To live your life by anything other than the joy of the gospel is like trying to drive a crooked nail through a piece of wooden block with a loose-head hammer. You know the nail is crooked. You know the hammerhead is a bit loose from its handle. But yet, you keep striking the nail anyway hoping for that zero-to-nothing possibility that the nail will somehow be driven through the wooden block. I was both the hammer and the nail, unstable and crooked. No assurance, no integrity, no lasting joy, but fear and pain and self-condemnation.
That’s how I lived my life for many years, hoping that somehow religion had to be the way to live for God. I saw all the results, yet I shut my eyes over and over again hoping that the next day would be different like the next hammer strike would bring better result. But the more I practiced religion, the more crooked I became as the nail that was already bent from previous hammer strikes. That previous hammer strike called sin.
Through religion, I could easily please anyone. Religion teaches you how to profile others and easily feed into their expectations so that they can easily be misled. That, in itself, is crooked.
Thanks be to God who made me straight and keeps me anchored to him by the blood of Jesus shed for me. Yes, Hallelujah, thanks be to God. Amen.
“For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
Jesus is the well of the living water, the Holy Spirit. 