Too often we have
preached a gospel of eternal, abundant life, but not a gospel of offence to a
righteous, holy God. The promise of eternal life without understanding the
offense of sin is no gospel at all. It is just a benevolent Santa Clause who
winks at our indiscretions and lavishes us with gifts because we’re such great
kids. But God is a holy, righteous, just and gracious creator before whom we
stand in dirty rags that we call righteousness.
Ezra was written
to remind those who had come back from captivity that they were a covenant
people. Ezra reminded them of God’s grace in allowing them to come back to a
land that He had promised them but which they did not deserve. Ezra reminded
them of how God moved the heart of the king, how God provided and protected
them, and how God enabled them to rebuild the temple and restart temple
worship. As a result of this Hesed, this covenant love, of God for his people,
Israel is called to a life of covenant love toward God. They are called to
righteousness.
So, in our own
struggle to live out the righteousness of God we need to learn to first look
back, remembering the pain and consequences of sin in our lives and the lives
of those around us. We then need to look down, recognizing, acknowledging and
taking full responsibility for offensiveness of our own sin. In looking back
and then looking down we set the stage to look out and to look up. I'll write about those two principles next week, but for now, have we been honest
with God and with ourselves about the nature of our own sin? It is depressing to be constantly talking about sin, but you can’t get to grace until you
face sin squarely. Look back and see how destructive sin has been, then look
down and see how unclean you really are. When we allow ourselves to be broken
over our own sinfulness we are ready for grace.
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