Our Part In Our Healing
When I began to understand what really went wrong and that sin was a disease and God a physician, it really took the pressure off of my performance. Before I was worried about God’s forgiveness, but now I realize that His forgiveness isn’t the problem at all. God has always responded to sin with forgiveness and wooing, but forgiveness is only a halfway house. His forgiveness doesn’t heal the damage done, and healing our disease is where the rubber meets the road. Those in unfallen worlds don’t want to know if men are forgiven. They want to know if they’re safe to live next door to.
What Makes Us Safe To Live Next To?
What makes us safe is our response to God’s forgiveness and wooing, a response that doesn’t make us instantly perfect, but avails us of the process to get us there. How? When we respond to God with trust, then we are no longer rebels and He can give us the new perfect human condition that Jesus developed for us. His perfect life is substituted for our faulty performance—surety of our successful reclamation—until we are fully healed.
Learning To Walk
We are like babies—falling as we learn to walk—as we progress through the process of maturing and healing spiritually. Salvation, then, comes by humbly trusting God to put us right and to help us all along our stumbling path to complete healing. Our critical choices are not over things like cussing, smoking, or cheating, but over our continued decision to trust God as a friend all along the way. This kind of trust in God’s unconditional love is the only thing that is powerful enough to heal us.
“The law requires righteousness,–a righteous life, a perfect character; and this man has not to give. He cannot meet the claims of God’s holy law. But Christ, coming to the earth as man, lived a holy life, and developed a perfect character. These He offers as a free gift to all who will receive them.” Desire of Ages 762
Saved by a Choice
This perfect character that Jesus developed is ours if we want it, and it is the antidote that gives us life here and now until we are healed. Our trust in Him, in His perfect life—even though we may often fail to love— saves us. It is all that is required of us. Salvation doesn’t come to us by never making another mistake, but by choosing not to rebel, by choosing to draw nigh to God. Like with the thief on the cross, it is this relationship with God that makes us safe to save regardless of how far we make it along the path toward perfection.
