We Are Not Good, But Jesus Makes Us Beautiful

We Are Not Good, But Jesus Makes Us Beautiful by Jennie Allen, from Anything

Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. - Jeremiah 18:6

"Jennie, do you think my dad is in heaven?”

My heart stopped and my brain raced to find the answer. I scanned through my memories of his mess of a life and found myself doubting.

Kathryn had recently lost her dad to a heart attack. Her dad, Mike, was one of the most joyful, screwed-up men I knew. He had broken his marriage and could be seen more in bars than church. His life did not at all resemble the steadfast Christian men I knew.

But something about Mike was alive and full of joy. Every time you were around him, you felt it. He befriended every person he ever met. The man loved well.

There are a lot of things about God and Christianity that are a worthwhile debate, but the fact that we all sin is typically not one of them. I have never met a person so brave as to say he was perfect, but I have met a lot of people who think they are good people. I get the impression when they say that about themselves, they are saying, “God thinks I am okay.”

On a core level, are we really as “good” as we think we are?

I’ve always thought the epic war in our universe was pretty simple — good versus bad. But if you read about the war in the Bible, it was always more complicated than that, even from day one. Adam and Eve chose evil, but then they found themselves in a place without church or Bibles or pressure from their priest. On their own intuition, they ran from God and tried to cover themselves and their shame with fig leaves (Genesis 3). These were leaves of pretending, the same leaves we call religion or perhaps morality or maybe being good. They tried to cover up just how bad they were.

I’ve done this. I do this. I impress the world with passionate, visible morality while avoiding God altogether. There is something to humility that is costly... something resembling humiliation... an outright declaration of the wreck we are without God rather than composing a beautiful existence that barely needs a savior.

We’ve often run to pretending, to covering ourselves with religion or the fig leaf of appearing good. It was the biggest fight Christ picked, and yet it is still our biggest problem. We think we can appear okay... okay to God and to each other, and that if we construct really pretty coverings out of our leaves, no one will know.

God is clear. The state of our invisible hearts takes precedence over all the good behavior, over all the bad.
We judge children on their behavior or performance from the time they are born. People just flat-out like us better if we are... good.

Everything in this life seems to hinge on our external behavior. When Jesus came, He went to the most broken, the least good. In fact, it was always the most sinful He ministered to. He touched them and healed them and loved them, and they loved Him back. They needed Him.

I remember the first time it occurred to me that my life looked more like the lives of the people Jesus rebuked than the people Jesus drew near to. I was reading His words to the religious in Matthew, “So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23:28).

Ugh. I felt that way. I knew deep down I was screwed up. I also knew nobody really knew it, and I liked it that way. I did not want to be facedown in the sand like all the sinners Jesus healed. I wanted to stay bright and shiny and good, and comfortably on my feet.

When I read the words of Christ, I felt this call. A call to fall on my face.
It physically hurts to see our pride, to see our sin, to quit playing good, to feel broken and to need God. And it hurts even more to let others see it. So we run from falling; we choose large fig leaves to cover up with and not God. We run from that vulnerable feeling that we may not measure up, all while aching to measure up.

I love the song “Beautiful Things” by Gungor. It says, “You make beautiful things out of dust. You make beautiful things out of us.”

God’s people have always been good at running from Him. Jeremiah was one of the people God sent to remind them that God was real and that they needed Him, and that he wanted them back. So he sent Jeremiah to the home of a potter. When Jeremiah arrived, the piece of clay in the potter’s hands was misshapen and ruined. As Jeremiah watched, the potter reworked the same clay into something beautiful, an altogether different vessel.

As Jeremiah walked away, God asked him,
Can I not do with you as this potter has done?... Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. — Jeremiah 18:6

Christ kept drawing close to broken people while He was here. For the woman caught in adultery, about to be stoned in John 8, her face in the sand, Jesus protected her from stones. And to protect her from eternal judgment, He whispered the same thing that He whispers to us: Repent, because you are not good; you are not okay. Come back to me. You need me. He says, Go and sin no more (John 8:11), which is impossible apart from the righteousness Christ offers to those who come to Him in faith. He is what makes us right.

There is something so beautiful about people aware of their sin and their need for God. That is beautiful to God. He can work with that, enter into that. Jesus’ first command after nearly every encounter with a needy person was for them to repent. He promised these broken people hope and healing. He promised to make a way for them. Often, after these encounters, He would turn to the religious people who seemed to have it all together and confront their sin of pride and pretending. Yet with every opportunity, for the most part, they never repented. They thought they were fine without Jesus. They did not need Him.

God is reaching out to us, wanting us to see we need him. But since He is God, we think He wants some song and dance from us — in other words, behavior modification. He actually just wants us. He longs to set us free. And yes, to accomplish all that, He wants us entirely. God is home to us. He is where we were made to be. He is what we were made for. We just forget all that while we are trying to be good and independent.

Pretending to be good halts God’s movement in our life. Legalism or religion helps us feel better about ourselves, puffs us up, gives us the posture to be critical and judgmental and prideful. Oh, and everything human about us loves that. It feels better to live that way.

We want to not need God.

I was visiting a halfway house filled with men who had all recently been released from prison. I hadn’t known what to expect, but my heart instantly began melting. I saw an older man with his worn shirt tucked in pouring lemonade — the grainy kind that you add water to and stir — and putting out cookies that looked store-bought but were arranged in a pattern on a plate. The other men greeted us with smiles as if they were welcoming the president. I had rushed to get there that night — I was dealing with sitters and car pools and honestly I felt a little cranky, but at the sight of these humble men my pulse slowed and I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

We went around the room, and each man shared a little about his life. With tears and true ownership, each man confessed his weaknesses and mistakes. Their hearts bled for the damage they had brought to those they love, and they gushed at how they lived forgiven because of Christ. There was no air about them, no pretense. Christ had moved into their wrecked lives and restored them. They spoke with peace, and I sensed they possessed hope.

I found myself longing to be like them, these men recovering from the consequences of sin. I wanted to need God as they did and feel broken as they did and be transparent as they were. It was as if they were already exposed... already caught. “Screwed up” was written on their foreheads — no need to act like it wasn’t. And something about that brought freedom. It made God the hero, not them.

My soul resonated with that. Even though I’m a blonde, mom-of- three pastor’s wife connecting with criminals fresh out of prison, I am a human, and we humans arrive with “screwed up” on our foreheads. We come that way, but somewhere between toddlerhood and being a grown-up we learn to wipe off our forehead signs. To sit up straight. To be good.

But before God I am no different from these men. My forehead is clean; my soul certainly is not. That day on an old, beat-up sofa with some old, beat-up guys, I rethought the things I valued in people and the types of people I valued, and I realized that God shone more through those accused and hurting men than through me.

We are all hiding from each other with big fig leaves, but God says, “You could stop because I am a way better covering. I have an actual payment for all the sin you are hiding. But it will take coming out from behind your leaves. It will take humility to see that you need me” (John 11:25, 1 John 1:8, paraphrased).

The irony is that Jesus' blood takes the least good and makes them the most good. It's beautiful.

We don’t want to fall. We like to see great testimonies of God’s grace, but we don’t want to be the testimony.

Even though I was bright and shiny—I was full of sin and pride. Eventually I fell, dramatically, face-first, crying because I had lived like a Pharisee in all my pride and arrogance. I actually have learned to fall a lot. I fall because I can’t keep pretending I am okay when I know deep down I’m not. But I also fall because I find God in the sand. I find God with my face in it. And then He gets to be the Lifter of my head, rather than my pride.

About the same time my more acceptable sin was bringing me to my face, my friend Kathryn called about her more blatantly sinning father. Everything I had thought God wanted from me was in question. When you only look at Jesus, what He did, what He said, who He loved . . . there is only one thing needed. One.

Anyone can get to heaven—no matter how messy his or her life. And by the same token, anyone can be kept out— regardless of all his or her fancy goodness.

I needed to answer Kathryn.

“I know this, Kathryn . . . It is the work of Christ that saves any of us. Our behavior here is really all the same — we all screw it up pretty bad without God. Some of us are just better at covering our sin up. When we get to heaven, a whole heck of a lot of people we never expected are going to be there, and a lot of good people we thought were going to be there won’t be. God deals with the heart, the unseen spaces in us, and while your dad never mastered church or his marriage, he had something inside of him that poured out on everyone who came in touch with him... Did he know Jesus?”

Kathryn had never asked her dad where he stood with Jesus Christ, so that night she got on her face and begged God to somehow show her that Mike was in heaven... she was desperate and pleading for proof so obvious that it couldn’t be denied.

The day after pleading with God and with no knowledge of Kathryn’s prayer, her aunt, with whom she had never had a spiritual conversation, reluctantly called. She nervously told Kathryn that a voice that she knew to be God woke her up in the night and told her that Mike was with Him, and that Mike had given his heart to Jesus a few years earlier when Kathryn’s father-in-law passed. Her aunt hadn’t even been at the funeral, but they all agreed, as they thought back, that her dad had experienced a sudden shift toward spiritual things. She remembered that something was different in him following that time — not perfect or “good” or showy, but something deep and real had appeared.

Grace is scary insane.

Grace says you have nothing to give, nothing to earn, nothing to pay. You couldn’t if you tried!.. Salvation is a free gift. You simply lay hold of what Christ has provided. Period. And yet the heretical doctrine of works goes on all around the world and always will. It is effective because the pride of men and women is so strong. We simply have to do something in order to feel right about it. It just doesn’t make good humanistic sense to get something valuable for nothing.

In one act God did what no amount of effort on our part could do. He sacrificed His perfect Son, placing every sin on Him.

It’s not just those in prison who are far from God; often it’s those of us sitting in pews, deciding where to go to lunch after this guy finishes talking about a God we barely need.

“I will not boast in anything.” I’m getting more comfortable with imperfect forehead signs.

Here is mine:

I am crazy screwed up. And my only hope is my Jesus.
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Your Turn

What does your imperfect forehead sign say? Join the conversation on our blog. ~ Devotionals Daily

(Editor's Note: We heard such a great response to yesterday's devotional by Jennie Allen from her book Anything we decided to give you another excerpt - and extend our sale on the book. Jennie is the winner of the 2013 New Author of the Year Christian Book Award and her writing has been praised for its honesty, passion and authenticity in communicating God’s truths. We hope you are blessed by today's devotion! Please share it with your friends).