“For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.” – Romans 7:5
Knowing all the rules isn’t particularly helpful if you haven’t experienced the love, kindness, mercy, or grace of the One Who made them. Trying to be a really good person by doing all the right things doesn’t ultimately make anyone a good person. It makes them a frustrated person, a resentful person, a hypocritical person, a rebellious person, and/or an exhausted person. But not a good person.
Why? Because we can’t keep all the rules all the time. Nobody can. More than that, deep awareness of rules without the loving touch of the rule-maker drives us to break the rules. Just as an overly strict diet leaves us thinking only of how to break it without anyone noticing, when we’re burdened by rules and laws we’re stirred up to break them. The more we know what’s expected without knowing the love of the One setting the expectations, the more we resent them and eagerly want to rebel. Our minds and hearts become increasingly focused on what we shouldn’t have or do.
This is the dilemma of God’s Law, the covenant of Moses. The Law was given as a blessing but became a burden nobody could obey. It filled people with desire for what they couldn’t have. It fueled the hypocrisy of trying hard to appear holy while being utterly rotten inside. It caused God’s people to obsess over the failures of others while wallowing in their own secret failures. God’s blessing had become a kind of curse.
The way out of this dilemma isn’t more laws and rules. The answer is to experience God’s love and grace. It’s to be raised to new spiritual life through faith in Jesus Christ, not because you followed the rules and deserve it, but because He followed the rules perfectly and then died to give it to you. In Christ, we are made clean by His work, not ours. We are loved because He is love. We are welcomed and treasured by God because His Son lives in us. It’s only after we taste God’s grace that we’re freed and given power to pursue a life of true holiness. Though we won’t be perfect, in God’s grace we can truly desire and pursue a life pleasing to the Lord. Rather than being filled with resentment because of our failures, in Christ, we can be filled with delight because of God’s love, mercy, and grace. #FollowJesus