be humbled. We have no sense of the greatness of God. We don’t tremble in awe.”

In the average Christian life, the pendulum needs to swing constantly between trembling and grace. Too much awe will crush us. Too little awe produces too much permissiveness … and too much promiscuousness and too much drunkenness and too much … yuck (say our discouraged college students.)

Is grace the alternative? Yes … and no. Too much grace is often the same as too little awe. We can excuse anything because God loves us anyway. And we cease to tremble. We cease to acknowledge that the day of the Lord will be great and terrible.

•      We need the pendulum.
•      We need to fall on our knees in awe.
•      But when the weight of God’s judgment seems heavier than we can bear, then we need to jump in praise, because this same God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.
•      But when our fleshly nature inevitably turns the freedom of grace into permissiveness and relativism …
•      we needed to fall down on our knees in humble worship and awe.

Then the pendulum needs to swing back again.

•      Fall in awe.
•      But when feeling crushed …
•      Jump up in grace.
•      But when you find yourself falling into permissiveness …
•      Fall in again in awe and grace.

Wait, look at that last point. What did God say in verse 12? “Even now … return to me with all your heart.”

In Christ’s Love,

a guy who’s been crushed and permissive

but wants to be joyful and awed