to the too far gone...

 You've heard all this "God stuff." You've listened to the preachers up on the stage in their 3-piece suits, talking about how God loves you. You've seen all the little church ladies, heard them talk about how God will take all the things in your past and wash them away, leaving your soul white as snow. You've heard the testimonies, how people came out of lives of sin and darkness, how broken lives were put back together and relationships were repaired. You've tried listening to "Amazing Grace" on repeat.

But there's still that nagging feeling, that voice telling you over and over again that God's grace can't reach you. Your sins are too dark, your mistakes too big, your past too much, your future too hopeless. Sure, God forgives...but that forgiveness is for people who are really good at heart, people who just messed up, who didn't mean to do the awful things, people who really didn't have a choice. God doesn't really want you--He just wants the people who have the strength to change their lives, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, the ones who can take the right steps to fix their brokenness.

Here's the thing, though--dead men can't save themselves. They can't take the first step. They can't make the right choices and decisions that fix broken lives.

And the truth about all those people? The little old church ladies, the preachers in 3-piece suits, the people pulled out of addiction, the liars and cheaters and murderers and little girls like me who grew up in church?

All of us were dead before Christ.

There's no difference between the man who falls on his knees before God in the prison cell and the 9-year-old girl who falls on her knees at the altar during revival. Both are dead, separated from God. Both are in desperate need of a Savior, One who goes down into the pit and pulls them up out of the grave to walk in light and life.

It's not about your past. It doesn't matter what you've said or done or tried or failed at. It doesn't matter how many times you've messed up. It doesn't matter how hopeless you think your future is, because all dead men have the same future--death. What matters is that God's grace doesn't care about your past. He looks at you like Jesus looked at the death of Lazarus: a chance for His glory.

A dead guy is a dead guy is a dead guy, right? I mean, it doesn't matter how you got to that point, once you're dead, the events that led you there don't determine how dead you are (it's not like "He's only partly dead," like in The Prince Bride). At that point, it doesn't matter how much willpower you have to snap yourself out of it, how much desire to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The dead man can't make himself live.

But the fact that a dead guy is a dead guy is a dead guy is a wonderful thing for us, because it means this: if God can raise one dead guy to life, He can raise them all.

He can take every one of us, dead in our sin, broken in our past, wandering around in the darkness, and tell us, like He did Lazarus, to come out of the grave.