What Was and What is to Come

We tend to forget the nature of our salvation. We are overwhelmed by the desperate need to earn that which we have been given. We are convinced of our own wickedness, which is completely true for we are desperately wicked creatures. However, our wickedness was taken into account in our salvation. Yet we never fail to find discontent in that which God has given. Unwilling to move out of our guilt and shame, which was set upon the shoulders of Christ, we feel ourselves unworthy. Having to prove our salvation once and again, in such ways that never allow for the true growth of higher minds into the children of God which we should now be.

In guilt we sit, mired in the darkness of the past
Yet forgetful of that great gift showered upon us
Mindful of our continuing sorrow for wrongs
Long ago committed in days of our lesser beings
We shy away from that greatness presently offered
As sons and daughters of God, certain we are undeserving
Of such monumental praise we stand forth
To denounce ourselves for the crimes of our former lives
Unheeding the notion that such grace as was given us
Requires no works of mercy, no stoic resolve of righteousness
For 'twas the gift that set our Lord upon the tree
Freely given and never earned, what once we were
No longer stands, as such, of any great, nor lesser, consequence
Excepting for the purposes of our own self-flagellation
Let us now step forward, mindful not of what came before
But instead of that which is yet to come, that our lives
Might be a sweetly fragrant perfume in the nostrils of God