Two Months?!?!

I haven't blogged in two months?! What's wrong with me? While I'm not sure if many people--if any--read my ramblings, if you do, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. So what I've been realizing over the past couple months is how much I like to play God. I'm a little bit of a control freak. And, while I'm working on it, I'm someone who finds the idea of the sufficiency (is that a word?) of God's grace a little hard to grasp. I want there to be some way I can earn heaven, if even just a little bit. If I'm being completely honest (gulp), I want to be able to get up to heaven one day and show God all my bells and whistles, all the good deeds I've done in His name and out of love for Him. I want to be able to show Him that I'm not like those who strayed away from Him and into the arms of deception, greed and the service of self. I want to be able to earn awards for each good deed I do, so that one day I can show them off to God. Gross, I know. And then I stumbled upon Luke 18, The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
"But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'
"I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted."

Eek. I am the Pharisee and I so desperately want to be the tax collector. The tax collector was so convinced of God's power and holiness, and of his own powerlessness and filthiness, that he could do nothing but lay prostrate at the feet of his Savior begging for mercy and love. Isaiah 64 says that even our righteous deeds are like filthy rags -- or more accurately and distastefully, like rags women use during that time of the month -- before God. All that can save us is the mercy and love poured out for us at Calvary. And the Pharisee didn't get that, and that's what scares me. He thought that with all his good deeds he was closer than most to heaven and salvation, and this thinking was the very thing that made him so far away from the very things he thought he was reaching.

May God our Father bestow His grace upon you to expose your sin and His Holiness so that you can do nothing but lay at His feet, relying on His power alone.