Heaven sent

I've been thinking about yesterday's post, and about Andy Stanely's take on the Ten Commandments. He believes that the first three can be interpreted as:

• God wants to be the center of our lives
• He does not want us to minimize him
• He does not want us to misuse his name to get our own way, thus missing him.

When we misuse the name of God, we use God's name as the "stamp of approval" of what we want to do, when our desires have no relationship to what God wants to have done.

It occured to me today that we also do the opposite. We become so convinced that in order to be close to God, we must be "good," that we falsely state that God wants us to be "good." Once we do that, we set ourselves up to try to transform ourselves, from the bad people we think we are to the good people we are convinced God wants us to become.

And we fail. We fail to change ourselves, and we fail to get close to God. We fail to get close to God, though, not because we aren't "good" enough, but because we have failed to trust him.

We try to save ourselves, because we have convinced ourselves that this is what God wants us to do. That's not his command. He sent us savior not to make us "good" but to make us free. He sent a savior not because we are trying to be "good," but because he knows that we are sinners.

He sent us a savior because he knew that we could not save ourselves. So why to we keep trying?

Image: Another sunrise at the VA.