I know I am loved by the King

"I know I am loved by the King and it makes my heart want to sing..."

I saw this quote, which is part of a song by Chris Tomlin, and it just jerked something inside of me. 

The King loves me. 

• Me! with all my pitiful mistakes, my repeat failures, my willful disobedience, my flaws and shortcomings. 
  
• Me! with all my lofty dreams and misplaced priorities and great imagination- all the things He must prick and rupture. 
  
• Me! the sinner He died to save long before I even knew or cared that He existed. 
  
• Me! now the sinner saved by grace, who keeps testing the limits of that grace -albeit often unconsciously- as I  stray and sin, yet again.
  

me. 

The King loves me. 

How, why, I do not know. But if I know even the littlest part of this truth (because Truth is Truth, even if we don't understand all of it yet), that The King loves me, how can I not sing? How can I not LIVE - truly live, as in the zoe life, abundant life, the life that is Christ? How can I desire sin, much less actually do anything that would in any way separate me from this King?

I know sanctification is process, it takes a lifetime, my old man is struggling with the new life in Christ, yada yada yada. I get that. We can't just jump from point A to point B and be done with it. 

BUT IT SEEMS TO ME that there should come a point of no return. A time when I realize all that I have in Christ and the absolute trash of the world. There should come a place where I understand, at least a little, of who Jesus The King is, and what He offers me - and this should propel me past all the entangling sin and the dead weight and the crap that beckons me to stay in and of this world. 

There should come a point when all I desire is to know Jesus, and Him crucified and risen and alive- when that is all I want, and no sin or pain or hell will keep me from pursuing this. 

Some would call this the moment of salvation, but perhaps it's more like Wesley's second work of grace or something. I don't know. But we see Paul struggling with his sin (Romans 7) long after justification and well into the process of sanctification. I think there comes a point in our Christian walk when we must choose to pursue God after we've experienced 'salvation.' I'm not making statements on predestination and that debate, or writing systematic theology to be studied by posterity (in other words, don't overanalyze what is spilling out of my gut into cyberspace). 

I'm just at a place of no return where I must choose radical discipleship or fall back and be content with the recycled religion I can spew out of my dark heart so easily. 

What would my life look like if I actually lived as if "I know I am loved by the King." I think my heart would be doing more than singing - I think it would be changing the world. 

I've been told that the only appropriate answer to radical grace is radical discipleship. I've been given radical grace. Let's see what radical discipleship looks like.