“You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sinners’ like the Gentiles. Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.” But suppose we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely not! Rather, I am a sinner if I rebuild the old system of law I already tore down. For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law—I stopped trying to meet all its requirements—so that I might live for God. My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die.”
Galatians 2:15-21 NLT
Humans want to do good. Even demonstrably “bad,” humans, believe that they are making choices that seem to “make sense,” for them. The difficulty is two fold. Firstly, humans fall short of God’s standard without his input. We must remember that the first sin was commuted by a perfect human. Humans cannot measure up to God, even in their perfection. Secondly, humanity has had sin injected into its core processing. Even without sin, man is predisposed to fall short of God, but with sin installed in his nature, man is doomed to reaping death by his notion of “goodness.” Faith in Christ is to be an acknowledgment of these facts. This is why it is called grace. Because no merit can save us. Many Christians have a merit based salvation where they continue they acknowledge the second point, but not the first. When we remember that we sin in perfection, than Christ’s death has meaning because it becomes God’s compass in our lives. But when we don’t see it that way, it becomes meaningless to us. All that it did was free us into a perfection where we could never measure up again. This is not the purpose of his death. He meant to bring us back into alignment with a need, not only for salivation from our choices and their consequences, but also from the burden of having to measure up to God. We chose in Eden to endeavor to be “as God, knowing good from evil,” but this is an impossible burden for a finite creature to bear out. We need God’s grace to navigate living. We need his revelation and word in all circumstances. Living in the accolade of our choices, without this, may bring limited success in this moment, but condemns us in eternity.
JOSH McGARY. COM 