Nothing To Add

Good Friday.

 

The day we remember that Jesus died for us.  He died to take away our sins.  All of them.

 

Sometimes I think we find it easy to 'sanitise' our sins and to imagine that Jesus only died for the stuff we don't mind other people knowing about.  The I-know-I-really-shouldn'ts of life.  But we think He couldn't really have died for the things that we don't want other people to know.

 

Or we can get to thinking that whilst His death certainly gave us a 'leg up' on our way into God' good books, we still need to add to it, or 'top it up' by our own good deeds.

 

But God has done it all.  We can add nothing to Jesus' crucifixion.

 

Paul writes,

"If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily."

[Galatians 5:21 MSG]

and

"The God-setting-things-right that we read about has become Jesus-setting-things-right for us. And not only for us, but for everyone who believes in him. For there is no difference between us and them in this. Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ."
 

[Romans 3:21-24 MSG] 

 

Jesus died for our sins once and for all.  There is nothing to add.

 

 

 

 

I Am Not 'Good Enough'

I am not good enough.
 
This is the fear that follows me through life like a shadow.  The fear that, no matter what I do, I will always somehow be lacking.  I will never quite be enough.

And so I find myself constantly striving, constantly trying to be just a little bit better.  I think if I work just a little bit harder or a little bit longer, if I get up earlier or go to bed later, I will become "good enough".

But whilst I might be able to do this for a short while, I inevitably fail.
 
I am not good enough.

And I realised last weekend that it's true.  I am not "good enough".  But not in a depressing, self-deprecating way.  In a liberating, bigger-than-I-can-imagine way.

Last week at church we looked at the description of God creating humans in the book of Genesis.  We picked out three key characteristics from the description: we are eternal, we are relational, and (for me, the most significant), we are good.
 
       "God created human beings;
       he created them godlike,
       Reflecting God’s nature.
       He created them male and female.
       God blessed them:
       'Prosper! Reproduce! Fill Earth! Take charge!
       Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air,
       for every living thing that moves on the face of Earth.' [...]
       God looked over everything he had made;
       it was so good, so very good!"

       [Genesis 1:27, 31 MSG]


I am good.  Because I am made by a good God who declares me to be good.  Undeniably, irrevocably, unarguably good.
 
I am not "good enough".  I am good.  So very good.

Winning And Losing

I hate losing.

 

I'm hugely competitive and, although I'm nowhere near as bad as I used to be, I will still probably sulk for a while if I lose a board game or a card game.

 

I have been thinking about this a lot over the past few days, as I have realised that a lot of my competitiveness links in with a desire to be the best, to always be number one.  To be the winner.  And so I feel insecure when I think I am in competition with someone else and I might not win.

 

But over the last day or so, God has been showing me how I don't need to see myself as competing with anyone. 

 

In the competition for being me, I win.

 

Paul reminds us of this in Romans when he writes,

"So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t."

 

[Romans 12:6 MSG] 

 

Rather than looking to the people around me and comparing myself to them, or feeling as though I am competing with them, I want to discover what it really means to be me.  I want to know what it means to be the person that God made me to be and I want to grow more and more into that person.

 

 

 

Why I Needed To Stop Blogging

I haven't blogged in a few weeks.

When I started writing back in June last year, I never intended to write every day, it just sort of happened: I kept finding and noticing things to write about. Things that I wanted to share.

But over time, I think writing almost became a religious ritual. It was still interesting to write, God was still revealing Himself and truths about Himself, His world and myself to me, but I felt a pressure to write, rather than always writing because I wanted to.

I also have a tendency to get caught up in patterns which I think will make me feel better - usually because I think that, with the right formula, I might just crack this longing-to-be-perfect thing and might finally attain it.

Now, writing a daily blog may not seem like a massive thing - certainly not a reflection of perfection, but I can get so caught up in doing things 'right' or 'well' that for me, making sure I wrote daily was becoming a god to serve, not a way to serve God.

Writing about a relationship with God was starting to replace a relationship with God.

So I stopped.

And I needed to not do something 'perfectly', to not keep it up, to be myself, to be real and, most importantly, to accept those 'imperfections' in myself.

The prophet Joel writes,

"The Lord says, 'Turn to me now, while there is time. Give me your hearts.'"
[Joel 2:12 NLT]

God is not interested in the content or regularity of my blog, so much as He is interested in the contents of my heart and the regularity of time spent with Him.