The God Who GivesExemplo

Resurrection Life  

In some sense everyone feels the pull to do good, but our relationships with God, each other, and the rest of the earth are ruptured. We are aware of our profound inability to care for others and to commune with God. As Martin Luther once commented, “Neither silver, gold, precious stones, nor any rare thing has such manifold alloys and flaws as have good works.” We are called to the good, especially as expressed in God’s law, but we can’t keep even part of it, much less the whole of what God commands (cf. James 2:8–11). 

In our flight from God, we try to substitute our work, even our religious law-keeping, for God. Sin takes even the blessing of the law and of our work and bends it back in upon us. Our work now becomes our god rather than a gift from God, and thus we end up missing God himself. 

When we worship our work, we worship an idol. But the answer to this problem is not to become indifferent to it or to oppose the value of work. We can easily overvalue our work, thinking that we are “made” by what we do. But we can just as easily undervalue the astonishing gift of being both made and remade for good work—a gift that is simultaneously our act. 

What changed Paul’s evaluation of his works? To answer that we must go to the Damascus road (Acts 9:1–22), where Paul encountered the risen Jesus and was forever changed. Jesus the Messiah, against whom Paul was fighting, showed himself to be one with the God whom Paul had thought he was serving. The crucified Jesus was not dead but alive. The God of creation had come to earth in Jesus, whom Paul was persecuting. This God had personally come to heal, to forgive, and to free us. 

When Paul meets the risen Christ…he is confronted with a stark contrast: he looks at Jesus, and then he looks at his own efforts to love God and neighbor. He realizes that before him are two meals: one is a feast; the other is a pile of you-know-what. One nourishes his soul; the other’s nourishment has already been used up. Paul’s credentials and his law-keeping were never meant to give him life. Properly experienced they come out of life, but they do not give it and were never intended to.