"If I Don't". . .Jesus Did, and Does All the More

"If I don't do something, then nothing will happen."

How many of us think like this?

We are convinced that without our worrying, our interventions, and our efforts to take care of things, then nothing will happen.

What motivates this nonsense?

Some of us were convinced that life begins with our choices.

Yet the Fifth Commandment was instituted in part to instruct us that we did not create ourselves.

God is He who has been from the beginning, and we receive this truth through His Son Jesus, who made the worlds, and through whom the worlds are held together.

Where do we get this outrageous idea that everything begins and ends with us?

Sin, the red-handed mutiny of Adam against God's superabounding goodness toward His creation, toward the man and the woman whom He made in His image.

God provided everything well in advance of man, since man was the last thing that God made.

Why?

First of all, so that man would be able to enjoy everything that God made.

Second, so that man could take no credit for anything that God had done.

They were made in God's image, they were already like God.

When Adam and Eve sinned, God had no choice but to send them away from the Garden, away from the Tree of Life, lest they eat and live forever fallen and separated from God.

He had planned from the very beginning that He would send His Son to die for us, to die for all humanity, to provide a perfect sacrifice so that we could not only be restored to God, but promoted above what Adam had.

We are not just reconciled to God, but we are in Christ, in His Beloved Son, and through Him we can freely receive all things.

Jesus Christ has paid for all our sins, and the sins of the entire world:

"1My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: 2And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." (1 John 2: 1-2)

He is our Advocate now and forever at God the Father's right hand, where Jesus sat down after He Finished the work of our purging our sins, our very conscience, from all wrong-doing and granting us the same standard of righteousness as Christ Himself.

As Christ is today, Beloved, so are you in this world! (1 John 4: 17)

We must get over this outrageous idea that if we do not do something, then nothing will happen. While we were still sinners, God showed His love for us and sent His Son to die for our sins (Romans 5: 8)

The greatest gift which God has given us is not the world and all its creation, but His Son, the Redeemer as well as the Creator.

If we cannot save ourselves from death into life through our own efforts, what gives us the impression that we can do anything else on our own, or that we are doomed to figure things out on our own?

Get rid of this wrong notion of "If I don't, then no one won't" -- Jesus has done it all, and He is doing so much more through us.