So, I have this friend who has recently lost a lot of weight. When I commented on how good she looks now, she said she didn’t see it. Being the loving, encouraging friend that I am, I told her to go look in the mirror. Then she said that her whole life her mom told her that “there’s always something to make better.” Now, I don’t think that her mom was being cruel or malicious in any way. I think that, as a cosmetologist, she just had a hard time leaving work at work. She gets paid to help people look their best, and it’s hard to shut that off when you go home. I mean, it’s hard for all of us to leave work at work. I spent most of my life doing technical support where I pointed out problems and offered solutions. That’s great at work, but sometimes it can be very annoying around my friends and family. However, I think this illustrates a concept that has been so driven into our culture that we barely even notice what it does to us anymore.
We all remember the moment when the gospel became clear. Maybe not a definitive moment in which we confessed Christ as Lord, but the moment when we realized that the gospel was all about what Jesus did for us, and not about trying to earn our way into God’s good graces. The moment when we realized that Christ’s work on the cross satisfied everything we owed God for our sin, making us righteous in God’s sight. The blended picture of Christ on the cross, where God nailed our debt to the cross (Col. 2:14), and of the risen Lord walking out of the tomb was crystal clear.
