I’ve been reading ‘Gentle and Lowly’ by Dane Ortlund over the past few weeks. If you haven’t read it you can have a look here. It was a book that was recommended to me by a good friend who told me he believed ‘it was the best book he ever read.’ That was quite the comment and to be honest I wondered if it had been built up too much and I would end up being disappointed.

I wasn’t – it’s incredible.

The other day I was reading it and I came across this quote;

It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will.

This sentence summed up in a couple of lines something that I have tried to communicate to others about Jesus for years. However, even knowing this truth and even when I hear it written so wonderfully as it is here it still feels like the hardest thing to understand about following Jesus.

Religion tells us to get right with God. There is the underlying current of thinking that if we could behave better, read the bible more, pray for longer etc. that we will become ‘better christians’ and maybe earn some more blessing or something. We all have had that narrative somewhere playing in our minds – I feel silly to even admit it.

It’s so unbiblical.

God doesn’t want us to ‘get right’ with Him. He just wants us to get with Him.

The only way I can reconcile this in my head is to think about my relationship with my son. I wouldn’t want my son to do all of these amazing things for me but then find out that the only reason he did it was because he was hoping it would grant him favour with me or because he was scared of the judgement I would hand out to him if he didn’t.

The moments I treasure most with my boy is when he simply wants to be with me

I love it when he doesn’t get it right and just falls into my arms in surrender and asks for help. My expectation of him isn’t that he will get everything right, how could he? My job as a father is to guide him through these days and help him to grow into all God wants him to be.

To do that I just want him to get with me, not just to get it right for me.

It’s the same with our relationship with God x1000. When we realise we can’t make it on our own we are acknowledging how much we need and love the Father. We are dethroning ourselves and enthroning Him. That is when we are right with God.