I Came Not To Call The Righteous

"When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." (Mark 2:17). One of the things that I’ve struggled with is the feeling that before I can officially begin the repentance process, I have to show proof that I have made a good faith effort. One of the lies that Satan tries to use to trick us into delaying our repentance is that we aren’t yet worthy to even begin to repent. We can sometimes fool ourselves into believing that if we can just fix what’s broken inside of us first, then we can go to Christ and show off that we are whole and thus need no physician. Maybe we think that if we can heal ourselves, then our sins never even made it to Jesus’s ledger and He didn’t have to suffer for those particular sins. This is all, of course, complete and utter nonsense. Christ didn’t perform the Atonement just so that He can put little gold stars on all of the perfect people who figured out how to sort everything out on their own. Christ performed the Atonement to save all of the ugly, sinful, lost and broken children from the great big horrible messes that they find themselves in. Christ is not afraid to get His hands dirty. He clambered into fishing boats, touched lepers, ate with publicans and harlots. We don’t have to clean ourselves up. Christ is here to wipe away the muck and the filth and the blood and the tears. We should not feel ashamed or embarrassed or found out when we come to our Savior while we are still filthy or bleeding or sick. Christ knows what we did. He knows how we feel. He knows our situation far better than we know it ourselves. None of it could ever come as a shock to Him. Repentance starts the very nano-second we decide to turn towards our Savior. The path back to Him begins with the very first step that we take. We don’t have to put any kind of arbitrary milestones that would bar us from running to our Redeemer the very moment that we want to change. If we are hoping to only turn to the Savior once we have become fully righteous, then that means we are turning deaf ears to Him all of the times that He calls out to us while we are still sinners. If our souls are sick, let’s not try to heal ourselves but rather turn to the Master Healer the moment we recognize the very first symptom.