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You Don’t Have to Hide!

middle aged woman having fear in the living room with copy space

But those who do what is right come to the light
(Jesus, John 3:21)

It is a painful and delightful reminder that the fundamental message of the Bible is that God’s grace has crashed into this world and invited broken men and women to no longer live in darkness.

It’s painful because being exposed and aware of the hundreds of ways we avoid God, rebel against God, and alienate ourselves from Him and others become so apparent when we approach God. It’s delightful because the One whom we approach is kind, compassionate, forgiving, redemptive, and triumphs our brokenness and wickedness. This is truly amazing.

Marriage can be one of the number one places in which men and women work over-time to hide something from a spouse. It could be shame, it could be discontentment, it could be greed or lust, it could be anything! But for anyone who has been married for any length of time knows, even if you have mastered hiding something from your spouse, you know it has created a barrier in your relationship and you may be managing your secrets perfectly, but they’re slowly eroding you as a person and your relationship with your spouse.

Enter God’s Amazing Grace!! What if you really believed the message of un-earned, un-deserved, un-achieved acceptance, love, and grace? What if your marriage was built upon the foundation that both of you are more “wicked than you could dare imagine” but “more loved than you could ever dare dreamed”?

I am deeply encouraged and challenged by the words of Paul Tripp:

“Did you know that one of the most comforting messages in the entire Bible is that, in all of our sin, weakness, and failure, we don’t have to hide from God? In the midst of all your self-imposed difficulty and foolish life decisions, God will never respond to you in shock or disgust.
In fact, if the Bible does anything, it welcomes you out of your self-imposed prison of fear and shame.

The Bible welcomes you to step out of the darkness and into the light, to face reality honestly and with hope.

The message of the Bible is that we don’t need to hide anymore. There’s a God whose grace is bigger and more powerful than any of our brokenness and failure. There is no sin so deep that Jesus isn’t deeper.
You don’t have to hide. You don’t have to run. You don’t have to shrink away in shame. The honesty of the Bible is a welcome for you and I to be that honest.”

Perhaps today is a day where you come out of hiding. Maybe today is a day where you resolve in your heart and in your relationships that all of the hiding and secrets you have “managed” so far are actually eroding everything that matters in life rather than keeping them safe!

God Bless,
Ryan Snow
(for further reading, read all of Ephesians 5)

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