Starting Right
Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
Starting Right
Why You'll Never Be "Good Enough" (And Why That's Actually Good News)
Perfectionism is a trap that has snared humanity since ancient times. As I share in today's episode, "God loves you just the way you are, but loves you too much to let you stay that way." This paradox captures the essence of grace: unconditional acceptance paired with gentle transformation. Whatever challenges you face today, remember that your worth isn't determined by your performance but by God's unwavering love for you. Take five minutes each weekday to reset your perspective and start your day right with these reflections designed to center your heart and mind.
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right. I am Danny Mac and I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting right. It doesn't take long, if you start reading through the New Testament, for you to come across a group called the Pharisees. Now, the Pharisees were the Jewish leaders and teachers of the law. They are the ones who took the commands that God had given back in the first five books of the Bible and they interpreted them so that, hopefully, the people of Israel could follow them properly.
Speaker 1:There were 613 laws in the Old Testament and everyone was expected to obey each and every one of these laws. There are some really strange laws within this group, and let me just share some of those with you. Do you know the Jewish law permits only 39 steps on the Sabbath? There's also a law stating that you can't carry a burden on the Sabbath, and there's also laws defining what a burden is, such as food equal in weight to a dried fig, or enough wine for mixing in a goblet milk, enough for one swallow honey enough to put on a wound. Oil, enough to anoint a small area, water enough to moisten an eye salve. Water enough to moisten an eye salve Paper, enough to write a customs house notice on and ink, enough to write two letters of the alphabet, and just enough reed to make a pen.
Speaker 1:The purpose of the law in and of itself was to show us how far we fall short, how often and how much we are not good enough, because our good enough is never good enough for God, because God is perfect. Can you imagine trying to be perfect? It would be really hard to live up to expectations of perfection. I know some people who try to do it and they drive themselves and everybody else around them crazy, because in and of ourselves we cannot be perfect. That just is not in us, it's not part of anything that we are as human beings. But as much as we see that we fall short of that level of perfection, the beauty of it all is that God gave us a way that we don't have to be perfect because we can receive that perfection from Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 4 and 5, say because of his great love for us, god, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. A little bit further down in the same chapter, in verses 8 and 9, it says God saved you by his grace when you believed. You can't take credit for this. It is a gift from God.
Speaker 1:Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. Salvation is not the reward for the good things we have done. That's one of those verses that we know in our head, but we still have a hard time accepting. Deep within us, we think we've got to be good enough for God. We think we have to perform so that we please God and that he will give us a pat on the back and he won't be disappointed in us. Yet the truth of our God is that he knows that we will fall short, but he also knows that it's not because of us that we can have the relationship with God. It's because of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1:So this morning, my friends, let me encourage you with this we can never hold ourselves up to the level of perfection and beat ourselves up because we're not there.
Speaker 1:We all know a lot about how God wants us to live what he wants us to do, what he wants us to say, how he wants us to interact with the people around us, and we all know that at times we fall very, very short. And here's the real truth about it all God loves you just the way you are, but he loves you too much to let you stay that way. He wants us to grow. He wants us to grow to become more like him, but at the same time he recognizes that we will never be perfect. Don't beat yourselves up for your mistakes, for where you fall short, but know that God is working in you to create all that you can be in him, by his grace and his power. Be blessed, my friends. I'll talk to you again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today and I invite you to join me Monday to Friday, right here on Starting Right with Danny Mac.
