Performance Review

 

When you were dead in your sins … God made you alive with Christ (Colossians 2:15).

We’re a pretty “performance oriented” country.  We love high-performance cars, get performance reviews at work, experience “performance anxiety” of all kinds and in lots of situations, and know that “past performance is no guarantee of future results”!  We’re only as good as our last performance.

Some of this makes sense: I really want my cardiologist, or auto mechanic, to be a high-performer, to be really, really good at what they do.

But when it comes to living in and walking with God, we have a problem: we are “dead in our sins and in the uncircumcision of our flesh (sinful nature).”  The solution to death cannot be better performance. When you’re dead, your performance options have narrowed to none.

Dead in our sins and in the uncircumcision of our sinful nature—almost as if we’re twice dead, dead in sins and dead in this uncircumcision business.  Whatever does Paul mean?

We relate to “sin” primarily as rule-breaking, as a failure to perform righteously.  That’s good as far as it goes, it just doesn’t go far or deep enough. “If only I tried harder, performed better, I could actually keep all God’s rules!” is a recipe for disaster, because I am in fact performing just as my master desires; the problem is, I have been mastered, captured, enslaved by Sin.  As a slave to Sin, of course I commit sins—I have no other choice!

And Sin, the power that controls my life, has a partner: Death.  We are dead in our sins—our repeated failures to live rightly with God simply express how unbreakable is our slavery.

“… and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature.”  This is covenant language. Circumcision was the mark or sign of God’s covenant with Israel.  This covenant proved unable to deliver on its promise of righteousness, not because there was any fault with the covenant-maker (God) or with the covenant (“the Law”), but because we couldn’t keep the covenant.  We are obligated to and by a covenant we are unable to keep. Dead and deader!

God made you alive with Christ.  Because we finally performed our way out of death?  No, because Jesus died and was raised to new life. On the cross, Jesus becomes fully what we are, he takes upon himself the unbearable weight of our slavery, disobedience and covenant unfaithfulness.  In his life and supremely through his death, he satisfies the demands of the old covenant, marks it “paid in full” with his blood, and ushers us into new life in his new covenant.  

It is Jesus’ performance of the cross that makes us alive, whole, forgiven, secure, reconciled, reborn, and redeemed.

Imagine: there is not anything you can or could do, no “performance” you could ever offer, that would make you more reconciled, more forgiven, more holy, more righteous or more loved than what God has already made you to be “in Christ crucified”!  What does this free you to do … today?

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