It’s not about our own efforts… and it never was.
Though we expend copious effort and worry in our attempts to makes ourselves ‘right’, we always seem to come up short.
Yet, we want so badly to be perceived as respectable and virtuous. It is of such vital importance to us that we agonize over the clothes we wear, the words we use, and the opinions we express. We spend so much time thinking about what other people think of us, that we lose focus of who we are and are left chasing the disparate whims of society.
Someone once spoke about a bedpan, and I think the analogy holds true if you’ll forgive the visual. Imagine a used bedpan. Through you clean it extensively, using all the best disinfectants, you are never going to feel good about eating out of it. You’d want a new bedpan at least, or ideally a plate. The point is that our sin similarly taints us beyond our ability to self-correct. That we need something greater to purify us. This is what we are offered in the verse below.
“Through the Spirit, Christ offered himself as an unblemished sacrifice, freeing us from all those dead-end efforts to make ourselves respectable, so that we can live all out for God.”
There are two important points this passage highlights: 1. Our efforts to clean ourselves up are in vain, and 2. that the goal of Christ’s sacrifice was that we might live all out for God.
First, our efforts alone were never going to purify us. More insidiously though, we have been self-limited by a belief that only once we are ‘respectable’ can we engage with and live for God - that we must clean ourselves up first. This verse reminds us that it is in fact Christ who makes us right while we are still flawed. I liken it to deciding you aren’t going to golf, until you are a good golfer. You won’t wake up one day having become one without daily practice and instruction.
Secondly, note the text: Christ offered himself…so we can live all out for God. Are we actually doing that? I can’t honestly say I am living all out for God. Some portion of my life, sure, but not all out. What a charge!
Maybe it is time to stop waiting until we are ‘right’ and thereby delaying our opportunity to live all out for God. We aren’t going to be able to purify ourselves, but that isn’t what we’ve been charged to do. He has already paid the bill, we just need to start living it out.