From
Galatians 2:1-16
“Freedom!”
H,
It has always been clear that we would try our little efforts at glory and we would fail. We are not immune from the need to grow bigger in mind after the first stab of joy from being found by God. Is that not the problem? We forget that we were found. The need to be special points out to us the wrong idea that there is something about us that makes salvation inevitable. We feel we have certain traits that predestine and separate us from the hordes going to hell. Now, we are saved we might as well let that (false) light show.
Of course we are on the road to fail spectacularly. It is the old nature that needs an audience, a bloated sense of self and the need to take all things said or thought by others, good or bad, personally. We have struggled to the top of the pile; we might as well stretch the legs and strut with the walks. So this old nature is unprepared for the epic fail to come. When it does fall down it may not even admit the fall. It may just find a way to hide it or run away from the call to be humble.
When I think of this part of me, I pity him more than anything else. Did we not come here to be free? Why am I bugged down with these details of the realization of the self above the grace of God to be made a real being? This is the good stuff, is it not? To fall down and realize what freedom tastes like. Is it not a gift to know and grow and be surprised by love over and over again? These critical failures save us from a life of believing that we are set apart for some trait in us that is missing in God. We are not special because we bring something to the eternal table but because we come hungry and in need. Once we have walked past the notion that we are inherently good or holy we can be truly and slowly made into the image and reality that is both those things at once and much more.