Room for improvement

All of us want to excel; that is the secret of success in many sports.

BETTY CUTHBERT won four gold medals for athletics in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and again in Tokyo in 1964.

In the 1960 Rome Olympics she was eliminated in the first heat and considered retiring at that point, but instead she decided to compete in the next Olympics and won the gold medal in the 400 metres race.

She always said God helped her overcome the hard times.

All of us have a healthy desire to improve. We want to improve in our studies, jobs, or relationships, reaching higher in everything we do, in the hope of becoming the champions.

But what is good in material life is not always the best thing for our spiritual life. At least, not at first. Let me explain.

I know many people who wear themselves out trying to reach God. You may be one of them. They try as hard as they can to do better, and make lists of laws and commandments to keep in order to refine even the smallest details.

They give all they have and more, to get access to God. They try to be more faithful and religious than anyone else, to get that distant God's attention. Directly or indirectly, they try to climb up to his level.

And it is all totally useless. Instead of drawing near to him, they seem to get farther away, simply because they are going about it backwards. That is right! You cannot improve enough to reach God! No one can!

Our sin is so big that it has separated us from God forever. God knows that. That is why he made a better way for us.

On the day you were physically born, you began to live as a human being. By the same token, you must be born spiritually and receive eternal life.

When you ask God to enter your life, you are spiritually reborn. At physical birth you have a human spirit, and at spiritual birth you receive the Spirit of God.

It is as simple as that; the Bible says that we become children of God, because He lives inside us. We have the same blood type as God because we have been washed in the blood of Christ.