...and out came this calf!

I’m an excuse maker. I come from a very long line of excuse makers, which I suppose is either a good excuse or a very bad one. As any normal descendant of Adam and Eve, I don’t like to be blamed as the perpetrator of bad behavior and so I have a handy store of good excuses. Such as:

When I haven’t eaten in a while (like, two hours, woe is me),I get a headache, and this makes me cranky. Or, I don’t sleep well, so I’m allowed be lazy, short-tempered, and snippy. Or, I know I’m right, which gives me leave to march over, belittle, and not listen to anyone whose opinion differs from mine. Or, that person is a hypocrite, so I don’t have to joyfully respect or obey him or her. Or, that person just really pushes my buttons, and I just can't help myself.

I’m ashamed to admit that I struggle with every one of these (plus hundreds), oh, maybe a mere seven hundred times a day. Here are two excerpts from two different sermons that are literally haunting me (in a good way) in this area of excuse making.

Character comes out in real life. You ever bumped into a person, maybe in the hall or something, and they were really short with you, grouchy, a little bit angry, turned off, maybe offended you a little? And they just kept going down the hall. And maybe two, three hours later, they come back to you and say, “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m just not myself today because I’m sick. Or, I‘m just not myself today because I have so many problems.”

But what we have to realize is it’s exactly the reverse. When everything is going well with a person, you’re not seeing their real character. You’re seeing them held up by all the good circumstances in their life. It’s when all those things are torn down that you start seeing who the person is.

It would be preferable to go back and say, “Excuse me, I do apologize, but I have no excuses because you saw the real me today.”
Paul Washer, Godly Fellowship

One of the reasons Scriptures hammers so constantly [on the heart] is that you will find a thousand other answers available to you, both from the flesh and from the world around us. There’s thousands of other ways to explain why we are the way we are, and we’ve all used them hour by hour--my parents. . . my kids . . . my allergies--and that’s why I’m selfish, that’s why I’m short and unkind.

Aaron had taken the gold from the people and shaped and fashioned it into a calf for the people. . . .and he told Moses, “So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.” We look at Aaron’s excuse and say it’s absurd, and yet hour by hour throughout every day that is often how we explain ourselves. Why these calves in your life? You say, I dunno -- mom, dad, kids, school, allergies, friends get in there and out comes calves. And we fail to see the massive amount of work that happens in the middle.
John Henderson, Matters of the Heart

Thank God, thank God! I have no need for excuses! Jesus paid it all! All to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain--He washed it white as snow!