521 Years
Titus 3:5a - He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy,
There was a comedy on NBC a few years back about a woman who dies and wakes up in what she is told is The Good Place. The premise is basically a morality scoreboard. Every action any human being has ever taken gets assigned a point value (positive or negative) and your running total decides where you spend eternity. Hold a door, gain points. Ruin someone’s day, lose them. Then, in one of the later seasons, the show pulls the floor out. Somebody checks the records and discovers that no human being has made it into the Good Place in 521 years.
The idea the show puts forward isn’t that people got worse, but that life got more tangled. It makes the point with two men and the same gift. In 1534 an Englishman picked roses for his grandmother and carried them to her door, and the system credited him 145 points. In 2009 a man in Maryland gave his grandmother a dozen roses and came out four points behind, because he ordered them on a phone built in a sweatshop. Not to mention, the flowers were grown with toxic pesticides and picked by exploited workers, shipped in from thousands of miles away, with profits going to a corrupt billionaire. Same gift, 475 years apart, opposite result. It’s a sitcom, and its afterlife isn’t accurate. But let’s take the question and leave the theology: can anybody build a record clean enough to carry eternity? The show answers no, because modern life has made the math impossible.
But the Apostle Paul goes further than that. He says the math was never what God was looking at, and he says it in half a verse: “He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness...” In righteousness. Paul isn’t excluding our worst moments from the calculation. Everybody expects that. He’s excluding our best ones! The works done in righteousness. The genuinely good ones. The times we got it right and nobody saw. The years of quiet faithfulness. The clean stretches. None of this is the ground we stand on.
But still, most of us keep a private version of that ledger. The Sundays we showed up when we didn’t feel like it. The check we wrote that hurt a little. The marriage that held when it could have gone the other way. The apology we made first when we were owed one. None of that is worthless to God. Paul will tell this same church to devote themselves to good works, so our obedience matters to Him more than we probably think. It just has a place, and that place is downstream. Good works are what salvation produces once it’s been given. Hold any of it back as the reason God should save you, and you’ll spend your whole life waiting on a verdict that already came in.
So what moved Him? “…according to his own mercy.” Mercy, already in Him before there was a universe to spend it on. Nothing we did drew it out. That doesn’t mean God was unmoved by us. He looked at people who were drowning and He came. Our need is what He answered. Our record is what He never even consulted.
And that’s why it holds. A salvation you helped pay for is a salvation you could come up short on. Mercy that was already in God has nothing in it that depends on you. Which means the pressure is off! You were never asked to run up a score that would make God save you. You can stop auditing yourself for reasons God should keep you. He saved you!
Head: If God's mercy started inside Him, my record was never part of the equation.
Heart: Ask God to quiet the part of you that’s still keeping score.
Hands: Write down the one achievement you’d most want God to weigh, then write “He already decided” beside it.
Prayer: “Father, thank You that You saved me out of Your own mercy and not out of anything You found in me. I praise You that grace was Your idea long before it was ever my need. Help me live today like the audit is finished. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK