Nowadays, you can’t get within a mile of a bookstore without spotting scads of self-help (or “self-care”) titles, and this may be the mother of them all! It offers not one, but fifty different methods to help yourself out of whatever problems you have!
We all know humans like to help themselves, but this book makes it seem that we can each lift ourselves out of pretty much any deficiency. Follow one or more of these multi-step paths and you can finally achieve…
Perfection. We like that word. We strive for that ideal. That’s not a bad thing; God created us for perfection with him after all (Matt. 5:48)! But too often we would rather help ourselves to perfection without God (Click to tweet).
We’d rather take the 10 steps, follow the 4 rules, achieve the 5 standards, or accomplish the 12–item list all by ourselves. The ubiquitous presence of self-help aids alone is proof enough of our pervasive desire to release ourselves from our flaws. We long to remove ourselves from the consequences of our actions, to victoriously look back at our former imperfection with a successful smile of self-satisfaction.
No self-help stairway to heaven!
Now taking the initiative to better oneself is certainly not bad, but there is at least one problem for which there can be no self-help. Our biggest problem: our inability to achieve perfection despite all human effort and aid.
None of our methods or mountains of good deeds can erase imperfection. So God did instead through Jesus (Click to tweet). Yeah, I know, by dying on the cross, by rising from the dead, by forgiving our sins, by (insert Christian cliche), right?
But how and why does any of that work? If our imperfection keeps us from God’s perfection, and we need God to fix that, then God’s solution needs to work. Can you explain – step by step – to yourself and to others precisely how it does? Try it right now and see if it would make sense to someone who has never heard it. Perhaps the pieces of the Jesus puzzle never quite made sense and simply weren’t questioned.
If that’s the case, or if you’d like to nuance some details that might make your confidence in the Gospel even stronger, God tells us very completely and satisfyingly how his help works when self-help doesn’t. So join me in discovering that in Healing Hereafter (especially Booklet 2!) my free ebook series you can download instantly here.
