Day 2655 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge. Galatians 5:4. You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. NIV
Yesterday we discussed the undeniable fact that each of us are in fact innately errant. We have all been born into sin and spent our lives crawling deeper into that pit chasing after our selfish desires. And we’re in a world that considers such a task to be enjoyable and commendable. Folks down here can’t get enough of what’s evil, wicked, and wrong. That’s pretty much been the topic we’ve been hammering for several days now. There simply is no such thing as good in us because we gave the good away.
But we don’t want to admit that. Not a single person wakes up in the morning all excited about confessing their flaws and humbly seeking out their weaknesses. We all have egos that try everything possible to keep our pride built up so that we don’t feel like the lowly scumbags that we really are. But try as we may, the fact remains that our best is utterly worthless. We can find a way to mess up just about anything through rash decisions, words shouted in a moment of anger, and our penchant for jumping to conclusions and acting all high and mighty.
We’re all just trying to prove to both ourselves and to the world around us that we’re good people. We don’t want anyone to see our failures or notices our weaknesses. We want everyone to think highly of us, and we’ll go about achieving that desired outcome through whatever means necessary. But no matter how we go about trying to prove our superior levels of righteousness and willpower, that fact is still right there under all the smoke and mirrors.
The issue is that often times we try to use laws and rules as the basis for our argument that we’re good, decent, and upright people. We point to all the things that we haven’t done wrong. We list off all the laws we’ve never broken. We present this amazing track record of mistakes we haven’t made thinking that it’s in those unfractured laws and unblemished reports that we can prove our worth and validate our stance on just how great we are. But we’re only building a reputation upon something that can’t really do that much for us. Laws and rules may guide us in the right direction, but something exterior can’t make up for a lack of what we don’t have inside.
And that’s the issue that we all have. We’ve spent so much time being focused on just checking off the boxes that we forgot what those boxes are there for. They’re not just a checklist that we can finish off and win a gold star for a job well done. Laws and rules are there to point us in a direction. They’re designed to increase morality and steer us away from this wicked innate desire we all have to selfishly do as we wish. Laws are not the goal, they’re the road signs along the way to help us stay on the right path toward the destination that we should all be aiming to reach.
But still, we stop at trying to prove our goodness through our ability to adhere to a list of rules and a bunch of expectations. Do we really think that we can simply hand God a list of all the rules we managed to not utterly decimate and that will be enough to satisfy His calling for us to be holy as He is holy? Friends, He didn’t give us the commandments because those 10 things were all that He was concerned about. He gave us the commandments to help guide us toward the sanctifying path toward righteousness that He created us and redeemed us and calls us to follow toward Him.
The simple fact is that none of us are ever going to be able to say that we’ve upheld every single law in Scripture. Not one of us can ever say that we’ve never done anything wrong. Not one of us can honestly come up with a concrete argument that proves our infallibility and justifies our good standing in God’s eyes. We need Christ. Jesus Himself address this very issue with a man in Matthew chapter 19. This man comes up to Jesus and asks Him what good thing the man must do to receive eternal life. Jesus points the man to the commandments and tells him to keep them. The guy says that he has kept all of those laws and asks what he still lacks. So Jesus says, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” But the young man leaves upset because he is wealthy and probably isn’t all that interested in selling all of his wealth.
He just thought that he could walk away from Jesus with a list of things he could check off in order to earn the perfection that God demands for our entrance into His Heavenly reward.
Folks, we can’t buy our way to eternal peace. We can’t earn it with good deeds or our ability to say that we’ve never done anything wrong. None of us can say that anyway. But even if we could say that we’ve upheld every command, Christ still tells us to follow Him. He still tells us to sell everything we own. He still tells us to lay down our worldly lives and live the rest of our time here following and serving Him. We can’t make it on our own! We can’t enter Heaven without the atoning sacrifice of Christ. We can never be good enough to reach His level of perfection that is required for our eternal salvation.
As much as we all like to think we’re good, we’re not. As we discussed yesterday, there is only One who is good. There is only One who is righteous. There is only One who is unblemished. There is only One who is perfect. The more we focus on trying to just make sure we check all the boxes the more we forget about where those boxes are meant to be pointing us. God’s commandments are there to guide us to Him. They’re to help us build our lives around His desires and His calling for us to be holy. They are not the goal. They’re a guidance. They’re an arrow. They’re a stepping stone to something better.
We cannot build our faith on simply fulfilling a bunch of rules and think we’re doing enough. If we’re trying to justify our goodness through our works then we’re completely missing the point. The point is Christ, and Christ isn’t hidden in the laws, He is the law. He is the way. He is the goal. He is everything that those rules and expectations point toward. Do not miss out on the utterly crucial need of a personal relationship with Him and settle for thinking that simply trying to be good little people who follow the rules is enough to take His place in the story of our salvation. He is the way, the truth, and the life. Without Him, we’re lost, living a lie, and will never find our way to eternal life.
It’s His salvation that leads to sanctification, which is an ongoing process that continues growing and deepening and improving every single day until He returns. Please stop trying to earn His grace and simply live as if you’ve already received it. Otherwise, we just get lost in this mindset that tells us that we can do enough or pray enough or give enough to earn a welcome at those pearly gates. At the end of the day, our actions can only testify to our faith. They can never fulfill that faith. Because without faith, it doesn’t really matter what we do or don’t do. All that will matter when our lives are over is whether or not we knew and accepted Christ as our Lord and Savior, not how many rules we managed to follow along the way. So please be careful to not lose the need for Christ and fall away from Him under this foolish assumption that you can find some way to do good enough that keeps you from needing His gift on that cross.
Instead of breaking our backs trying to earn something we cannot achieve, perhaps we should hit our knees and thank Jesus for being everything we can’t be and doing everything we couldn’t do.
