I remember a while back, listening to Jesus in the Gospels on the Bible I have on CD. As I listened the things he said got heavier and heavier.
He starts out in the Gospels and we identify with Him and feel we can live it. Then He begins incrementally telling us what it means to be a true follower of Him.
By the end of the CD and that day it felt like the weight of the world was crushing down on me. I saw what Jesus said and maybe, maybe when I was a kid I might have been naïve enough to believe I could live up to it, but now having lived awhile it is so incredibly obvious. There is absolutely no way to do it.
Yet we see Jesus in the Gospels preaching ultimately the impossible for us and yet living it out. In the end all of his disciples forsook him. They couldn’t even stay awake with him in the garden in His darkest hour knowing what was to come.
Some who want to hang on to our ability to be the perfect disciples of Jesus point to John with Jesus’ mother at the cross. They say he didn’t forsake him. John though was merely acting in love and was not being a true disciple. Had he been a true disciple (disciplined follower) he would have insisted on being crucified along with Jesus. In their own ways they all scattered in the end. Even the one Jesus called as the lead disciple. Peter when put on the spot, when it was crunch time, he denied him. Three times even cursing saying he did not know the man.
Even for Jesus’ very own disciples, their best turned out in the end to not be good enough.
When we step back and look at it in a panoramic view, we see that it wasn’t about simply a failure and then the disciples getting up from the failure. It was a demonstration of man’s total failure and God in flesh and blood doing and living what we could not do and live for ourselves.
When we lose that humility. That knowing of who we really are. That knowing that we are not simply dependent on the help of God. We are completely at God’s mercy and completely and utterly helpless without His accomplishment for us on our behalf, then we go back and have to live it over again. We have to be decimated by our failures and crushed by the weight of our own short comings. Our own, “I tell you I do not know the man” moments.
Jesus didn’t come to rely on the will of men, He came to do the will of God. The will of God was to set right once and for all everything man had made wrong. He came to make a new covenant, but this time not with man, but with Himself. God purposed to reconcile the whole world to Himself through Jesus (doing what we could never do for ourselves), remembering our sins no more and offering to all mankind the free gift of reconciliation.
We stood in a court where God was the judge and satan was the accuser. We stood guilty and condemned and God stepped down, took off His courtly robe and took the consequences of all our failures for us. Then the judged looked at us and said “acquitted of all charges” and we never have to go into that court room again.
To ever go and plead our case again, saying “I am a good disciple, I live a good life, I carry my cross” is to disregard everything Jesus already did for us. It’s as if we disown ourselves from Him or say, its not enough Jesus. God needs more than what you did.
If there is to be repentance in the lives of Christians, let it be a repentance from dead works, of thinking we can add to what God has already done. If there is ever to be any fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, self control) it won’t come from our doing, but our trusting in what God has already done. That is why it says we must enter in by faith. We must really believe that Jesus was and is enough. We can never find the gift of God’s life while we are still laboring to fix our own.
If we truly enter in by faith though, if we believe we are reconciled, if we trust God completely and unconditionally loves us and accepts us because of Jesus having already accomplished EVERYTHING necessary for our right standing with God, then we can have peace, we can find grace (unmerited favor) and begin loving each other and ourselves not because of who we are, but inspite of who we are just as God in Jesus has loved us. We can find a heart for true holiness because His love continually touches our hearts keeping us soft and tender hearted toward one another, forgiving one another just as God has forgiven us.
Well said. Going to your archives to read more.
Love this blog!