Behold...and remember

     Re-entry after a vacation is for the birds.  Seriously.  Trying to return and adjust to a schedule and schoolwork and chores and busyness... sigh.  I feel like I'm trying to run through deep, soft sand and making precious little progress.  Mercy, this is discouraging.
     So here's what I had to do: refocus.  Like putting on my reading glasses that miraculously transform a bunch of indecipherable lines and dots into legible words that I can actually read and comprehend.  I had to force my restless, overwhelmed self to cease striving and fussing and sit down with the Word. Rest with the very Breath of God in my lap and glimpse His sufficiency and His power and His glory.
     We're reading John 19 in Bible study.  And today these words stopped me in my tracks: "Behold the man!"  Pilate had brought Jesus out before the bloodthirsty mob.  The Savior--beaten, bloodied, bruised from the scourging, a crown of thorns jammed into His head--stands before the crowd.  Sinners, just like me, screaming "Crucify Him!"  And Pilate demands, "Behold the man!"
     Did they behold?  Did they look?  Did they consider?  Did they dream what Jesus had come to do--die for them?  Die for their selfishness and pride and bigotry and ingratitude and jealousy... and mine.
     Do we behold?  Because when we turn our eyes away from ourselves, away from our problems, away from our annoyances, away from our entitlements... and behold Him, we cannot help but be changed.  Love does that.  Grace does that.
     Our circumstances may not change one iota, but if we truly behold Jesus, if we gaze at Him in His Word,  we are transformed.
     In beholding Him, I see afresh my sins nailed to His cross.  I see my failures and weaknesses covered by His blood.  And I see that divine exchange of my sin for His righteousness--ashes for beauty, cross for a crown, forsaken for forgiven.  As Scottie Smith prayed, "Because You were fully forsaken, I am forever forgiven.  Because You exhausted God's judgment against my foul sin, I now live by the gift of  Your perfect righteousness.  Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!  Hallelujah!"
     Sometimes we forget, don't we?  Or at least I do.  In the midst of the mundane and muck and mire of life, we tend to lose sight of the glorious message of the Gospel.
     We stop beholding the God-Man.
     But as Luther once said, we need the basics of the gospel everyday because we forget the Gospel everyday. And so daily, we need to behold the God-Man and remember.  Remember the price paid for our sins.  And remember that price paid it all... forgiven... forever.  Done.  How can I complain?!
     As Stephen Curtis Chapman once sang--we need to "remember our chains... and remember our chains are gone."  Help us not to forget, Father.  Keep us beholding You.  To God be the glory.