It is Finished. Chapter One.
Building Life on the Foundation of Christ’s Finished Work
Change Our Viewpoint
“The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” Revelation 19:10
PDF Version here.
I am about to share the most honest conversation I have ever had with God—a conversation that changed the trajectory of my life.
About nine years ago, I was sitting on my back porch during a much-needed ministry sabbatical, wondering what I could be missing. I was battling disappointment and perhaps even some depression. I lacked joy and purpose, feeling like I was on a hamster wheel—always doing the “right” thing but constantly getting beaten down.
Don’t get me wrong; there were beautiful treasures in my life that I deeply appreciated—my husband, friends, and kids—but the pressures and unpredictability of ministry caused me great sorrow and pain.
As I sat outside with my Bible and a book, I chose to reflect on my feelings and began an honest dialogue with God. Having grown up in church and being an avid lover of the Word, I thought I had a fairly good grasp of truth. However, no matter how much truth I knew, it didn’t take away the feelings of disappointment and frustration that came with the hardships of life and ministry.
As I poured out my thoughts to God, I asked Him to show me if there was something I had missed along the way because the truth I did have led me to a conclusion about Him that I just couldn’t reconcile. For all His supposed “goodness,” He didn’t feel good. My head told me He was good—I had countless personal experiences that proved His goodness—but my emotions recoiled at the idea of His love.
How could a God of love allow so much pain in my life because He loved me? Ridiculous. I treated my kids better than that. It made no sense. Either I didn’t understand something about Him, or I was too proud to surrender completely—to let Him take everything from me, like Job, in order to refine me further.
I mean, how much sin could possibly be in my life to warrant such treatment? It felt cruel. Sanctification as I understood it sucked. I was over it. Either God would have to show me that my beliefs—many of which had been shaped by some of the best scholars of theology—were faulty, or I was done serving Him.
That was the day everything changed.
God met me right where I was, at my current level of understanding, and revealed His love to me in a way that changed my perspective forever. That moment launched me into a journey of discovering His beauty.
Hardships and trials still come, but my joy and peace have never wavered since that day, nine years ago.
So what did God show me that led me to this place of rest?
It was the Finished Work of His Son.
Since my husband, Ted, and I married, we've always been hands-on—fixing, building, and creating. We've put in a lot of work together, from homes to furniture, fences to ministries, and even churches. It's been a part of our journey that neither of us anticipated when we first met.
In the early days of our marriage, we spent hours dreaming and talking about what we hoped our lives would look like—imagining travel, family, and business ventures. What we didn't foresee, however, was the hard work required to bring those dreams to life. Many of those dreams felt like they came at a steep cost, often feeling more like a nightmare. But when it was all said and done, we couldn't help but smile. I'm not sure if all the work was worth the pain, but we certainly walked away with some valuable lessons.
Our dreams were always complete—homes fully built, decorated, and filled with beautiful things. That vision motivated us to work hard toward making them a reality- most of the time, we enjoyed the fruits of our labor, but sometimes we didn’t.
Like the finished dreams and ideas my husband and I had, we often relate that to the gospel; we don't understand what the "Finished Work of Christ" means. We may understand one element of it, such as forgiveness of sin, but we still battle with constant fear, depression, or anxiety. If our marriages are strained or our kids are rebelling, we feel hopeless, and if we get a bad report from a Doctor, for example, we are thrust into the depths of despair. If we are wise, we may look for glimmers of hope to keep us from complete despair, but we may rationalize why God allows these things. We live in habitual failure and sin cycles because we don’t know what He accomplished, so we either make much of sin or ignore it altogether. We also live in fear of God instead of “the fear of God”- there is a difference; one leads to anxiety, and the other leads to peace. Have you ever felt God was more like The Godfather than God, your Father? If you struggle in your relationships, have church hurt or are frustrated with it, struggle with hidden sin, live in cycles of defeat or self-sabotage, struggle with anger, anxiety, fear, control, pride, or feel stuck in life, this study is for you.
The answer to peace in all that struggle is found in Christ and His Finished Work. But we must understand what that work was and why it matters to you. Could it be that there is more to the story than we realized? There is- and it's not complicated; it’s simpler than we thought.
I have grown up in church all my life; I don't remember when I wasn't in church. I entered "ministry" in 1999 when my husband and I said yes to becoming youth pastors. I have read my Bible countless times as well as studied theology and doctrine out of a hunger to understand the Word of God; I have a lot of head knowledge, but I discovered that all the "doing" of ministry and "serving God," "serving people for God's glory," etc. leads to burnout and defeat just as quickly as living a life apart from Christ if not faster. What I didn’t know then was that I only knew about the God I read about, the One I was told, but I did not know Him as Father or intimate Friend. Jesus was abstract- God’s Son who paid for my sins- that it. I used to list every sin I could think of so that my conscience would get to the place of remorse to appreciate His sacrifice - that was how I measured His love; humility equaled self-degradation; holiness was measured by self-sacrifice and the ability to endure suffering cheerfully because suffering was God loving me enough to sanctify the sin right out of me- a bottomless pit. I was also easily frustrated with people who were struggling with sin. If someone abused my friendship, I measured my value on thier perception of me. If they discarded me, I felt discarded. The more I tried to love people, the worse I was treated. It’s no wonder I hit burnout. God felt like a taskmaster.
It wasn’t until I sat and faced my beliefs and owned that I did not have a healthy view of God that things began to change for me. I had defended myself often, using my faithfulness, knowledge of scripture, good behavior, and righteous living to measure myself, but I was miserable! I began to resent ministry and the people in my life - I wasn’t very joyful or pleasant to be around, I’m sure. I had to sit and face that none of my righteousness was leading me to peace with God, peace in difficult circumstances, or peace in relationships. I needed to let go of my beliefs and explore whether something I had missed led me to this place. Like God likes to do, He surprised me and changed me forever. My view of God had been skewed, and I didn’t realize it! The misery led me to burnout, but it is the burnout where God revealed His love. My life is marked by joy, and I am not rattled when the difficulty of life hits; I know His voice and how to sit and receive His love. My value is not in what I do but in who He is. Jesus is the most beautiful person I have ever known, and I just want to spend my life knowing Him more and telling others what a Friend He is.
Have you ever sat down to listen to someone's story only to discover a different person than you thought you knew? As a teenager, I had the opportunity to move closer to my grandparents. While growing up, they would grace us with a yearly visit, and I had the joy of a two-week summer stay at their home in Alamogordo, NM. I had only a romantic view of my grandparents because of the pieces of stories I had heard and seen here and there. Every year, they would drive into town for a visit- it was a grand day, full of excitement beginning with hours leading up to thier visit. We would get the house sparkling clean and then rest our chins on the windowsill, ready to sound the alarm when their car pulled up to the curb. My siblings and I would practically fall over one another to be the first to greet them as they exited their vehicle. I remember being enamored by my Grandmother's beautiful Native American jewelry. She always wore it on her long, thin fingers, clutching a sturdy purse that hid mints and chewing gum that she would quietly slip into our palms. My Grandfather, tall and slender with thick-rimmed spectacles that made his eyes look too big, terrified me, while his bobbing Adam's apple kept me enthralled. They were magic to me. Aloof, yet fascinating.
It wasn't until I was older and sat to listen to my Grandmother's stories that I learned who they were and why they did and said what they did. In listening to those stories, my relationship with her was birthed. Before, I thought I knew her, but I did not know her until I understood her. I had to understand what gave her strength, resilience, and determination. What was the reason for her sacrifice, sorrow, and pain? I wanted to know more about what made her who she was the longer I spent time with her. I wanted her to pull out pictures and tell me the story of her family and how she contracted tuberculosis when she was twelve and then survived a deadly lung disease from raising fishing worms when she was a young mother and still lived to the age she had; how she learned to play the organ and why she turned down an opportunity to sing at the Grand Ole Opry; how she survived the Great Depression and why she doted on my Grandfather despite glimpses of their challenging marriage. Who was my Grandfather, and what secrets was he holding on to? That mystery was never solved before he died.
Like my childlike view of my grandparents, we sometimes don't realize that what we read in the Bible and the God we learn about at church is often a "veiled" or "surface" viewpoint. If we only read our Bibles without understanding the Finished Work, we will have a surface understanding of God and conclude that He is ultimately the source of trouble, a distant, angry, or aloof God. We may have glimpses of His nature, such as goodness, holiness, kindness, love, etc., but we feel insecure, "doing" all the right things to obey out of obligation, or we keep God at arm's length because we don't want Him to punish us. Perhaps we feel like choices we have made brought curses, or maybe we don't know what it means to have a "relationship" with God because what we believe about Him is a bit fuzzy and unclear. Jesus is the "good guy" who died for our sins, and God is the "bad guy" who sent His Son to the cross, doing so because He was angry at our sins. We may have grown up in church and have not had a history of sinful choices, so we hold others to a standard of behavior that we feel marks a holy person.
Understanding the Finished Work reveals a much different God than the surface tells. Many believers tend to steer clear of the Old Testament altogether, or they mix up the covenants—mingling the Old and New, which is a deadly cocktail. Why is this?
"Then Jesus gave them this illustration: "No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and uses it to patch an old garment. For then the new garment would be ruined, and the new patch wouldn't even match the old garment. "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the new wine would burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine must be stored in new wineskins. But no one who drinks the old wine seems to want the new wine. 'The old is just fine,' they say." (Luke5:36-39 NLT)
In this parable, Jesus talked about mixing the old with the new. This applies to mixing the Old Covenant of Law with the New Covenant of Grace. Many still mix both covenants because they do not know how to distinguish them from one another— how to discover Jesus below the surface of the Old. The "old wine" that the church often gets accustomed to is focusing on sin, behavior, and rule-keeping to stay "right" with God
For a joy-filled and restful conscience, we must understand what Jesus came to do - to forgive sin, defeat death, disarm Satan, establish His Kingdom, restore mankind's purpose, and do away with every flawed way we relate with Him. He did not leave any of this work incomplete, nor was it a distant dream or promise that will only be fully revealed in Heaven. The good news is that Jesus came to do a work and complete it through His death, burial, and resurrection.
The Gospel is good news! The word Gospel comes from a word used during the Roman times to refer to something almost too good to be true. The word was a technical term for news of victory. Paul used the word "Gospel" to describe what Jesus had done- he said in Romans 1:16 that the Gospel was the "power of God unto salvation." Power is the word "dynamis" in Greek and is where our word for dynamite comes from. Believing the almost too-good-to-be-true message that God demonstrated His unconditional love for us by sending Jesus is God's power for salvation (the word sozo means wholeness, provision, deliverance, and redemption).
Mixing the Old and the New and not understanding the Finished Work results in burnout, competition, jealousy, hidden sin, fear of man, fear of punishment, worry, guilt, an awareness of sin and failure, doubt, and insecurity. It also produces an ineffective life, one that is marked by defeat, constant battles, weariness, depression and anxiety, relational conflicts, rebellious kids, marriage problems, church hurt, personal habits that hijack any success, a hamster wheel of defeat, and feeling stuck in life.
Understanding the Finished Work results in joy, rest, peace, a guilt-free conscience, the ability to celebrate another's success, no competition or comparison, freedom to serve and love, and a willingness not to hold people to a standard of our own making. This produces peaceful and happy marriages and families, secure children, harmonious work and church experiences, and personal-goal victories. Life no longer becomes a hamster wheel of defeat and anxiety but one of steady growth and a mind at rest no matter the circumstances.
In this study, I will focus on the Finished Work, using scripture to help unveil your eyes to His perfect and extravagant love and goodness. In each chapter, I desire to apply this truth to your life in every aspect—which will affect your marriage, parenting, workplace, and church life.