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.

 

 

 

 

The Writing's On The Wall

I spent ages this afternoon at work redoing some wall displays.  I do find a bit of staple-gunning quite therapeutic...

 

However, today I had a marvellous brain-wave and I'm not sure why it has never occurred earlier.  Instead of stapling everything to the backing paper - key information, titles etc., I put the backing paper up and then simply wrote onto it.  No faffing about printing titles to go on the display.  No extra waste of paper.  No waste of time.

 

My wall suddenly transformed itself into a giant (pink) 'whiteboard'. 

 

It made the job so much faster.

 

In the book of Daniel in the Bible, he describes writing on the wall.  Except it's not his writing, and it's not a display at work.  It is God's hand writing a warning to the King at the time, Belshazzar.

 

The message is that Belshazzar has been 'weighed' and has been found to be wanting.  He doesn't measure up.

 

If God were to 'weigh' us, too, we could expect a similar message: none of us 'measure up' on His scales.  But the good news is that we don't have to.  If we trust in Jesus, when God 'weighs' us, He weighs Jesus instead.

"But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify.  This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.  There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.  God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus."

 

[Romans 3:21-26 NIV]

 

We have all been found wanting.  There is no one righteous, all fall short.  But through the grace of God poured out for us in Jesus, we find ourselves measuring up.

 

For us, the writing on the wall is a reminder that whilst, by our own merits we are absolutely lacking, through Christ, we are enough.  We measure up.