GOOD NEWS!!! : All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God!!!

So I came across some good news in the Bible that I hadn't seen before. That news is this in a nutshell: "All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God." (Romans 3:23). There are a bunch of other versus with this same theme, basically the idea of Total Depravity and Orginal Sin. I always thought and was taught that this was the "Bad News" (especially when someone regurgitated the Bad News/Good News evangalism technique "I've got some bad news, you suck and your gonna burn in hell, the good news is that if you say these magic words about Jesus it will all be ok"). Here's a very uncomfortable video to demonstrate, not the good news bad news technique but just as bad, (I think Mitt Romney stars as the hero in the video, you'll have to watch to see what I mean).

The thing is that the bad news is not the bad news at all, it really is really really good news that we are totally depraved and that all of us have fallen short of the Glory of God, in fact it may be the best news.

If I'm correct in latching onto the idea that the whole purpose of my being is for me to seek and obtain a right relationship with God and that God Himself is all that can satisfy the longings of my soul, and if there is no way on my own I can come into a right relationship with God because of my sin, then that is just awesome! It's awesome because it means that God must be incredibly good and worth obtaining, so good that not even Christ "who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped" (Phillipians 2:6).

I was always shown Romans 3:23 to explain to me how I was destined for Hell and this is why I needed Christ to save me. True enough, but it does little to motivate me to love God. I'm just looking to save my own skin. But if I take the focus of this idea off of me and put it onto God, I can see something completely different. That God desires for me to have the very thing that will bring total, abundant, and even overflowing satisfaction to my entire being (a relationship with Him) and the even better news is that this gift of God is so good that there is no way I can be good enough to deserve it. I could work for the rest of eternity and not be able to earn or deserve it by any standard human or divine. Even if I lived a PERFECT life for all of eternity I still could not deserve a relationship with God that could satisfy me and Glorify Him simply because I had a beginning and He didn't (maybe another post on this idea later, maybe not). This relationship that God is offering must be AMAZING!

If I DID earn or deserve this relationship with God then the magnificance of being with God would have to be limited by my mortal ability to achieve the deserving of it and therefore God's goodness would be limited by my goodness and then God would cease to be God. In other words what I recieved could only be as good as me. And I am mortal, I had a beginning and I will die. This really limits the scope of whatever goodness I can provide for myself. So this new understanding of Orginal Sin and Total Depravity also brings about for me a new understanding of Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Through Christ I can recieve God who is so good that there is no way for me to deserve Him. And if I was not totally depraved then none of this would be possible!

Thank you Lord that mankind fell from grace through Adam, so that you could give us an inheritance through Christ that is infinately more than we could ever deserve on our own.