Take the plunge
A famous parable of Jesus: Two people go into the temple to pray. One is a Pharisee, the other a tax collector (Lk 18,9.14). Today, two thousand years after Jesus told that parable, we might be tempted to nod knowingly and say, "Yeah, the Pharisees, the epitome of self-righteousness and hypocrisy!" Fine...but let's put that assessment aside and try to imagine how the parable affected Jesus' listeners. Firstly, the Pharisees were not seen as the bigoted hypocrites that we, Christians with 2000 years of church history, like to think of them as. Rather, the Pharisees were the devout, zealous, devout religious minority of Jews who bravely defied the rising tide of liberalism, compromise, and syncretism in the Roman world with its pagan Greek culture. They called the people to return to the law and pledged faith in obedience.
When the Pharisee prays in the parable: "I thank you, God, that I am not like other people", then this is not hubris, not empty boasting. It was true. His respect for the law was impeccable; he and the Pharisaic minority had taken up the cause of loyalty to the law in a world where the law was rapidly declining. He wasn't like other people, and he doesn't even take credit for that—he thanks God it's like that.
On the other hand: tax collectors in Palestine had the worst possible reputation – they were Jews who collected taxes from their own people for the Roman occupying power and often enriched themselves in an unscrupulous manner (compare Mt 5,46). So the distribution of roles will have been immediately clear for Jesus' listeners: the Pharisee, the man of God, as the "good guy" and the publican, the archetypal villain, as the "bad guy".
As always, Jesus makes a very unexpected statement in his parable: what we are or what we have up to do has no positive or negative effect on God; he forgives everyone, even the worst sinner. All we have to do is trust him. And just as shocking: Whoever believes he is more righteous than others (even if he may have solid evidence of it) is still in his sins, not because God has not forgiven him, but because he will not receive what he does not need to have believes.
Good news for sinners: The gospel is for sinners, not the righteous. The righteous do not grasp the true gospel of the gospel because they believe they do not need that kind of gospel. The gospel appears to the righteous as the good news that God is on His side. His trust in God is great because he knows that he lives more godly than the obvious sinners in the world around him. With a sharp tongue he condemns the awfulness of the sins of others and is glad to be close to God and not to live like the adulterers, murderers and thieves he sees on the street and in the news. For the righteous, the gospel is a fanfare against the sinners of the world, a flaming admonition that the sinner should cease to sin and live as he, the righteous, lives.
But that is not the gospel. The gospel is good news for sinners. It explains that God has already forgiven their sins and given them a new life in Jesus Christ. It is a message that will make sinners weary of the cruel tyranny of sin sit up and take notice. It means that God, the God of righteousness, who they thought was against them (because he has every reason to be), is actually for them and even loves them. It means that God does not attribute their sins to them, but that the sins have already been atoned for through Jesus Christ, the sinners have already been freed from the stranglehold of sin. It means that they no longer have to live in fear, doubt and distress of conscience for a single day. It means that they can build on the fact that God in Jesus Christ is all that He has promised for them - forgiver, redeemer, savior, advocate, protector, friend.
More than religion
Jesus Christ is not just one religious founder figure among many. He is not a naive weakling with noble but ultimately unrealistic ideas about the power of human kindness. Nor is he just another moralist who called people to "striving," to moral improvement, and to greater social responsibility. No, when we speak of Jesus Christ, we speak of the eternal source of all things. (Hebr 1,2-3)And more than that: He is also the redeemer, the purifier, the reconciler of the world, who through his death and resurrection reconciled the entire derailed universe with God. (Kol 1,20)Jesus Christ is the one who created all that exists, who sustains all that exists at every moment, and who took all sins upon himself to redeem all that exists—including you and me. He came to us as one of us to make us what he created us to be.
Jesus is not just one religious founder figure among many, and the Gospel is not just one holy book among many. The Gospel is not a new and improved collection of rules, formulas, and guidelines designed to appease an irritable, ill-tempered higher power; it is the end of religion. "Religion" is bad news: it tells us that the gods (or God) are terribly angry with us and can only be appeased by meticulous rule-following countless times, at which point they will smile at us again. But the Gospel is not "religion": it is God's own good news to humanity. It declares all sin forgiven and every man, woman, and child a friend of God. It extends an immeasurably vast, unconditional offer of reconciliation to every person wise enough to believe and accept it. (1Joh 2,2).
"But nothing in life is free," you say. Yes, in this case there is something for free. It is the greatest gift imaginable, and it lasts forever. To obtain it, only one thing is necessary: to trust the giver.
God hates sin - not us
God hates sin for one reason only - because it destroys us and everything around us. You see, God does not mean to destroy us because we are sinners; He intends to save us from the sin that destroys us. And the best part is - he has already done it. He already did it in Jesus Christ.
Sin is evil because it cuts us off from God. It makes people afraid of God. It prevents us from seeing reality as it truly is. It poisons our joys, disrupts our priorities, and transforms serenity, peace, and contentment into chaos, anxiety, and fear. It makes us despair of life, even and especially when we actually achieve and possess what we believe we want and need. God hates sin because it destroys us—but he doesn't hate us. He loves us. That's why he has done something about sin. What he has done: He has forgiven it—he has taken away the sins of the world. (Joh 1,29) —and he did it through Jesus Christ (1Tim 2,6)Our status as sinners doesn't mean that God turns his back on us, as is often taught; it means that, as sinners, we have turned away from God, become alienated from him. Yet without him, we are nothing—our entire being, everything that makes us who we are, depends on him. Thus, sin acts like a double-edged sword: On the one hand, it forces us to turn our backs on God out of fear and mistrust, to reject his love; on the other hand, it makes us hunger for precisely that love. (Parents of adolescents will be able to empathize with this particularly well.)
Sin is eradicated in Christ
Perhaps in your childhood, the adults around you instilled in you the idea that God sits enthroned above us as a strict judge, that he carefully weighs every single one of our actions, ready to punish us if we don't do everything perfectly, and to open the gates of heaven for us should we succeed. But the Gospel now conveys the good news that God is not a strict judge at all: We must orient ourselves entirely toward the image of Jesus. Jesus—the Bible tells us—is, to our human eyes, the perfect image of God ("the image of his being," Hebr 1,3). In him God has "deigned" to come to us as one of us to show us exactly who he is, how he acts, with whom he associates and why; in him we recognize God, he IS God, and the office of judge is placed in his hands.
Yes, God made Jesus the judge of the whole world, but he is anything but a harsh judge. He forgives sinners; he does not "judge," that is, condemn, them. (Joh 3,17)They will only be damned if they refuse to seek his forgiveness (verse 18). This judge pays the fines of his defendants out of his own pocket. (1Joh 2,1-2), declares everyone's guilt erased forever (Kol 1,19-20)...and then invites the whole world to the greatest celebration in world history. We could now sit endlessly debating belief and unbelief, and who is included and who is excluded from his grace; or we can leave all that to him (it's in good hands there), jump up and sprint off to his celebration, spreading the good news to everyone along the way and praying for everyone we meet.
Justice from God
The gospel, the good news, tells us: You already belong to Christ - accept it. Rejoice over it. Entrust your life to him. Enjoy his peace. Let your eyes open for the beauty, the love, the peace, the joy in the world that can only be seen by those who rest in Christ's love. In Christ, we have the freedom to confront our sinfulness and admit it to us. Because we trust him, we can confess our sins fearlessly and load them on his shoulders. He is on our side.
“Come to me,” says Jesus, “all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Mt 11,28-30).
When we rest in Christ, we refrain from measuring righteousness; we can now confess our sins to him quite frankly and honestly. In Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Lk 18,9-14)It is the sinful tax collector who unreservedly confesses his sinfulness and desires God's grace who is justified. The Pharisee—dedicated from the outset to righteousness, practically keeping meticulous records of his holy successes—has no eye for his sinfulness and his corresponding acute need for forgiveness and grace; therefore, he does not extend his hand and does not receive the righteousness that comes only from God.Röm 1,17; 3,21; Phil 3,9). His very "pious life by the book" obscures his view of how deeply he is in need of God's grace.
Honest assessment
In the midst of our deepest sinfulness and godlessness, Christ comes to meet us with grace (Röm 5,6 (u. 8). Right here, in our darkest injustice, the sun of justice rises for us, with salvation beneath its wings. (Mal 3,20)Only when we see ourselves as we truly are in our neediness, like the usurer and tax collector in the parable, only when our daily prayer can be “God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” only then can we breathe freely in the warmth of Jesus’ healing embrace.
There is nothing we have to prove to God. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our sinfulness, he knows our need of mercy. He has already done everything we needed to do to ensure our eternal friendship with him. We can rest in his love. We can trust his word of forgiveness. We do not have to be perfect; we just have to believe in him and trust him. God wants us to be his friends, not his electronic toys or his tin soldiers. He seeks love, not cadaver obedience and programmed hedonism.
Faith, not works
Good relationships are based on trust, a strong bond, loyalty, and above all, love. Mere obedience is not enough as a foundation.Röm 3,28(4:1-8). Obedience has its place, but—we should know this—it is one of the consequences of the relationship, not one of its causes. If one bases one's relationship with God solely on obedience, one either falls into stifling pride like the Pharisee in the parable, or into fear and frustration, depending on how honest one is with one's assessment of one's level of perfection on the scale.
CS Lewis writes in Christianity Par excellence that there is no point in saying you trust someone if you don't take his advice. Say: Whoever trusts Christ will also listen to his advice and put it into practice to the best of his ability. But whoever is in Christ, who trusts him, will do his best without fear of being rejected if he fails. It happens to all of us very often (failure, I mean).
When we rest in Christ, our efforts to overcome our sinful habits and ways of thinking become a committed attitude, rooted in the knowledge that God reliably forgives and saves us. He has not thrown us into a never-ending battle for perfection. (Gal 2,16)On the contrary, he takes us on a pilgrimage of faith, where we learn to shake off the chains of bondage and pain from which we have already been freed. (Röm 6,5-7)We are not condemned to a Sisyphean struggle for perfection that we cannot win; instead, we receive the grace of a new life, in which the Holy Spirit teaches us to rejoice in the new self, created in righteousness and hidden with Christ in God. (Eph 4,24; Kol 3,2-3)Christ has already done the hardest thing – to die for us; how much more will he now do the easier thing – to bring us home. (Röm 5,8-10)?
The leap of faith
Believe, so we will be told in Hebräer 11,1 To put it simply, it is our firm confidence in what we, the loved ones of Christ, hope for. Faith is currently the only tangible, real foreshadowing of the good that God has promised—the good that remains hidden from our five senses. In other words, with the eyes of faith, we see, as if it were already here, the wonderful new world where voices are kind, hands are gentle, food is plentiful, and no one is an outsider. We see what we have no tangible, physical proof of in this present evil world. The faith produced by the Holy Spirit, which kindles in us the hope for salvation and redemption of all creation (Röm 8,2325), is a gift from God (Eph 2,8-9), and in him we are nestled in his peace, his tranquility and his joy through the incomprehensible certainty of his overflowing love.
Have you taken the leap of faith? In a culture of ulcers and high blood pressure, the Holy Spirit urges us onto the path of serenity and peace in the arms of Jesus Christ. Moreover, in a frightening world filled with poverty and disease, hunger, brutal injustice, and war, God calls us (and enables us) to fix our faithful gaze upon the light of His Word, which promises the end of pain, tears, tyranny, and death, and the creation of a new world where justice reigns. (2Pt 3,13).
“Trust me,” Jesus tells us. "Regardless of what you see, I make everything new - including you. Worry no longer and count on me to be exactly what I have promised to be for you, for your loved ones and for the whole world. Worry no longer and count on me to do exactly what I have said I will do for you, for your loved ones and for the whole world.”
We can trust him. We can load our burdens on our shoulders - our burdens of sin, our burdens of fear, our burdens of pain, disappointments, confusion and doubt. He will wear it as he has carried and wears us even before we knew it.
by J. Michael Feazel
