Do you always feel not quite good enough? Perhaps this stems from a foundational misunderstanding of our nature and plight. Accepting our condition before a holy God abiding in steadfast love helps us understand that we’ve considered it entirely wrong. It isn’t that we’re not good enough. It’s that we’re never bad enough to wander beyond the reach of His love.
Merit
We swim in a sea of merit and become blind to how deeply it impacts us. Understanding grace is challenging, and when we’re transplanted into that sea, we struggle to breathe despite the inherent freedom. We’ve been conditioned to live and die by our works. So, unexpected, undeserved mercy is an outrageous paradigm shift. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”(Romans 5:8).
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.
Christ died for sinners, and our salvation is by grace through faith as the gift of God. This good news sounds alien to creatures of a meritocracy like us. Even as recipients of grace, we tend to default to our modus operandi of merit. Like hamsters returning to the hamster wheel we know, we fail to realize that we’ve been entirely removed from the cage.
Mercy
Unexpected and undeserved mercy shocks our inclination to performance. God is merciful in the midst of suffering or prospering and to our enemies as much as to our friends. The weeping prophet heralded the extravagant mercies of God and His endless steadfast love at the crescendo of his lament for Jerusalem (Lamentations 3:22-23). Jonah ran from Nineveh because he knew God would show mercy (Jonah 4:2). Jesus told the Pharisees to go and learn what it meant for God to desire mercy and not sacrifice (Matthew 9:13). After all, Christ didn’t come for the righteous. Steadfast love and indiscriminate mercy are offensive to our human sensibility.
Mites
We’re thinking in terms of an inferior currency. Our minds go to the diversification of stock portfolios and financial gurus. Yet the kingdom of God views giving from poverty as wealth as in the widow’s mite (Mark 12:44). If we up the value a bit (from a mite to a denarius), we can also identify with the disgruntled laborers in the vineyard who thought that a partial day’s work deserved partial pay (Matthew 20:11-12). The kingdom of heaven inverts our human understanding as the first will be last, and the last will be first (Matthew 19:30 and Matthew 20:16). Generosity is God’s prerogative, and grace is not prorated.
It was never about being good enough, as if we could measure up to perfection. While there is technical accuracy to the thought that we are not good enough, it carries a false assumption of merit. We’ve fundamentally misunderstood our sinful condition and God’s gracious disposition. The depth of our sin impacts every facet of our being and renders us utterly incapable of pleasing, understanding, or coming to God (Romans 3:10-12, 1 Corinthians 2:14). Yet, God’s mercy, grace, and love are deeper, and He has lavished forgiveness through Christ. Being good enough isn’t good enough. We’re never bad enough to outweigh the goodness of God, chiefly displayed in mercy and grace that redeems through Christ. We must embrace our desperate dependency and cling to the God who rescues us not despite our sin but because of it.