Better than the bad guys

Sometimes your body is just tired.  At 7:30pm.  You should listen and go to bed.  But you don't.  You stay up watching Verlander do what he hasn't done all season... give away 6 earned runs.  I like him.  He stayed in the duggout with his team.  The team he'd just led into a loss in their first World Series game against the Giants.  Other pitchers usually leave when they're pulled. 

After work today I finally did a workout.  Monday and Tuesday weren't happening.  It was so nice outside and with the World Series starting I decided to just go for a run and do a short workout in the garage.  I ran a mile, did 4 sets of 10 pushups, 10 barbell curls, 10 tricep presses, 10 jumping lunges followed by another mile run.  I'm spent!

I always think of arguments for or passionate defenses of the good news I believe in while I'm running.  It's probably in part the lyrics to the music I'm listening to at the time that inspires me.  Today, and many other days, I've had this argument going thru my head:

God didn't make us to just be better than the bad guys!

I mean people argue that they're good people.  They say they're good because they're better than the bad people they compare themselves to.  I find myself thinking that way too.  But God didn't make us to just be better than rapists and murderers and liars and thieves and child abusers and drug users and gangsters and cheats.  He made us to be reflectors of his goodness! 

The Bible says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."  The glory of God.  That's what we fall short of.  That's what we were made to be: glorifyers.  We were made to reveal or make clearer the glory- the weightiness, the actual-ness, the substance, the presence- of God.  Imago Dei.  We were made in the image of God.  We only think we're good because we compare ourselves to those worse than us.  But if we compared ourselves to the One we were made to reveal we would know how not-good, how fallen we really are. 

What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all [things] under his feet...- Psalms 8:4-6

The crown has fallen from our head; woe to us, for we have sinned!- Lamentations 5:16

There was only one good Man.  The rest of us are fallen. 

Quieted,

Sheila