I think that most people at first have a hesitation to be honest about their struggles when speaking to someone they recently met, or that they don’t know well. It makes sense. We’re unsure of their reactions. We don’t know if they will be sympathetic or judgmental. We don’t know if they’ll understand.

Even more so, I think that most of us have that same hesitation with God, but for much deeper reasons. We know of God’s holiness, and even though we hear of and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice, there remains a disconnect. God his holy, we are not.

But just as it is with people, the more we get to know them, and the more they get to know us, the more aware we become of their struggles and imperfections. Most, in time, become sympathetic of our struggles and the judgment from people who we’ve become close to stops being a worry. We can look at them and know they’ll understand. We come to trust their sympathy.

John Piper makes, perhaps, the most intelligent argument for why we can have that same confidence before God, right out the gate.

“On the way to the cross for thirty years, Christ was tempted like every human is tempted. True, he never sinned. But wise people have pointed out that this means his temptations were stronger than ours, not weaker. If a person gives in to temptation, it never reaches its fullest and longest assault. We capitulate while the pressure is still building. But Jesus never did. So he endured the full pressure to the end and never caved. He knows what it is to be tempted with fullest force.”

Humans know the displeasure of failure, and that’s something. But no human understands the full force and weight of temptation to sin—except Jesus. When we sin, Jesus knows, and relates to every ounce of weight we experienced before meeting our failure.

As John Piper continues later, “Jesus feels with us, not against us.”

Before Jesus, in spite of God’s holiness, we are able to come with our struggles and failures. Not only before a gracious God with a legal obligation to pardon us, but with an emotional understanding of what led to our struggle and sin. He gets it. And not only in a cosmic, all-knowing sense, but in a real, “I’ve been there” sense. One that is much more potent than any brother or sister we might have confidence in.

I’ve been thinking this morning about our access to God. I take it for granted. Praying openly without thinking about how incredible it is that I am able to simple speak to God. That I’m not immediately swallowed up because of my sin.

There is a Catholic notion of the tabernacle. It’s a space where the Catholic church places the eucharist—what Catholics believe to be the actually body of Christ used during communion. The tabernacle can only be accessed by a priest and it is treated as holy ground. This is a concept borrowed from the Jewish concept of the same name.

God commanded Moses, in excruciating detail, just how to build the tabernacle. Once a year could the high priest enter into holiest of grounds. It’s even said that a rope would be tied to the ankle of the priest who went in, just in case he was struck dead for some reason, they would be able to drag his body out, since no one else would be able to enter.

But the Catholic sect of Christianity seems to have a corporate denial of the complete message of the Gospel. The tabernacle is among the traditions eradicated because of the fulfilling work of Christ. We are all priests and we all have full access to God, to the holiest places, because of Christ.

Christ became the true high priest, he entered the holiest of places, bore all the wrath due to mankind, not with the blood of animals, but with his own all sufficient blood and once and for all removed the curtain that kept us out. Not to mention, by drenching us in his own blood, we are now protected from the wrath that would lash out and destroy us should we approach on our own.

Hebrews 9:11-12

When Christ appeared as a high priest… through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.

Placing anything between us and God is an absolute neglect of what God has done in Christ to bring us to himself. This is among the paramount messages of the Gospel. To deny this would be like insisting to send word of your child’s birth by messenger pigeon, rather than email.

It’s an incredible thing that we can approach God. And it’s almost just as dumbfounding when Christians will not exercise this incredible privilege.

In Romans 8:32, we’re promised to be given “all things”. We know from elsewhere in scripture that this means “all good things”. I think what trips up a lot of Christians when pondering this verse is the difference between perceived good and actual good.

After all, Christians in lots of different places of the word go without bank accounts, cars, safety—even food. How could that be reconciled, except by differentiating between what we think we need and what we actually need.

John Piper comments like this:

What then does it mean that because of Christ’s death for us God will certainly with him graciously give us “all things”? It means that he will give us all things that are good for us. All things that we really need in order to be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). All things we need in order to attain everlasting joy.

Sometimes what we would define as “good” for us or our spiritual walk is not so. Sometimes an even greater good is not having those things, in the interest of what we might learn, or how we might rely on God for what we do not have. Even safety and food. Some of the most basic needs.

It’s not as popular a sentiment as it used to be. Or at least it seems that way. That is, the idea that our salvation is a matter of outweighing our bad deeds with good ones. Kind of like a works-based Gospel meets karma. Or something like that. But nevertheless, it is still an idea that has a way of prevailing. And at first, it makes sense. After all, that is how we operate.

We often assess people or things by their greatest good, and neglect their evil, provided it’s to a lesser degree. Or vice-versa. In a spiritual sense, deed-counting seems like a reasonable approach.

Of course a careful rational exploration of what God must be like will reveal that keeping the works in balance probably wouldn’t get you anywhere with a true deity of cosmic proportion—at least not one that is hands-on. And, the Bible flat out tells us that this isn’t the case. However, the Bible also leaves other clues that this couldn’t possibly be the case. Even if we were somehow misunderstanding what is meant when it tells us that our Life is not based on “works” but on “grace”.

The clues lie in the bible’s teaching that all of man’s works are flawed. Our good deeds aren’t good per se. They are good, in one sense, that all things that hold some reflection of God’s character are good. But they are not “good” in a different sense that nothing is so unless it comes from faith.

The bible teaches that “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” (Romans 14:23). It also teaches that before we are made alive through Christ, we are “dead” in our trespasses (Colossians 2:13).

Before being redeemed by Christ, a persons ‘good deeds’ are in their greater part not good deeds. They have the appearance of good deeds, and in a way they are good because they are a reflection of God’s character, but they are still bad deeds.

If our salvation were a matter of balancing the scales, we would never pull it off regardless of how many we manage to perform. For every good deed we do, we not only add weight to the good side of the scale, we add even more weight to the bad side. It would never balance out and we would invariably perish in our sin, thinking to ourselves, “but I’ve been so good!” And our final prideful declaration would dot the T’s and cross the I’s of our well veiled life of sin.

So much for Christian Karma. Thank God for grace.

I was in the back yard watching my dog Mikey as I drank my coffee this morning. Like most dogs, Mikey has a real obsession with squirrels. It’s impossible to say if his excitement is sporting or a true bloodlust for the furry rodents. But one thing is for sure, he wants to get his jaws around them and tear them to shreds at every possible opportunity.

Mikey will spend hours tracking squirrels through the back yard. He’s part beagle. That little nose of his will stay pretty close to the ground all the time. Going over and over the squirrels tracks. He knows where they come in and where they go out. He’s even wise to the squirrel nest in a tree tree twenty feet above the yard.

Yet still, in spite of all his hard work and constant ‘research’ of squirrel behavior, he’s never caught one. And still, when one dares to come in our out of the yard, invariably, Mikey isn’t ever close enough to put an end to the trespasser.

Rationally, with all this constant investigation, you’d think that he’d be honing in on the critters. Like a police detective, Inching closer and closer to capturing them. But that never happens. You know why? Because he’s a dog. His memory span is about 15 seconds. He can’t employ reason, just instinct, and some element of habit. But never reason.

This all got me thinking—we kind of do this too.

Who has done more research and investigation of my own habits than me? No one. Yet I will consistently walk into my own pitfalls.

Just think about it. Have you ever been to a party, drank way too much, puked your guts out, then throught a hazy hang-over said, “I drank way too much. I’m not going to do that again.” What happened a month later? Too much drinking. Puking. And dehydrated resolves to reform your habits.

So maybe not the drinking. But how about dating someone who’s bad for you? I’ll bet you’ve gotten into that (kind of) relationship more than once. How about speaking carelessly and hurting people’s feelings? How about pornography? Yeah. I see all this and a lot more in the people around me—and of course my own ludicrous failure to learn from the mistakes I’ve made. I think most people can relate to the apparent inability to learn from our own personal research of ourselves.

Problem is, you’re not going to be able to fix this. Even with a massive resolve to do so, the best you’ll ever do is push the problem into some other context.

Enter Jesus. Problem solved. On so many levels—though perhaps not the ones you’d expect—problem solved. Problem so very, very solved.

Romans 5:7-8:

“For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

John Piper responds:

I have heard it said, “God didn’t die for frogs. So he was responding to our value as humans.” This turns grace on its head. We are worse off than frogs. They have not sinned. They have not rebelled and treated God with the contempt of being inconsequential in their lives. God did not have to die for frogs. They aren’t bad enough. We are. Our debt is so great, only a divine sacrifice could pay it.

I respond:

God didn’t have to die for frogs. They aren’t bad enough. Dang.

Imagine a boss or supervisor at work who simply cannot be satisfied with anything you do. Each time you discover a new way to fulfill his wishes, you discover ten new things that you’re not even coming close to getting right. When you finally rectify those things, you discover ten more you’re missing completely. This is the law.

No matter how much you seek to follow it, satisfying it will always be out of reach. The law is intended for one main purpose: to drive us to repentance by showing us the destitution of our plight.

That is why Paul writes in Romans 3:20:

“For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.”

We cannot be justified by something that is endlessly revealing how short we’re falling of success. The concept of being justified, heck, even having any hope for this life, by our works—by the things we say and do and feel—is simply unreasonable. What human being can say with honesty that they’ve even been honest their whole life? No one. And before a righteous God, that has rendered their works null.

Even quantum traces of logic and reason will say that if there is a just and righteous God, grace is our only hope.