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Live Right

Public service announcements as well as product advertisements intruding into the media often try to tell us how to live. Good hearted folk promote eating well, exercising appropriately, getting enough sleep, taking care of our bodies and minds and more. It’s hard to fault most of these messages. They fall into the category of “common sense” and if we don’t go overboard on any one of them for too long, we won’t do too much damage to ourselves.

Spiritual advice also abounds. Much of it seems like common sense as well, but the stakes are higher here. Much of this advice focusses on making life more pleasant for us today. Prayer and meditation promote healthy relaxation which allows us to benefit more from our rest. Taking a personal inventory of our soul will help us identify our values and allow us to live a more focussed fruitful life. Learning to love and accept ourselves more fully is supposed to enable us to love and accept others in ways that enhances our interpersonal relationships, gets us more sex, and makes people think more highly of us.

But spiritual development which is focussed on the here and now, isn’t worth all that much. After all, when someone calls the funeral director to pick us up, the benefits will all be over. Spiritual development that really makes a difference has a different focus, though its side effects are often the same as the principal goals of the short-sighted methods.

Even people who don’t care much for Christianity have a degree of respect for Jesus. He is pretty amazing by anyone’s standards. If you accept the biblical accounts of His life, He is head and shoulders above the most enlightened souls we’ve heard about. A man named Peter walked with Jesus during his entire earthly ministry. He had been personally invited by Jesus to follow Him. He had witnessed many miraculous signs identifying Jesus as the Christ - the Anointed One, the Messiah.

Later in life, Peter reflected on the significance of this. He wrote: “as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct.” Some spiritual leaders offer ultimate divinity or that we will be unified with the divine spirit. The Bible doesn’t make this offer. God is of a different essence and while He offers to make us His children, He does not make us gods (with either a big G or a little G). At the same time He does invite us to be like Him in character.

This presents a problem to us, because holiness is totally foreign to us. Nothing in our nature responds positively to holiness. It seems uncomfortable and unnatural because it clashes with everything we are as fallen creatures. Even though God designed us for relationship with him and calls us to Him, we can do nothing to approach him because of our sin. Even our best efforts, motivated by our best intentions fall short of God's standard of holiness. We are helpless to “live right” because there isn't an aspect of our lives that is not contaminated by sin.

Since God is truly holy and we are full of sin, there is only one way that we could ever approach God. That is if He took the initiative and reconciled us to Himself. But how could He do that and at the same time be true to His holy character? The answer is found in God’s own great plan of salvation which involved God Himself, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, taking our sins on Himself and giving us his own righteousness.

What happened is this: Jesus, a man in the full sense of the word, but at the same time God in the full sense of that word, lived the only truly holy life that this planet has ever seen. Then, after just thirty-three years he was arrested by the religious authorities, handed over to the political authorities, subjected to a travesty of justice, sentenced to death and then executed. Why? Two things.

Firstly, by His death He satisfied the holy justice of God and thus provided a way for God to forgive us. Secondly, He not only took our sin on Himself, but gave us His own righteousness. He made us good or righteous, not with any goodness of our own, but with his own righteousness. By dying in our place, Jesus forever put away our sin and made it possible for us to be justified, or declared righteous before the Holy One. If God's Holy Spirit is prompting you to faith today, don't resist Him. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved.

Ron Hughes
© January 2008