Condemned No Longer

When you become a Christian, God does not see you in your sin. He sees you in His Son. God sees you for who you are in Christ, not who you were in sin.

The apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 8, “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (verse 1 NKJV).

Maybe you’re thinking, “I’ve messed up.” But God doesn’t see His children that way. Rather, He says, “This is my child now. This is the one I have forgiven. This is the one I’m not condemning any longer.”

God always sees us for what we can become. For example, Jesus gave Peter his name. He was Simon when Jesus walked up to him and said, “‘You are Simon the son of Jonah. You shall be called Cephas’ (which is translated, A Stone)” (John 1:42 NKJV).

If there was anything that Simon was not, it was a rock. Simon was hotheaded, vacillating, and argumentative. But Jesus was saying, “From now on, you’re a rock.”

I wonder whether the other disciples were laughing. Rock? Does Jesus actually know Simon?

Oh yes, He knew him. But Jesus wasn’t calling him what he was; He was explaining what he would become.

I also think of Gideon, who was hiding from the Midianites when an angel of the Lord appeared to him. The angel said, “The Lord is with you, you mighty man of valor!” (Judges 6:12 NKJV). That’s hardly a mighty man of valor.

But God does not see us in our failure; He sees what we can become. We see the past, but God sees the future. We see a mess, but God sees a message. God can change everything in our story—if we will let Him.