salvation

Enjoy Your Life

~ godisnotlikeyou ~ 3 Comments

Q: If we’re sure to be bad Christians no matter how hard we try, why should we try at all?  It all seems so pointless.

A: We ought to try hard to love God and serve our neighbor, but we don’t do these things to become better Christians in this world or brighter saints in the world to come.  We do them because God deserves our love and our neighbors need our service.  Unlike self-help programs, the Gospel frees us from ourselves, our failures, our successes, and best of all, from our performance reviews!  Have you ever been on a diet?  Oh, what a life!  You become obsessed with results.  Every morning you wake up worried about what the bathroom scale is going to read. If you’re down a pound or two, you’re giddy; if you’re the same, you’re disappointed; but if your weight is up, you fall into despair and turn to the fridge for comfort.  The Christian life is not a diet, it’s a feast!  What Christ has done for us is so good we don’t think about our enjoyment of it, but the thing itself, and in doing that, we truly enjoy it.

Do your best.  Accept your failures.  Trust the Lord.  Enjoy your life.

Why Do You Call Yourselves ‘Bad Christians’?

~ godisnotlikeyou ~ 4 Comments

We call ourselves ‘bad Christians’ because that’s what we are. By ‘Christians’ we mean people in relationship to Christ and other believers. By ‘bad’ we mean, we do plenty of nasty things and leave a lot of good things undone.

God took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. In other words, the life we have now is not something we produce or sustain; it is given to us for Christ’s sake and maintained by the gift and ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. Any applause we might receive for doing good belongs to God alone. It’s his mercy alone that keeps us. We need him to forgive us every second of every day, while the blood of Jesus keeps on cleaning us from all our filthiness.

Also as ‘bad Christians’ we need the community of other Christians, the preaching of God’s Word, communion, the prayers of God’s people, and the very needful help they can, and often do, give us.

We’ve tried the books, the counseling, and the retreats, but success alluded us. What progress we make as Christians comes as a gift from God. We have no idea how or why God gives it to us except for the fact it gives him pleasure.

The truth lies elsewhere: to live successfully as a Christian we need to recognize that no matter how hard we try to manage our sin, the oil-spill of our pollution continues to spread. That’s because we cannot remove the source. The problem will not be fixed until that day when God exchanges our corruption with the incorruptible. Meanwhile, we live by faith. Daily we seek forgiveness and strength by looking away from ourselves to our Savior. Our faith rests in his completed work and trusts God to make us holy as he sees fit.