You suck.
No, seriously, you do.
But before you all start running to me with pitchforks and
torches yelling to kill me as a monster that destroys good human’s self esteem,
let me explain myself.
My good friend Colton wrote a post a while back about how each
and every one of us is awesome. We were created perfectly. Each of us is an
individual person that has specific traits that makes us really pretty darn
awesome. This can pull us up out of our own self flagellations (big word for ya
Gabe) and make us see ourselves for what we really are: a creation of an
almighty God who knew what he was doing.
Mr. Awesome is right, but I’m going to talk about the flip
side of that equation.
When we were created, we were perfect. The first two humans
were put in a perfect garden in a perfect world with some perfect animals and
perfect plants and everything was just peachy. But something came into that
perfection that threw things out of whack and made us all into messed up jerks
that can’t do a good thing to save our lives. Yeah, the perfection is still
there, but there’s a wrench in the plans and now we are stuck. We have SIN in
our lives, and there is nothing, no, nothing, we can do to stop it.
Since those first two humans let sin in, we’ve been stuck.
We sin, and then we come up with a way to stop sinning, but it doesn’t work, so
we make excuses for why it isn’t wrong, but when that messes up and doesn’t
work either, we try to fix it again. It doesn’t work. Yeah, something is very
obviously wrong with us humans. No matter how hard we try, we cannot achieve
perfection, and that brings me back to the first point I made: you suck, and so
do I.
But thank goodness we aren’t stuck there. Even though we
suck, and we consistently screw things up and cause loads of problems for
everyone else in the world, there is a solution. And we didn’t have anything to
do with it. We didn’t earn it, we don’t deserve it, and we by golly can’t do
anything to get it for ourselves.
Jesus Christ, the son of God, came to save us, and when he
did, we no longer had to worry that we would die because we suck. No, now we
were saved, and there wasn’t anything we did for it. We were stuck down in the
deep dark pit of sin and suckishness and then light broke through, and a hand
reached out, and pulled us out into the light.
Throughout our failures, are foolishness, and our vanity, a
just and mighty God who should shun us, who should throw us out into the
darkness and leave us for everything we have done, has instead shown us grace,
wonderful awesome grace, covering us in righteousness and pulling us out of the
muck.
So take heart. Nothing you can do can save you.
But everything he does will.
