STOP THE HARD WORK,YOU DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES!

STOP THE HARD WORK,YOU DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES!

Hard work; a word every excellent student is familiar with. Hard work, the key to success whether in business, sports or academics.To succeed in any field of endeavour, you must work hard. There is no great person on the face of the earth who is not hardworking. To achieve anything great in life you must work hard. 


However, when it comes to attaining righteousness as a christian, I charge you to stop the hard work. Stop the hard work! Yes hard work can give you everything else except God's righteousness. When it comes to becoming righteous your hard work cannot achieve it.The reason is because your hard work cannot meet God's required standard of righteousness. 


The most hardworking christian on the face of the earth, the best of us(if any) who has obeyed all the commandments of God can only achieve a filthy rag. I mean the righteousness he will get by his hard work is just a filthy rag in the eyes of God. Hence I say stop the hard work. It can only beget a filthy rag. 


There is an error I have seen in the body of Christ. An error that has been for many generations and this error proceeds from the preachers. Preachers who have changed the truth concerning Christ and have preached a lie to the people. I see Christians who are depending on the laws of Moses for justification. They seriously think that the laws of Moses can guarantee them righteousness. A greater percentage of today’s Christians have no hope of salvation except that built on morality and self-righteousness. They meticulously observe the Ten Commandments thinking that the entry ticket into heaven is predicated upon the Jewish laws.

If only they know that they are inviting God’s curse upon themselves

If only they know that they are trying to carry a load only Christ can carry

I wish someone had told them that they are struggling to get a righteousness that God already gave to them as a gift.

But how are they bringing God’s curse upon themselves when they are actually trying hard to obey God’s laws? Aren’t they doing God a favour by obeying the Jewish laws? Well! Let God’s word answer that question:

¹⁰ Yes, and those who depend on the Jewish laws to save them are under God’s curse, for the Scriptures point out very clearly, “Cursed is everyone who at any time breaks a single one of these laws that are written in God’s Book of the Law.” ¹¹ Consequently, it is clear that no one can ever win God’s favor by trying to keep the Jewish laws because God has said that the only way we can be right in his sight is by faith. As the prophet Habakkuk says it, “The man who finds life will find it through trusting God.”{Galatians 3:10-11 TLB}

The verse 10 above says “You come under God’s curse when you depend on obedience to the Jewish laws for salvation” In other words, whenever you look at yourself and approve yourself as a candidate of heaven just because you haven’t committed any sin, that same moment you bring God’s curse upon yourself. But why is this so? I thought it’s a good thing to obey God’s laws. You see, the God who gave the laws to Moses through the hand of angels, is the same God who is saying now that you can never be righteous by obeying those laws. And if you still go ahead to still want to depend on obedience to those laws, then you must be the most arrogant person on the face of the earth. This is not an arrogance against man but against God himself.

But wait a minute is this not heresy? No sir it’s not. It’s the very word of God. I know someone is wondering why he/she should be cursed while trying to do the right thing to become righteous. The truth is that what God sees as the right thing is very much different from what you are thinking is the right thing. Let me show you what God says the right thing is when it comes to righteousness and salvation. God has said “The only way we can be righteous in His sight, is by FAITH”. The prophet Habakkuk had written that the only way to find life is to trust God. But the average Christian out there trusts in his/her adherence to Jewish laws.

³ I’ll say it again. Anyone trying to find favor with God by being circumcised must always obey every other Jewish law or perish. ⁴ Christ is useless to you if you are counting on clearing your debt to God by keeping those laws; you are lost from God’s grace.{Galatians 5:3-4 TLB}

Did you notice that trying to be justified by keeping the law is a dead trap?  The verse above says, once you choose to obey one Jewish law, then you must obey all other Jewish laws or you die. Now you have entangled yourself under a yoke that you cannot bear. Why is it an unbearable yoke? The answer is simply because no man born of a woman whether born again or not, Holy Ghost filled or not, fire brand or not can obey all the Jewish laws without faulting any. Again I say no man!

Perhaps there is somebody somewhere who has or who can obey all the Jewish laws, I dare Him to write me and Identify himself.

But if there is no such one then we all need help from God to make us righteous and in fact He has made us righteous already when we accepted Christ Jesus. Not only did he make us righteous, but also made us righteousness. Now we are righteousness and it will take ignorance to start struggling to become what you already are. It is this ignorance which is at work in a greater percentage of Christians that made Apostle Paul pray thus” That the eyes of your understanding being enlightened,  that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints,” Again He cried out saying “ Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God”.

Unfortunately, the majority of Christians have their eyes blinded by the veil of Moses’s laws and they do not know the things that God has freely given to them. They know the laws of Moses but do not know the God of the Cross. The God of the gospel of Christ they do not know yet they claim to gather every Sunday unto Him. They do not know the God that hung on the tree of Calvary to deliver them from the law of sin and death. They do not know that the way God operates now is by faith.

¹² How different from this way of faith is the way of law, which says that a man is saved by obeying every law of God, without one slip. ¹³ But Christ has bought us out from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself. For it is written in the Scripture, “Anyone who is hanged on a tree is cursed” (as Jesus was hung upon a wooden cross^[a]).{Galatians 3:12-13 TLB}

The difference between the way of faith and the way of law is so clear. The way of faith says “Believe that Jesus paid for your sins and made you righteous and you shall be righteous” while the way of law says “obey all God’s laws without breaking any and you will become righteous” Should you have forgotten, I would remind you that breaking just one law is counted as breaking all laws. This is such that a man who broke 9 laws and obeyed one is as guilty as the man who obeyed 9laws and broke one. Need I remind you that there are about 613 commandments for man to obey to become righteous? Yes 613! The way of law says you must obey all of them, if you break one, you have broken all and you are doom to death.

That is an impossible way to go. Thanks be to Christ who has bought us from under the doom of that impossible system by taking the curse for our wrongdoing upon himself.

It will be foolishness for any man to want to return to that impossible system of the law bringing a curse upon himself again. Sadly, many Christians are back into that cursed system without even realizing it. They have cut themselves off from Christ and fallen from grace without knowing it. Christ has become useless to them. They feel good about their self –righteousness not knowing that their morality is no match for God’s standard. They do not understand that their goodness is not good enough before God’s eyes. I wish I could scream in their ears that their self-righteousness is far below God’s requirement. Only Christ is enough to satisfy God’s wrath against sin. Only His death on the cross perfectly atoned for sins and makes men perfect. Only by placing our faith in His finished work on the cross can we please God because without faith it is impossible to please God.

Many Christians are trying to help themselves, flexing their muscles as though they have what it takes to be righteous. If we could help ourselves, Christ wouldn’t have come to die for our sins. If obeying the laws could make us righteous then Christ died in vain. Could it be that Christ came to help a people who didn’t need his help? Could it be that the ones he came to lead are trying to lead themselves?

Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am {Matthew 16:24 MSG}

Why can’t the church trust the finished work of Christ. Why can’t we just allow him take the driver’s seat. Why get into His car when you don’t believe he can drive you safe to your destination {heaven]. He saw how helpless we were and then came to our rescue. How come we have suddenly become stronger than Him? At what point did our morality become stronger than his blood. When did our rule keeping {even though we keep faulting} become more potent than His life on that cross? Where did all this self- help originate from? Why can’t we just sacrifice our lives and let Him live through us?

Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for? {Matthew 16:25-26 MSG}

Perhaps someone is thinking “God will love me more if he sees that I'm trying so hard to help myself and become righteous”. You see, he loved us when we were still helpless in sin. He didn’t die for us because we were good. He didn’t die because we kept all the Jewish laws. In fact he died because he knows we can never keep those laws. He died to take the punishment for our weaknesses and propensity to sin.

                   
⁶ When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. ⁷ Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. ⁸ But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.{Romans 5:6-8 NLT}

What he wants from us now is just simply to believe that we were the ones he died for. That it was our sins that took him to the cross. He wants us to accept the salvation and righteousness that he has won for us and not going about establishing our own righteousness. We can only be counted righteous if we accept His righteousness.

⁴ Yet it was our grief he bore, our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, for his own sins!⁵ But he was wounded and bruised for our sins. He was beaten that we might have peace; he was lashed—and we were healed! ⁶ We—every one of us—have strayed away like sheep! We, who left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet God laid on him the guilt and sins of every one of us!

⁸ From prison and trial they led him away to his death. But who among the people of that day realized it was their sins that he was dying for—that he was suffering their punishment? 

¹⁰ But it was the Lord’s good plan to bruise him and fill him with grief. However, when his soul has been made an offering for sin, then he shall have a multitude of children, many heirs. He shall live again,^[b] and God’s program shall prosper in his hands. ¹¹ And when he sees all that is accomplished by the anguish of his soul, he shall be satisfied; and because of what he has experienced, my righteous Servant shall make many to be counted righteous before God, for he shall bear all their sins{Isaiah 53:4-6,8,10-11 TLB}

If only we could believe these verses of scriptures. If we could only accept what God has prepared already for us, we would drop all our self –righteousness and never try to justify ourselves by the law. We would lean on Christ alone like apostle Paul did.

What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a “law man” so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not “mine,” but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.

Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily. {Galatians 2:20-21 TLB}

I will like to end this article by stating that until we believe like Abraham did, we can never become righteous. Abraham accepted what God did for him. He didn’t try to do what only God could do. He realized that the task of becoming righteous was bigger than him, so he had to depend on God alone. Read what the bible said about accepting what only God could and did for us.

 So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we’re given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, “Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own.”

^4-5 If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift.

^6-9 David confirms this way of looking at it, saying that the one who trusts God to do the putting-everything-right without insisting on having a say in it is one fortunate man:

Fortunate those whose crimes are carted off,
    whose sins are wiped clean from the slate.
Fortunate the person against
    whom the Lord does not keep score.

Do you think for a minute that this blessing is only pronounced over those of us who keep our religious ways and are circumcised? Or do you think it possible that the blessing could be given to those who never even heard of our ways, who were never brought up in the disciplines of God? We all agree, don’t we, that it was by embracing what God did for him that Abraham was declared fit before God?{Romans 4:1-9 MSG}

WILL YOU ACCEPT WHAT ONLY GOD CAN AND HAS DONE OR YOU WANT TO BE A HARD WORKER?

DO YOU PREFER SELF-HELP TO GOD’S HELP?

DO YOU WANT THE GIFT OR YOU WANT TO WORK HARD AND OBEY 613 COMMANDMENTS?

BELIEVE ME, YOU DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES.