The fundament of life ...

Friday, September 24, 2010. Our kids come with the results of class tests every second day. They write tests in English, in Math, in Biology, in German etc etc. And these tests are important to them … they want to do good and their day seems to be quite devastated when they bring back bad marks. Why is our day so influenced by the results of what we do?

What do we base our life on? …

In the New Testament one of the important topics is the evaluation of what humans do. What is the result of our actions, of our words, of our interaction with others? What if we judge these results and then judge ourselves based on our actions (including those which we do NOT carry out and including the words we say, the sentences we write, ALL we do)?

The New Testament reaches the conclusion, that when we judge people by their actions, this leads to devastating results. We don't do what we should do. We do what we should not do. And we fail with many things. We focus our life around our own well-being. We don't care for others. We do not spread truth and love. Some think everything is all-right with them. But most of us know that when we are judged by our results, then we will not get far!

But there is more in it. We have to dig one step deeper. It is not only that we cannot reach full success with what we do. The whole concept of judging someone based on actions only cannot succeed. Of course: actions ARE important, since they can hurt other people, they can help and heal, they make a difference. But they are not adequate for full judgment. We cannot base our life on them. We are more than our actions, life is more than our success or failure!

The core …

The core of life is the love and grace of God. The core of existence is the love and grace of God in Jesus, the Christ. God himself generates a new and better base of life. He restores the original approach: living together with himself, with the creator and source of all that is.

As long as the basis of our life is our own behavior, we are lost. As long as we try to earn heaven, try to earn the right to exist, we are completely lost! We cannot earn love. We cannot earn friendship. We cannot earn heaven. They are gifts, which we can only receive. We can open our heart. We can open our life to these gifts. We can be influenced by them.

Jesus communicates the invitation to a new life. It is a life based on God's actions, not on our own. It is a life based on love and grace, the love which we receive, the grace which HE gives to us. On this new basis, actions can grow and will grow. But without the basis our actions will be dead from the beginning, mere imitations of what they are meant to be. ... more texts