“Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:19).
When my children do not wish to do something they make all sorts of excuses. They will tell me that they are busy attending to another matter. They will tell me that they did not hear what I was asking them to do. Or they will tell me that they do not understand what it is that I am asking them for.
The problem for my children in all this excuse making, is that when I was a child, I pretty much invented all of these excuses myself, so I find it very difficult to believe the excuses that are being made.
Christ – God Himself – does not like excuses. God the Father is the Just Judge. As a PERFECTLY Just Jude, what this means is that God the Father does not listen to excuses when he judges our thoughts words or deeds. Unlike a normal, human judge who considers all the excuses and reasons why a person has done a particular thing or acted in a particular manner, God is able to understand the TRUST – the irrefutable truth of the matter – without EXCUSE…
Christ did not like excuses. He called out the Pharisees for the excuses that they made…
“But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:16-19).
The Pharisees were never happy. They were either sad because Saint John fasted or sad because Christ did not. Nothing ever met with their list of what was good and acceptable because nothing ever fit within their scope of what God was and how God should be. And they made sure of that because every time they were confronted with goodness, they made excuses about why it was not really good. And they did this as a way to justify their own miserable limitations and as a way to help themselves to feel better about their limitations.
And I have been thinking about that today. Because it is the easiest thing in the world to make excuses. It costs me nothing and it gets me away from a world of trouble and misery. And because I know that and understand it, I must now pray for the Grace to stop. Because those excuses to avoid that misery are the one thing that could be holding me back from the eternal salvation that my soul craves. And I have been thinking about that today as I have been thinking about my Beloved…
Because my soul hungers for the Lord, and I do not see how I am expected to kneel at His Feet for eternity, if I keep making excuses in this Earthly life…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.