Are you good enough? It doesn’t matter.

One of the "traditions" that some of us participate in is the 'New Year's Resolution.' These resolutions usually have to do with getting healthier or becoming a better person in someway or a commitment to a good work. If I were to hazard a guess 99.9% of us usually fail at some point in the new year in fulfilling our resolutions. The worst part of this resolution businesses is that we set our selves up for failure because we set a bar that cannot be attained or maintained. This is also true for those who follow Jesus.

Many feel that to be a follower of Jesus that we must be good enough or work toward some form of perfection in our doing of good works.

In the Lutheran tradition there is a saying, “You do good works because God loves you. You do not do good works so that God loves you.”

A few years back a parishioner and I had a long conversation about God. Specifically, the question was, how can God love a guy like me? Because I knew this individual I knew that the real question was, am I good enough?

We can strive all our lives to be “good enough” and we would fail. That is just the plain truth of the matter. We will fail because we never meet our own standards. We will fail because we do not think we live up to a mother or father’s perceived standard. We will fail, because, quite frankly we can never be perfect.

So where does that leave us in our relationship with God?

Pretty much where we should be - at God’s mercy.

The problem? This is just not acceptable to many of us. We want to be in control, we want to be the authors of our own destiny. In a television show called “Heroes” there is a character that can paint the future. The question being asked with this particular gift is “can we change the future? Can we make perfect what we perceive to be imperfect?” Can we force what we think is perfection onto a world that is in chaos? Can we force our own lives to be perfect even if we are imperfect?

Of course the answer to these questions is no. We are not masters of space, time and dimension. We are not even masters of our selves. We are slaves to our own shortcomings and desires. Again we are at God’s mercy.

In the Christian Church we celebrate the end of Christmas with a day we call Epiphany. It falls on the twelfth day of Christmas, January 6th.  It is a day that we remember the revealing of Jesus as the Son of God. This epiphany, or aha moment, opens for us the reality of being at the mercy of God's judgement. Can we ever stand before God justified without the forgiving work of this one, the messiah, the one who takes away the sin of the world? Of course not. We are good enough, because of the love and work of God through Jesus. Jesus first loves us so much, that he took away our sin.

That is the answer to my brother in faith who struggled with the question of whether he was good enough in God’s eyes. God is good enough for all of us … enough to die for us; as a friend would lay down his life for a friend. Because God is good enough for all of us we can know that we are no longer slaves to ourselves and the world’s expectations of perfection. We are set free from that worry so that we can go out in the world to share this Good News. This new year let us be reminded that we do good works because our God is willing to come down to hang out with us.

This brother of faith died not long ago. He died without the worry of whether he was perfect enough. He died with the not so secret knowledge that God is good, all the time.