Because We Aren’t Worth It (Sorry to disagree L’Oréal)

I had one thought this week that makes so much sense to ponder aloud on Good Friday- and I have a few spare minutes now so here goes!

Recently Romans 5:7-8 (particularly 8) played through my mind: “7Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  (NIV)

And while I’ve heard this verse a million times, for some reason the part that stuck out to me was “while we were still sinners…”  Well, of course that should stick out to me, right?  That is the crucial hinge between the two verses, you might say, so why is it just now significant to me?

I guess it hit me in a different way.

What got to me this week was NOT the fact that Christ died for me while I WAS STILL a sinner, but the fact that I AM STILL a sinner.  I am not an innately better person since accepting Christ’s death for me.  Christ’s death cleans my slate AS THOUGH I am not a sinner. But Christ’s sacrifice did not cover my past and demand that I now shape up and live a life deserving of being saved.  His sacrifice was precisely because He knew I would never live a life deserving of being saved.

I suppose the ridiculously amazing thing about that verse is that it presumes to call me what I am not: a righteous person.

A friend posted this quote on facebook and the last line took me right back to the original verse:
“No creature that deserved redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.” – C.S. Lewis

I guess my rambling thought here is that I am in no less need now of a Savior than ever before.  If Christ had to die all over again, I would be just as much an “unrighteous” person today as I ever was.  There will never come a day when I will have arrived- when I, in my own right, will not be a “sinner” with ever new flaws, mistakes, and faults.  

Yet to the One I can never repay- to the One who best knows my brokenness- His own perfection is what He sees in me precisely because of His own death.  His own death makes me “worth” dying for.  I can’t really wrap my brain around that.

Romans 9:16 

“It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.”