We live in a culture that loves the idea of a loving God but hates the idea of a judging God. We often ask, "If God is so good, why doesn't He just forgive everyone? Why all this talk of wrath and judgment?" But think about that for a moment. If you hired a gardener to care for your prize roses, and he watched a swarm of pests eating them leaf by leaf, would you call him a "good" gardener if he just smiled and let it happen? No. You would fire him. A good gardener protects his garden. And that brings us to a terrifying realization: If God is truly good, He must deal with the pests. And if we are the pests... what does that mean for us?

We have a tendency to categorize people, don't we? We divide the world into "good" people and "bad" people. We look at the person who pays their taxes, volunteers, and speaks politely, and we say, "That is a good person." Then we look at the person whose life is a mess, maybe they are battling addiction, or they’ve made terrible choices, and we think, "That is a bad person." But what if I told you that in the eyes of the Gardener, that distinction doesn't exist? What if the "good" person and the "bad" person are exactly the same distance from the miracle they need? Today, we are going to look at two powerful words that level the playing field for every single one of us.

Here is a hard question to start your day: When you look at the world around you, do you see yourself as the victim of its brokenness, or a contributor to it? We all like to think of ourselves as the flowers in the garden of life: adding beauty, color, and value. But what if the true reality is something far less flattering? What if, in the eyes of the One who owns the garden, we aren’t the flowers at all? What if we are the pests? Today, we are going to confront a desperate reality about our nature that we usually try to ignore, and we’ll discover why "trying harder" to be good is a strategy doomed to fail.