My conversion was simultaneously dramatic, terrifying and completely life changing.

I wasn’t listening to God when He politely approached me with the Gospel.

So, He went from “small arms to artillery” and revealed just what a stinker I really was, and apart from His gracious intervention, that I was on my way to Hell with a high hand.

I survived, but as through fire, singed eyebrows and all, and with a newfound respect for the sound of God’s “voice,” just as the Jews experienced at the foot of Mount Sinai.

But it was the gentle voice of Jesus who brought the message of deliverance from my sin problem as prophesied centuries before in Jeremiah 33:6: “Behold, I am going to bring to it (Judah) healing and a remedy, and I will heal them; and I will reveal to them an abundance of peace and truth.”

God’s grace dawned upon my heart and yielded peace and truth like I’d never known before.

‘Works’ Position

After a few years of being bathed in the warm sunshine of God’s grace, however, some of my old self-righteous ways returned, sneaking in the back door unnoticed.

My knee-jerk reaction was to fall upon my own fleshly methods of “making things right” through personal effort and will power. I was losing sight of the cross of Christ. It became all about me.

Two thousand years ago, the saints at the church in Galatia had a similar problem. The Apostle Paul had to take strong disciplinary action to prevent them from going over the cliff and back to personal merit as their justification before God. Thank heaven he did.

Here is how he put it in Galatians 1:6-7:

“I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel, which is not just another account; but there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ … if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!”

Is deserting Jesus and going back to the Law (works for justification) serious to God? “… he is to be accursed!”

Ouch.

Now to be clear, Paul is talking about false teachers, but he is warning you and me not to listen to them.

Path to Freedom

Paul went on in his gospel to the Galatians in Galatians 5:1-6:

“It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore, keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.

“Look! I, Paul, tell you that if you have yourselves circumcised (or any other law keeping activity), Christ will be of no benefit to you. And I testify again to every man who has himself circumcised, that he is obligated to keep the whole Law. You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by the Law; you have fallen from grace. For we, through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.”

You see, if you sign up to justify yourself before God on your own personal merits by keeping the Law, you are signing up to keep the whole Law — not just the Ten Commandments, but the other 613 laws associated with them.

And there are unintended consequences with this approach. As the Apostle James explained in James 2:10, “For whoever keeps the whole Law, yet stumbles in one point, has become guilty of all.”

So why go back into the squirrel cage of works?

The Law was never meant to save us, but to convict us of sin and point us to Christ, as noted in Romans 3:19-20:

“Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are under the Law, so that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law none of mankind will be justified in His sight; for through the Law comes knowledge of sin.”

How About You?

Have you been tempted to return to your empty works for justification? It’s a fool’s mission, as explained in Romans 7:6: “But now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.”

Leave the squirrel cage of human merit behind and stand on the work of Christ on the cross FOR you.

As written in Romans 3:21, He is your righteousness: “But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been revealed …”