“The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, ‘Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive?’” (Luke 24:5 NLT)
As human beings we tend to place a lot of stock in our personal goodness and ingenuity; our ability to work through problems; care for ourselves; find solutions; take credit for things for which we’re owed no credit. And the irony is, we worship at the feet of humanities’ accomplishments while ignoring the only true and living God. “How so?”
We have created machines that are far more intelligent than we are; developed medicines and sophisticated instruments that can see inside our bodies, our brains, our minds; we have at our fingertips the wherewithal to destroy the planet many times over; and on and on it goes as we set the stage for our own grandeur and majesty. “Who needs God” when we, as human beings, have produced everything we need to sustain life without Him? Or have we?
I marvel at God’s patience. How has He put up with mankind for so long? How obviously we’ve left God out of our lives with no hint of regret – even as professing believers! We offer Him our dead works, our dead worship, our dead will as we frolic in our trespasses and sin, somehow believing the “filthy rags” we’re bringing to our King are going to get us to heaven.
As I age, I grow weary of my inability to give God the credit that is His due. Finding myself thanking Him for “helping me” accomplish a project or write an article, failing to realize “apart from Him I am nothing and can do nothing.” My prayer is that the more feeble I become in body and mind, the more insight He will give me into things I think I now know.
In Romans 6 Paul addresses the reality of our deadness to God because of our “aliveness” to sin, giving us insight into the “cure” for “dead” people. In Romans 6:16 he writes: “Don’t you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living.”
One of the problems with which we wrestle as Jesus followers is believing that God believes what other people believe about us. We take comfort in how “spiritual” others commend us for being, when the reality is, there’s nothing good about us but Jesus. We have no goodness of our own. ANY goodness in us is only and always a reflection of His goodness, for which we can take no credit.
And the second we begin to feel good about ourselves and take the slightest bit of credit for what God is doing in us, we slip back into the realm of the “dead.” And please don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying we lose our salvation, but we lose ground we’ve already covered and for which Jesus’ blood has purchased for us.
We cease to honor our Savior the moment we pretend what He’s done and is doing in, through, and on our behalf has even the slightest hint of our goodness. It’s all Jesus! HE’s the life, not us. To search for any goodness, mercy, kindness in us – except the attributes of our Savior is to search for the living among the dead.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 