Friday, February 06, 2009

Stating the obvious



The press is often caught stating the obvious. Many of the headlines in print communicate more than was intended and this is one of them. I was humored by the statement, "Supreme Court says some OK, some not." That is a most honest statement of the real heart of each one of us. We want the final "OK" regarding which rules we will obey and which ones we will ignore. We want to be god. It all depends on what we really want to do. For each of us there is the rebellion against anyone telling us what we can or cannot do, and yet God is clear about what holiness looks like. As one comedian said years ago, "these are not the 10 suggestions." They are meant to communicate to us God's holiness and his "requirements" for heaven. The truth is that these 10 commandments are impossible for us to keep, they were meant to be impossible....all of us have broken at least one of them...and so we each of us wants to dismiss the one or more we can't keep still hoping that God will give us access to heaven because "we were better than most." Our hope is that God will somehow grade on the curve and we will get in. The truth of the 10 commandments is that if you really read them and then look at your life you realize you simply cannot keep them. God's goal is that you will run to him for his mercy and grace. That's the message of the cross. Jesus came to provide for us, simply by faith in him, something that we could not attain in the law. There is no "good enough," there is only this from Peter's words in Acts, speaking about Jesus, Act 4:12 "And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved."

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