Where do people get the idea that God blesses us on the basis of our performance, our lives, our holiness? It comes from misunderstanding the purpose of the Law. Many people both outside and inside the Church still try and use the Law to 'try harder' to overcome the sin in their lives, because they think that is its purpose. But as Romans 7:9 reveals, that is like using petrol to try and put out a fire! Through our own will power we are capable of keeping some of the Law, but considering that Scripture declares that to only keep some of the Law is to break it all, then to attempt to deal with our sin through our willpower, is like trying to empty the Atlantic with a bucket (with a hole in it!). It is not hard to see why a failure to accept that Christ did a complete work on the Cross, has led the body of Christ to divide many times. Each time a church reaches for the Law to try and curb sin, they take the eyes of the congregation off the perfect and complete work of Christ and onto the imperfect and incomplete lives of the congregation, a sure recipe to stir up condemnation, judgement and division, for that is exactly the Law's purpose; to point out fault. God's solution to our self-centred hearts has never been for us to try and make our lives holier, by merely modifying our behaviour (pruning the branches). His solution has always been that nothing short of a heart transplant will do (an entirely new root for an entirely new tree). The truth of what Christ has done for us, that He has become our new root, our genome for an entirely new life, sets our hearts free from the limitations of the life we inherited from Adam, a life bordered, imprisoned, by sin and death. The same life, the same Spirit, that broke Christ out of the prison of death, is the same life that now remains in everyone who receives Christ as their new life. It isn't enough to say that a Christian is someone who receives Christ into their life. A Christian is someone who has received Christ as their life (Colossians 3:4). God is not in the business of fixing up the old tree. He has replaced the root system to produce an entirely new tree! The first Adam was a living soul, but to be born of the last Adam is to be born of a "life-giving Spirit"The life He has called us to is NOT a natural "do you best for God" life. It is "God's best IN you" life. The Holy Spirit does not speak to the "me" life. He speaks to the "us" life (1Cor.6:19). When we teach Christians that rather than pray to God for the sick, that they should heal the sick, many actually get offended that we are asking of them the impossible! The ironic thing is, that when we look across the body of Christ, what we see are many Christians getting burnt out, not by trying to do the impossible, but by trying to do nothing but the possible and striving to do it better! God asks of us the impossible, for that is who He insists we now are; people yoked to the God of the impossible, a people who have ceased from their 'possible' works and found the rest of allowing His life in us, the impossibly good life, to be our life.
