If you watch the news with any regularity, it can be easy to become disheartened about the world. So far this morning: N. Korea continues its aggression against S. Korea, financial markets around the world are still unstable, and your baby monitor can put your family at risk! Ugh.
I have always though there a should be a TV news program devoted only to good news – people who help their neighbors in times of need, folks who feed the hungry, kids who do the right thing in the face of peer pressure.
But it would never fly because we don’t like good news as much as we like bad news. It’s true – thats why the networks focus on it so heavily. People are drawn to the misteps, failures, and tragedies of others more than they are to the stories with a positive spin.
Why? Because it makes us feel better about ourselves and our circumstances to hear that others are worse off. Sad. True.
So the networks and new hours and newpapers continue to lead off with the worst and put the good news like a tag on the end – so we can all feel a little better, a little more smug about our lives and our short comings.
But, here is the absolute truth about that: “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking it all.”
James 2:10
So, the murderer on the news is no different from me – the person who may lie occaisonally, or have a moment of rage, or have impure thoughts.
We are both law breakers in the eyes of the Lord. Doesn’t matter if you have broken one law or 100 laws. Doesn’t matter if you have lied or killed.
It is all the same. If you weren’t disheartened before, maybe you are now?
But don’t be. Because like the evening news I am going to finish with good news.
Because we are all lawbreakers in the eyes of God,we need a way to make things right – to get back into a right standing with God. But an imperfect person can never fully please a perfect God. So, God made a way for each and every person to be justified – to have their guilt removed. Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man, met every requirement of God’s law.
As Pastor Justin said this past week, Jesus was 100% perfect 100% of the time. And then he willingly traded his perfection for our imperfection: “God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus willing took upon himself the sins of the world, past present and future, and allow the full wrath of God to rest upon him, so that we might be redeemed. He threw us a life preserver. But what good is a life preserver to a drowning person of they do not grab a hold of it? None.
You have to give up your struggling, and trying to save yourself, grab hold of the life preserver and allow yourself to be pulled to shore. If we do not grab hold of the truth of Jesus Christ and what he did for us, and give him control, then the gift of life is useless to us. We don’t get saved by default. We have to let Jesus take control of our lives and pull us out of our lives – which are drowning in sin and corruption. Then our own story, one originally written with a rotten ending, becomes one with the greatest ending of all -
“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Sprit of life set me free from the law of sin and death.”
Romans 8:1-2
That is the best news of all!