January 30, 2024,
Billions of people across the globe are catastrophically mistaken to believe that they can earn salvation by being good. The Word of God warns us that our good works are like garbage to God.
All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. Isaiah 64:6 (NIV)
How can this be true?
- We
don't understand how corrupt our heart is. 99.999% of the time we do good works for selfish reasons. How many times do we do something kind to someone exclusively motivated to honor Jesus Christ and with no thought whatsoever of gaining favor with the recipient of our kindness?
- Jesus Christ is the one who does the good that we do. We stand before Jesus at judgment and say, "I did such and such good deed!" No, I did that! The Holy Spirit and I did that good work
through you. If we hadn't acted through you, you would not have done anything good at all.
- We can never do enough good works to be perfect. God demands perfection from us. Purity! Holiness! Flawlessness! In terms of baseball, a 1000% batting average throughout an entire career. In other words, every single time you stood at bat you got a hit. No walks. No strikeouts. No fly outs. No ground outs. No sacrifices. That is the minimum standard for perfection. Once we've
sinned, we've lost perfection. At best we can be .99999999999999999999999999999999999% and that is NOT perfection.
This was driven home to me as I've been laboring to make a "perfect" manuscript of The Two Souls of Heidi Lonsberry. I read every character on the 490+ pages at least five times, eliminating what I
thought was every mistake from the book.
Well, I just went through a "final" edit and discovered 94 mistakes in my 160,000+ word manuscript. An .0005875% error rate is still imperfection! Sadly, I am confident that if I read my book three more times I will still have a flawed manuscript, perhaps missing a mistake in chapter 4 or chapter
17.
Perfection is impossbile!
Praise be to God that Jesus Christ was and is perfect! He has become our substitute, standing in for us at the judgment. He will not find any sin in His own
reflection that He sees in us.
My brothers and sisters in Christ, tell your lost friends and family that they cannot possibly save themselves! Tell them that Jesus took care of that for them!
May God bless you!
Charles Wagner
