Stop It! Just Stop It!

I love this piece by Bob Newhart where he plays a counselor,

"Stop it! Just stop it!"

I wrote yesterday about how hypocrisy is a sore subject for those of who seek to follow Jesus. It's brutally tough because we are compared by the whole world to Jesus. That is our name after all isn't it? "Christian" or "little Christ". Jesus is the plumb line and we fall short.

Our lives don't reflect well the life of Jesus. But, our words, oh our words, they are demand it and we preach and we preach and we preach. We tell others and one another how we are to live and then our lives fall dramatically short of our words.

HYPOCRITES!

The charge is accurate.

Many of us respond by trying really hard to be better. We try to be good people. We apply a lot of effort into being like Jesus. Our lives get disciplined, we create rules for ourselves to keep us on the straight and narrow. We give it everything we have and we experience failure. That failure creates in us shame and guilt or it hardens us and makes us even more ardent to work harder.

One of my favorite passages in all Scripture is found in Ephesians 2, it reads:

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Every time, every, single, time, I read those words I am left in awe of God. His grace abounds to us. He saved his followers not because of their works, but in spite of them.

Did you catch that? He saved us not because of what we did but in spite of what we did. This is what grace is all about. I don't deserve to be in a relationship with God and be forgiven of my sin. Yet, he did all that anyway.

Beautiful.

The thing is we get so caught up in the "saving" bit that we stop reading and start celebrating. The last sentence is just as important as the first. We are God's workmanship created for good works, which he prepared for us. This should overwhelm us! The good lives and works that we are supposed to do God has ready for us, by his grace!

If we could understand this truth about how we are to grow and live and love in faith by grace it would change everything.

When someone becomes a follower of Jesus they do so because they understand that they can't get right with God on their own. They are in a position of brokenness. Then a funny thing happens they start trying to live for God on their own apart from grace. When we do this, we have moved ourselves away from the beauty of the gospel. We set ourselves up to be hypocrites because our words and our actions will inevitably not match up.

But, if we're living in faith, trusting in God's overwhelming grace for how we live then something happens to our words. Instead of "you should's" and "I ought to's" they become penitent and humble. Our preaching becomes an admission of our own weakness and desire to be more like Jesus and how through his grace we are starting to see his character and competency developed in our lives.

You see the follower of Jesus who is well aware of his sin and brokenness is also acutely focused on the grace and mercy of Jesus. She must live there and as a result her life reflects the gospel story. A story of how broken people separated from God are reunited with him through his self-sacrifice and grace.

How do we get lose of the charge of hypocrite? We live into grace (tweet this). We look at our efforts to measure up to Jesus and we just, "Stop it!"