Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire. | Hebrews 12:28–29
This Sunday, we looked at how the sin of human beings brought shame into the world and caused a breakdown in relationships. In an attempt to get the shame away from ourselves, we blame and cause conflict. We looked at some of the ways that this manifests itself. The focus was on how our response to shame does damage to our relationships. We are constantly feeling the consequences of sin.
There is another aspect to this: our response minimizes the cross. When we started the church fourteen years ago, we went through a study called: The Gospel-Centered Life. This study begins with the concept that the Christian life is a growing understanding of God’s holiness and our own sin. As these two diverge, it leaves a growing gap between who we should be and who we are. What fills this chasm is the cross of Jesus Christ; He bridges the gap between our sinful humanity and the holiness of God.
There is another aspect to this: our response minimizes the cross. When we started the church fourteen years ago, we went through a study called: The Gospel-Centered Life. This study begins with the concept that the Christian life is a growing understanding of God’s holiness and our own sin. As these two diverge, it leaves a growing gap between who we should be and who we are. What fills this chasm is the cross of Jesus Christ; He bridges the gap between our sinful humanity and the holiness of God.
Pretending can take many forms: dishonesty (“I’m not that bad”), comparison (“I’m not as bad as those people”), excuse making (“I’m not really that way”), and false righteousness (“Here are all the good things I’ve done”). Because we don’t want to admit how sinful we really are, we spin the truth in our favor.
Performance-driven Christianity is actually a minimizing of God’s holiness. inking we can impress God with our “right living” shows that we’ve reduced his standards far below what they actually are. Rather than being awed by the innite measure of his holy perfection, we have convinced ourselves that if we just try hard enough, we can merit God’s love and approval.
Pretending does not force you to change anything in your life, because it is making who you are enough. This is the biggest difference between pretending and performing: to perform is to bring down God’s expectation so that you can work to reach it, while pretending is to minimize sin so that you aren’t too bad. What both of these do is take away from the reality of our predicament. They rob God of glory, but also give us a limited view of grace.
If we aren’t that depraved, we don’t need that much help. If God is not that great, we can effectively work our way toward Him. In both of these, God’s mercy toward us becomes small. His action on our behalf decreases. This will not only cause you to aim your life at the wrong ends, but in it, you will miss out on the joy that comes from being loved by God.
When you grasp how deep the Father’s love is, and how kind He has been in extending His care to you, your thankfulness can grow. As you consider what Jesus gave so that we could be made righteous, our desire to live a life of worship grows. As the cross gets bigger, so does our love for Him and others. We can only truly love God by knowing what He has done for us, and the love that we have for our neighbor flows out from the love that we have received.
Recognizing that this world is broken is not enough. We need to have a vision for how it can be remade. There are a lot of people trying to repair our broken world as an act of pretending and performing. True restoration comes from knowing the gospel and living out of what Jesus has already done for us. In this way, we are bringing back together all of the relationships that were broken at the Fall as we aim toward the New Heavens and the New Earth – life together in the presence of our Lord.