Giving God Dead Leaves
by Rebekah Leavell
One afternoon several years ago, our youngest children got themselves in trouble when I caught them doing something they knew I had explicitly told them not to do. Our four-year-old daughter was troubled that I was upset over her disobedience. She decided she would give me a present to help smooth things over. She went out into our backyard and gathered a bouquet of dead leaves from off the ground. She presented them to me proudly and then said, "Are you happy now, Mommy?"
From her perspective, she hoped that the gesture of giving me some old, dead leaves from the yard would eradicate the impending consequences of her disobedience. She was not gifting me the dead leaves because she loved me and wanted to do something sweet. She was giving me a present to hope to butter me up so that she wouldn’t get into trouble. She could not have been more wrong.
I thought later about how we disobey God, and then because we worry about God being displeased with us and punishing us, we try to proudly present Him with what we feel is a grand gesture to make up for it.
“I went to church this week! Did that make you happy, God?”
“I made a financial contribution to charity!”
“I slipped a few dollars to that guy holding a sign at the street corner!”
“I did the dishes without being asked!”
“Aren’t you happy with me now, God?”
However, to Him, our best efforts are no better than just a few dead leaves. They could never make up for the choices of our sins or erase the consequences that we will encounter for those choices. He knows our hearts. We aren’t doing these things out of love. We are hoping that they will keep us from the consequences.
Scripture says it this way,
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Rom 3:23)
"The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus, our Lord."(Rom 6:23)
“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” Isaiah 64:6
Did you catch that? Each of us fades away without the life of Christ. We aren’t just presenting God our dead leaves. Because of our sin, we ARE dead leaves. Even at my very best, what we offer God are dead leaves or even "filthy rags,"(Is 64:6). Do we think that our best efforts will make up for our sins? We have about as much a chance as turning dead leaves into a living bouquet.
As Jonathan Edwards once noted, “You contribute nothing to your salvation except the sin that made it necessary.”
Jesus presents something better. He gave the only gift that could ever work on my behalf through His perfect life, substitutionary death, and victorious resurrection. Now, instead of trying to present God with my dead leaves, I have the amazing privilege and freedom of holding up the perfectly gorgeous, full bouquet of Christ's righteousness given to me as a free gift in place of my dead leaves, because of His great love, grace, and mercy!
Are you still trying to hold up your dead leaves to God to gain His approval, hoping that you won’t be punished? Are you trying to better yourself through actions, even counseling? Are you hoping that your ‘grand gestures’ will erase the consequences of your decisions before God and others? You have things backward! This isn’t love. This is self-preservation and will do nothing to make up for your wrongdoing. You must look to Jesus and embrace the humbling truth that you have nothing to offer a perfect, holy God other than your full surrender.
Only through the grace of Christ will you find true forgiveness! We would be happy to explain further! Please reach out today!
“Nothing in my hands I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling; - Augustos Toplad
