When Being Good Isn't Good Enough: 21 Days of GraceSample

The Successful Laugh

Laughter and success go together too.

In your Christian life, you tried. You really tried, but in the end you failed. You really wanted to do better, but you only did worse and you didn’t know how to fix it. Maybe you considered giving up completely. You said to yourself, “I’ll never get it right. I’m probably not a Christian at all.”

Rules and regulations are Satan’s way of reminding Christians that they have failed. But even worse, rules and regulations are the reason we do fail.

Let me give you a wonderful secret. When success isn’t the issue, success becomes the reality. Success is always a side benefit of something else. 

Holiness and righteousness is the desire of every Christian. Many Christians say, “I’m going to be holy and righteous even if it kills me.” And it usually does. But, and here is the exciting thing: Holiness and righteousness have already been achieved for you by Christ. When you stand before the Father, He sees you as holy and righteous because of the blood of His Son. You are, in fact, justified before God because of the cross.

That is a cold hard fact; you don’t have to try so much anymore to be holy and righteous. You are now free to fail and, more importantly, free to allow Him to love you and to love Him back. You enter a relationship, not between a criminal and a policeman, but between a loving Father and His child. When you enjoy that relationship something wonderful happens: You find holiness and righteousness come tagging along behind. You find that you, almost without knowing it, are in a process that makes you increasingly more holy and righteous.

This is all about freedom. It’s not a system. It’s about the person of Jesus who said, “If the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).