Bulletin 6.1.25

The good news is actually good: you are not capable of contributing anything to your cause before God because the law of God levels all of us to the ground. That’s not reason for self-flagellation, though some people make it out to be. Instead, it is to force your gaze away from yourself and to the ever-compassionate arms of Jesus… There’s the movement: the leveling law showing our need for a Savior, and the Savior giving himself. It is the glorious, good news of our gracious God whose property is always to have mercy.

If you are currently caught in the cycle of chasing worth and meaning, believing even a little bit that you can actually satisfy the constant accusations of not-okay-ness that never let up, or if, perhaps, shame has you in a deathly chokehold that feels like it will crush you, may God give you the gift of clear vision of your desperate need and deep sickness. And this vision is not to engender self-hate; your Creator made and loves you, sick and messy and terrified as you are. This clear vision is so that as you see clearly, you may fall to the ground where the loving arms of Jesus are waiting to embrace you. In a place where all your efforts have been blessedly stripped away from you, your only job is to receive the gift of the God who gives himself freely. 

– Lyndsey Holifield, Insatiable Hunger Pangs: Anorexia and the Burden of Creating Self-Worth (MBird.com, 5.21.25)

Faith consists not in doing something but in receiving something. To say that we are justified by faith is just another way of saying that we are justified not in slightest measure by ourselves, but simply and solely by the One in whom our faith is reposed… faith means receiving something, not doing something or even being something… At bottom, faith is in one sense a very simple thing; it simply means that, abandoning the vain effort of earning one's way into God's presence, we accept the gift of salvation which Christ offers so full and free.

- J. Gresham Machen, What is Faith? (1925)