Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Don't Measure Up? Here's the Good News | Advent | John 1:14-18

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

What are you striving for? Is God's love conditional? What do you have to do to earn God's love? How does grace work? In today's episode, Keith uses John 1:14-18 to discuss the importance and depth of God's grace toward those who don't deserve it. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Christine and I have four kids, and several years ago, kid number three said that for Christmas he either wanted a rat or a monkey. Well, what do you do with that? Monkeys are obviously not an option. So we decided we would get him a rat.

When he opened it on Christmas morning, he seemed excited and named the rat Grover. I have no idea why. but Grover the rat. So the kids play with it for the first few days, but it becomes pretty obvious to us that we're going to be the ones taking care of this thing. The kids don't really like the rat, not any of them,

including the one that got it as a Christmas gift. So one day we take the rat back to the store and just exchange it. Really, we didn't exchange it. We gave the rat back to them, and we got nothing in return, no money back. So I don't know what that is considered. Maybe a donation to a pet store.

Well, the next day, the rat wasn't around, but none of the kids really noticed. In fact, our youngest son, who was maybe about 10 at the time, he walked past where we'd been keeping the rat and said, good night, Grover on his way to bed. Well, Grover wasn't there to hear it. He hadn't been there in a couple days. Somehow he just took it for granted that the rat was there taking care of himself. I don't know. But he said good night to an animal that was back at the pet store.

I think we take God's grace for granted, just like my son took Grover for granted. We don't pay much attention to it. We just assume it's there. But grace is way too important to take for granted. John 114 says, The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only son who came from the father,

full of grace and truth. A couple verses later, it says, The law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. Jesus brought grace. He is full of grace and truth. Sometimes in order to understand grace, it's helpful to understand what justice and mercy are and how grace is a little bit different. So here's a way to think about it. Justice is getting what we deserve.

Mercy is not getting what we deserve. Grace is getting what we don't deserve. There's an old story about C.S. Lewis walking through a faculty meeting at Oxford. The faculty in the meeting were discussing what makes each religion different from all the others. And they couldn't figure out what made Christianity unique. Lewis, who was a Christian by this time in his life, stopped and said, oh, that's easy. It's grace. And all the other professors agreed. Grace is unique to Christianity. It's the notion that God's love comes to us free of charge with no sense.

strings attached. That goes against every instinct we have. Only Christianity makes God's love unconditional. Think about the last words of Jesus and the last words of the Buddha. The Buddha's last words were something like this. Work hard to gain your salvation. Never stop striving. So Buddha was commending all of his followers to keep striving for their salvation. Now Jesus's last words were completely different. His last words were, it is finished. Well, there's a really big difference between never stop striving and it's finished. One says that you have more work to do. The other one says that God has done all the work in Jesus on that cross. Our culture sounds a lot like Buddha. It says that we must always keep striving, always keep striving for acceptance. It's kind of what I call the

gospel of Fitbit? Remember when Fitbits were new? They were all the rage. Everybody was talking about these little devices that measured and tracked all kinds of helpful information. And for some people were the catalyst they needed to improve their health. Almost everyone I knew who had a Fitbit used it to count their steps. And they had a goal that they were going to try to reach of so many steps per day, so many steps per week. And that, of course, is a good thing. It's a good thing to be moving more. But we human beings have an amazing ability to take good things and misuse them. And it seems like the Fitbit is susceptible to the same kind of corruption. Because it became one more yardstick that people used to measure themselves and determine whether they were a success or a failure.

Did I take enough steps today? Did I hit my goal? And since you can hook your Fitbit up so that all your daily results will be posted online, there lurked this temptation to compare yourself to your friends. Now, of course, I'm not saying the temptation to constantly measure ourselves as peculiar to the Fitbit. I mean, not at all. Remember, the Buddha says never stopped striving. We have the same kind of comparison issues when it comes to the scale. How much do we weigh or GPA or salary? And of course, there's many others. Now, some people who used the Fitbit, I remember reading articles about this,

said the device had made their workouts more stressful because they kept checking to see how they were doing and whether they had done enough to meet their goal or to beat a friend in the number of steps that they took. Now, I thought we exercised to reduce stress, but now we've created a fitbit that increases our anxiety during our workouts. Now, perhaps you were one of the people who were able to use your fitbit in a healthy way that didn't induce comparison or set you on a roller coaster of emotions leading to feelings of pride, boy, I did it, or defeat, I failed. If so, that's great. my personality, or maybe it's just my sin, is already prone to wanting to keep score in some way. So I'm sure that a device that provides another way of me keeping score and feeling good about

myself would not be especially good for me. If I have a point, it's this. The culture we live in always comes up with more and more ways for us to keep score that will either leave us feeling self-satisfied or crushed, depending on how we measure up at that particular moment. and if we aren't very very careful we will begin to believe that god works in the same way so the gospel of fitbit stands in stark contrast to the gospel of grace the good news of the gospel is that god accepts us not because of what we do but because of what jesus did that we don't have to measure up to be good enough god offers grace and freedom to our soul that we desperately crave but we can't find anywhere else the gospel of grace is

far better than the gospel of Fitbit. But it's the gospel of Fitbit that dominates our culture. We live in a culture that demands performance. I mean, every institution in our world seems to run on performance. Who gets honored at school? Well, those who get the best grades. Who gets honored in sports? Well, those who have the best times or the best points per game average who score the most touchdowns. Who gets honored in business? Well, those who have the most business success. I mean, Fortune Magazine lists the 500 richest people, not the 500 poorest. Think about Santa Claus. He's making his list and checking it twice to see who's been naughty or nice.

Maybe Jesus is the same way. People yearn for grace to know that unconditional acceptance is available even though they don't deserve it. Instead, we live on a performance treadmill, and none of us can measure up. We're all on that treadmill because of the culture we live in. and it's the air we breathe. But I think we can even go deeper than that. Because underneath that performance mentality,

we all struggle with a sense of guilt and shame, knowing that we aren't what we are supposed to be. We're not what we want to be. And that leads us to try to measure up to overcome that guilt, to overcome that shame, to appease others with hard work and good behavior, to act as if we're always getting better. If I can just stay out of trouble,

if I can just get good grades, if I can just lose weight, if I can just overcome this bad habit, if I can just get that promotion, if I can just make this team, then I'll feel better about myself. I'll be acceptable. I'll be able to live with myself. I'll like myself. I'll be valuable. I'll be worthy. Grace says that God loves you when you're unlovable. Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. Grace has nothing to do with one receiving it. In this case, that's you. It has everything to do with the one giving it. In this case, that's God. Grace is irrational in that it doesn't quite make sense. You can't point to something in a person and say this is the reason they got

God's grace. Grace isn't given to those with intrinsic qualities or those who do the right things. Grace never keeps score. In fact, from our vantage point, grace always goes to the wrong person. Jesus extends grace to sinners, to prostitutes, to tax collectors. The most extravagant sinners receive his most compassionate welcome. Listen to Christians, and it's easy to get the impression that the core of Christianity is what can you do for Jesus. But it's not. It's not at all.

Christianity is about what Jesus has done for us. It's not first and foremost about our sacrifice for him, but his sacrifice for us. So grace freezes. from the oppressive pressure to perform, the slavish demand to do more to earn God's love or favor or blessing. Because Jesus paid it all, we are freed from the need to do it all. Jesus came to liberate us from the weight of having to measure up. He came to free us from the need to fix ourselves.

Jesus came to release us from the need to be right and rewarded and regarded and respected. Jesus came to set the captives free so we don't have to return to the sloth. slavery of trying to prove and validate ourselves. Because Jesus was strong for you, you are free to be weak. Because Jesus succeeded for you, your failure isn't counted against you. Because Jesus was sinless, he came to rescue the sinful. See, we never outgrow our need for God's grace. We never get to a point where we can stand on our own before God. It's good news for me. It's good news for my soul. it's good news for you that Jesus's acceptance and love doesn't depend on our devotion or our commitment to him. It's not about my grip on him. It's about his grip on me.

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