Bruce Levinson, he would probably put himself right here.
If I gave you this pen, where would you put yourself? Would you have yourself on that continuum? Where would you put yourself?
We have a problem. Mother Theresa has a distance that she can’t make up on her own. She can’t perform her way to God’s standards. She is in trouble. Billy Graham on this continuum, hypothetically, is in trouble; serious trouble. Woo! I am in real trouble. All of us are in trouble, because distance is distance. Bruce Levinson, he is in trouble.
So, the performance plan. We think, “Yeah I will bat one thousand; I will play error free baseball. Woo, woo, woo!”
It is all about woo. Woo makes God to say, “Give it up, give it up. It is not going to happen.”
So what did God do? Here is what God did. This is a giant chasm. Us: that is you and me. Us. God. God’s standard right? Perfection, 100% righteous. We have a problem; we have sinned, and sin has caused this cosmic chasm between ourselves and God.
One bad mood, one off day, one sin of omission and commission and we have this cosmic chasm separating ourselves and God. So, what have we done? In our humanist view we say, “Ok, I will be very philosophical and surely I can get to God by doing that. I will be religious.”
“Man, my father was a pastor in the Church of Christ.”
“My grandmother, she prayed every day and I read my Bible.”
“I will go to Africa and help with this whole AIDS thing and I will go on missions trips and I will serve in the church”
All of those things are dandy. Good for you. But you are on the performance plan.
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