Get It Together (But You Can’t)!

You ever meet someone who’s always planning for “some day?” Doesn’t it seem like such people always have a 5 year plan, but it’s changing every 2-3 years, so they’re like 15 years into it? There’s nothing wrong with dreams, but people are always waiting for “some day” to happen, or for their big break, or for their ship to come in. Those who are successful in this life never wait for some day. They try and fail until they succeed and then keep working and building on the success when it comes in. The thing is, this isn’t how it works in the Kingdom of heaven.

In the Kingdom, you can’t be enough! You can’t fail until you succeed. You can’t earn or deserve anything the Kingdom has to offer. To gain access, you need to, first, admit that you can’t! The Bible doesn’t say that we’re drowning in our sin, it doesn’t say we’re treading water, it doesn’t say we’re getting pulled under the waves: it says we are dead in our sins and trespasses. No matter how good we try to be, we can’t be good enough, because we are dead! We deserve nothing and can earn nothing on our own accept what we’ve already earned by our rebellion against the standards of God: death. But God, rich in mercy and power and grace and mercy has, through His Son provided a way out!

You don’t have to “get it all together” to come to Jesus: He came and lived as one of us, but kept it all together! Though He is God, Jesus took on the form of a human, being born of a virgin and living a perfect life according to standard of perfection that God demands. He offered Himself, dying in our place because of OUR sin, putting it to death with Himself on the Cross. In rising from the dead, He proved that Our sins were conquered, as was the consequence of Sin, Death, and that in Him we can have eternal life, and a full and abundant life while we wait! We don’t need to come to Him when we have it all together. We come to Him because we are dead and broken. He fixes us and makes us new!

Ephesians 2

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.