Absolute Grace at Christmas

The following is excerpted from John Mark Reynold's blog...

We mean well, but do badly.

We intend to love our neighbors, our kids, and our spouses, but end up being hateful for all the wrong reasons. How many marriages have been ruined over a missing cup of coffee?

One response is just to give up and accept the fact that we are selfish. Good luck to those people, but here is hoping they stay out of my neighborhood. For the rest of us, we must face the irritating truth that we want (so badly!) to be better than we are. We cannot give up hoping, because the alternative to hope is barren intellectually and poetically.

Atheism means to kill God, but kills hope instead.

Religions without Christmas offer an incomplete or false hope. They offer a second chance or some way for us to work to fix self, but self-help is useless. There is nothing we can do to fix the messes we make. Only those with no sense of self wish to have their good works and bad weighed in a scale in the hopes that one can make up for even one evil by doing twenty other goods.

Sometimes we are tempted by the illusion that if we just got a second chance everything would be fine.

It is a good thing we do not serve the God of Second Chances, since most of us need many more. A second chance is not really what we need anyway.

Continue reading: http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/2007/12/22/absolute-grace-at-christmas/