All of us like to try and justify ourselves: the sense that we need to ‘do’ stuff to make people accept us. We talk about being accepted for who we are, knowing we are all works in progress – yet retain a nagging doubt that relationships are fragile.
This may be most obvious when it comes to God: the sense that we are not good enough to keep up with His expectations can lead us to do things that reinforce our error – we can develop religious rituals or make sacrifices that make us feel as if we’re making ourselves acceptable and somehow ‘keep’ or ‘maintain’ our relationship with Him.
Yet the Bible is clear that there is NOTHING we can do to make ourselves acceptable to God – only faith in Jesus’ death for us on a cross to take the wrath of God on our behalf and rising from the dead proving it worked can make us acceptable to God. The Bible’s message is ‘Gospel’ (Good news) because of what He has done rather than what we can do.
Yet none of that is to say that we can’t rightly respond to the love God has for us: last Sunday morning we saw the Lord Jesus correct religious elites and summarise the right response in our motto verse:
“The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’” (Mark 12:29-31)
Loving God with our whole being is a great response, it will lead us to love others in the same way – and they’ll see that all they need to do is trust Him too!
Spencer Shaw