By Russ Johnson
It was a Thursday in 2013 when the phone rang. Dwayne. A regular at the church I led. A regular at our neighborhood pub.
Hey Russ, it's late.
Can you walk down to Gio's for a beer?
Gio's was the kind of bar where the wood was older than your grandfather's recliner and the air carried the faint scent of spilled drinks and second chances.
Dwayne had done everything by the book.
Every service.
Every discipline.
Married the right girl.
Managed his money.
Kind to his neighbors.
Generous to strangers.
If self-improvement were a sport, he'd have shelves lined with medals.
But that night his carefully built scaffolding had collapsed under the weight of an exposed secret. His wife knew. The closet door was open.
And what he feared now wasn't getting caught. That ship had sailed.
What he feared was something quieter. The suspicion that all the effort,
all the devotion, might not have amounted to much after all.
So he did what desperate well-trained Christians do. He searched for the fix. Is it my prayer life? Do I need to fast more? Is there a better Bible reading plan? What about an accountability group?
I'd heard it all before.
I'd answered it all before.
But sitting there, staring past him at the Christmas lights strung half-heartedly from the ceiling, snow falling outside the smudged window —
the usual reflex didn't kick in.
Because this wasn't just Dwayne's story.
It was mine.
The version where faith isn't trust in who Jesus already is for us, but effort to become someone we think God requires. A treadmill where we're always running. Never arriving.
Something had to give.
And it did. Through a parable nobody in that bar was ready for.
In Matthew 25, Jesus said the kingdom of God is like ten bridesmaids at a wedding. At that time, bridesmaids weren't chosen by the bride. They were chosen by the groom.
And in this story Jesus is the groom.
Which means before the parable gets to anything else — before anyone does anything right or wrong — all ten of these women were already chosen. Because the groom wanted them there.
That's where the story starts.
Five of them were wise. Five were foolish. A distinction we often pin on whether they brought extra oil to help light the party.
But let's be honest.
If you saw someone lugging a jug of oil to a daytime wedding, you wouldn't think, that's wisdom, you'd think, that's a little OCD.
The groom takes longer than expected. So everyone does a normal thing and falls asleep.
Then at midnight — the cry goes out. He's here!
The five without oil. They turn to the others and ask to borrow some.
They say no. There’s not enough for us if we help you.
Which is worth sitting with, since the ones Jesus calls wise just failed the simplest test of loving their neighbor.
So the foolish go searching for more. At midnight. In first-century Judea.
Looking for an oil vendor running a midnight madness sale that does not exist.
Stop there.
Why would they go?
They went because the anxious religious mind does exactly one thing when it feels unprepared. It goes to get more of whatever it thinks will make it acceptable.
More effort. More preparation. More of the thing it believes stands between itself and the party.
They weren't faithless people. They were anxious ones. And anxiety always reaches for something to add to what was already enough.
While they're gone, the five who stayed go in. The door closes.
When the five come back — oil in hand, feeling prepared — they knock.
And Jesus says: "I don't know you." (Matt 25:12)
Which sounds like rejection, until you realize it's the saddest possible version of something else entirely. If you knew me, then you would’ve known you didn't have to leave.
They had looked at the belonging they already had and decided it wasn't enough. So they went to find something to add to it. And missed the party doing it.
The party that was never waiting on what they thought they needed to bring. Which means the question was never whether they belonged. The question was whether they believed they already belonged.
Paul writes to the Church in Ephesus: "It is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast." (Eph 2:8-9)
Grace is the gift. We have been saved.
The declaration of our belonging, our union with God, is already done. And still true.
Through faith doesn't mean faith makes grace true. Faith is the pair of glasses, that lets us finally see, what was already there.
Think of it this way.
Someone tells you that you've inherited everything. The house. The land. The account. And instead of moving in, you spend the next ten years camping on the lawn, trying to prove you actually belong there.
The deed was never the problem.
The addiction underneath the search was.
Paul knew the engine better than anyone. He'd run it harder, and longer, and more impressively than most. Then a road changed everything.
He landed here: Jesus has become for us "wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness, and redemption." (1 Cor 1:30)
Not something we climb toward. Not a standard we work to meet.
He is our righteousness.
He is our holiness.
He is our redemption.
Now. Completely. Before we did anything.
Faith doesn't make any of that true. It just lets you see it clearly enough to stop leaving the party.
But here's where it goes deeper than even that. The faith doing the justifying, was never your faith.
Paul writes to the Church in Galatia — and this is one of those places
where the original Scripture says something our translations undue: "A person is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ." (Gal 2:16)
Not your faith in Jesus Christ.
The faith of Jesus Christ.
In the original Greek — pisteos Christou — Christ is the subject of faith. Not the object. The ground you're standing on was never the quality of your belief. It was Jesus’ faithfulness.
Because forgiveness and union with God, that depends on you’re doing,
is not a gift from a God whose love is unconditional. It’s a works based salvation that rides on human frailty.
The bridesmaids who stayed weren't justified because their faith was strong. They were justified because Jesus showed up.
He’s the groom who already made his home in you, to become your “righteousness and holiness.” (1 Cor 1:30) Before you even knew to ask, or believe.
Faith doesn't make that reality true. It lets you see it clearly enough to stop missing the party.