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There’s no list.

There’s no list that God is keeping and checkin’ twice. Finding out who’s naughty or nice.

I assure you, that’s not God you’re thinking of. 

In Psalm 103, David is poetically reflecting on what it means for God to interact with broken, fractured humanity.

He says that he removes our sin from us as far as the east is from the west.

That’s a long way.

And by removing our sins from us, what God is doing is affirming his love for our soul.

That we are broken but he desires to love us back to wholeness.

God sees us as more than the sum of our failures (and maybe successes). 

We mean more to God than some list of naughty or nice, good or bad. 

This matters to the utmost when it comes to how we practice our faith. 

If we think about God as interested in us being naughty or nice, we’ll usually just try to find a way to keep from being on the naughty list. 

However, if we believe that God is affirming our humanity and reconciling us to our God-given image, then we are complicit in growing into that God-given image and calling.

And that means we are now a part of the affirmation and mending of broken souls. 

After all, if there’s a question to be asked after we die, the question won’t be:

“How clean did you stay?”

but rather, it’ll be:

“How did you bust up the dirtiness?”