Dying to Self

Frauds

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By the time I’d counted my tenth radar-wielding cop in only twenty miles, I could only shake my head. I’m no speed demon, don’t get me wrong. Still, I knew our ride back home from visiting the in-laws over Memorial Day would be more snail-like than usual. People get cowed by all the law enforcement and they take on a herd mentality that makes good driving impossible.

When a mobile cop car pulled onto the highway, I knew we were done for. Every lead-footed, Top-Gear-watching, Michael Schumacher wannabe suddenly spazzed and downshifted into second. Think “trailing the pace car” kind of gridlock here as about forty vehicles all jammed together behind the cop car, each driver petrified of passing him. Three lanes of gear jockeys cursing their dumb luck scrunched onto I-71 heading south through Amish country. Oh, joy.

What did I think? What a bunch of frauds.

And they were frauds twice over, too. If they truly were crazed speed enthusiasts, you’d think one would have the guts to pass the cop (who was doing about 55 in a 65 zone). On the other hand, they all acted like law-abiding little old ladies out for a Sunday drive in their pristine K-cars—another lie.

Frauds.

I think most of us are frauds, each in his or her own way. Our society doesn’t reward honesty. Doesn’t give out medals to people who keep it real. We may think Jeff Bridges’ iconic character from The Big Lebowski, The Dude, epitomizes a guy just being, but he’s a fictional character in a movie mouthing fictional statements written by someone else. The whole thing smacks of fraud when you distill it down to its essence.

I think most people in this country would die a thousand times over if other people knew what they were truly like, could know their thoughts, could feel their insecurities. I think most spouses have never scratched the surface of what the other looks like deep in his or her heart of hearts.

I’m convinced that far too many Christians in churches around this country live a fraudulent life filled with keeping up an aura of spiritual perfection. They go through life as someone they’re not. FraudsA few live in such self-deception they don’t even know they’re doing it. Still, most do know—and they hate themselves for it.

In the very early days of this blog, I’d get e-mails from folks castigating me for being holier than thou simply because I pointed out a few things I thought we all could do better. Me, holy? No, I’m just as fraudulent as the next guy. I think as time went by, people saw through whatever mask they thought I was holding up. But what they didn’t see was the more subtle one I wear all the time. It looks like me, only better, stronger, sharper, and swifter—but most of all, more spiritual.

When we age, the first thing that goes is pretense. Suddenly, the young punk down the street we used to dust in pickup basketball is creaming us every Saturday. We reek of wintergreen the day after, too. In the silence of our homes, we hear the knees creaking.

It happens the same way in the soul of the Christian attuned to the Lord. (At least it should.) We wake up and see that same masked face in the mirror. And when we pray, the Holy Spirit shows us that same lingering shadow of the Old Nature. He tries to get us to admit we’re frauds, but it doesn’t come easy. People talk. People have opinions. People, people, people—that same old fear of men. A snare, the Bible says.

The Bible also says this:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
—2 Corinthians 5:17-21

We are ambassadors of Christ, and as such we represent the government of a new Kingdom with reconciliation as its message. And ambassadors don’t get to be ambassadors by clinging to fraudulent identities. No, they endure a character trial that proves their mettle. In other words, No Frauds Allowed.

All of creation awaits our coming into our ambassadorship. It’s groaning, in fact, that we come into our own, that “own” Christ established before the foundation of the world.

If only we’d put down the fraudulent lives, the fears, the secrets, and step into the Light.

Caltrops on the Road to Glory

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Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.”
—John 5:14

Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.”
—John 8:10-11

A long while ago—at least in the history of this blog—I wrote a piece called “Whatever Happened to Sin?” CMM adherents will recognize the title as being from an old Steve Taylor song. Jesus adherents will simply ask the question again. See, they remember sin.

In an age where Osteen-ism rules the land, we don’t hear much about sin anymore. Church growth pundits suspected sin didn’t play in Peoria, so they found a way to dismiss it. This explains why Christians crash and burn more frequently today than I remember. Or else their faith doesn’t hold up when the time of testing comes.

An ancient weapon used in war, the caltrop is a nasty piece of work. Throw them on a path or road and they land with a vicious spike always pointing straight up. History says the Romans came up with caltrops to permanently remove chariots from the battlefield.Imagine this caltrop in your tire—or foot! Wouldn’t want to be the horses—or the pitched rider.

The kind shown at right does its work on tires. Hollow, it allows air to rapidly escape even from self-sealing tires. Run your Pirellis over a few of these and you can forget your Roman Holiday.

Sin is like caltrops. Every time we sin, it’s like tossing a bucket of caltrops behind us. But what’s behind us is behind us, right?

Funny thing about life is we sometimes must revisit the way we came to get to where we’re going. And those sins we left behind? Well, they’re sitting in the middle of the road, sharpened steel tips up, waiting to put a halt to our journey—or at least make it nastier.

Weirder yet, sin’s caltrops have a way of landing behind us, yet winding up ahead of us at the same time. They get you coming and going. The double-whammy. They seem to to multiply ahead, too. Sow a bucket of caltrops behind, reap a highway-full ahead.

So when one of us finds our plans and dreams going up in smoke, when adopting that Osteen positive attitude makes no difference in the face of despair, do we ever take a step back and wonder if our sin finally caught up with us? I don’t hear people saying that this setback or that can be attributed to personal sin. Do you?

Sure, it might be obvious in the promiscuous girl who gets pregnant and lands in a beat-up trailer with an abusive Cro-Magnon of a husband got on the end of Daddy’s shotgun. But is it so obvious in the lives of mature Christians who stuff it down in hopes that no one will ever find out?

I’ve got to believe that at least some of the grief in your life and mine comes from running over the caltrops of sin we scattered on the road to glory. But where’s the sermon on fleeing sin? On repentance? On restitution?

Too outré? Too pietistic?

Perhaps we need some good old pietism in the Church today. After all, Jesus Himself confronted two folks in His part of the world and told them outright, “Stop sinning.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any addenda from the Lord on that command. No “Only by God’s grace and power” or “You’re not the one in control, God is” or even a “You can’t do it in your own strength.” I just see the admonishment to stop sinning.

We used to revere men and women who wised up and stopped sinning. Now we try to find something wrong with their theology. Or we use that our own brand of theology to make excuses when one of us today tries the same approach only to fall back into sin. I’m beginning to wonder if folks two hundred years ago who turned and shunned their sin and never looked back AREN’T better people than we are today. They sure seemed to take God’s wrath a lot more seriously than we do.

After a promising start down the life’s highway, are we staring at four Bridgestones that look like deflated porcupines? Did we run over the consequences of our own sin, those nasty caltrops we sowed, the ones we thought would never catch up to us? They did, didn’t they?

Well, let’s not just sit there moping because past sins caught up with us. Clear the road! If we made the mess, we need to deal with it. And stop throwing the caltrops down, too! Yes, Jesus provides forgiveness. He forgave the man at the pool of Bethesda who tried to game the old familiar system. He told the hooker He didn’t accuse her. But He also told them both to stop sinning.

If life’s not treating you the way you want it to, stop sinning. And if not for you, then for your progeny. Because the sins of the fathers have a way of working themselves down through the generations. That promiscuous girl in the trailer with the abusive husband? Chances are that’s how her own mother got started. We can’t think our kids won’t inherit our little problems. (Note: Lying to oneself is a sin.)

So stop sinning. No excuses.

Better Than You

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This last week proved exceptionally busy, as it seemed I had to be in about eight different places at once every day. With no time to do grocery shopping, I put things off until the last second. On Saturday, I finally hit Kroger for replacement sundries.

Standing in the coffee and tea aisle, I heard a commotion, looked left, and witnessed a red-faced mother yelling to her child, “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to smack you in the mouth!”

On hearing this, I looked over at my son and thought, Thank God I’m a better parent than….

Then it hit me.

It doesn’t take much for us to compare, does it? The senses take in data and the judgmental wheels start grinding. Too often, they grind up others Jesus said are my neighbors.

I see an out-of-control parent fighting an out-of-control child and I think of that parent in terms of “I’m better than you.” 'Giving Alms to a Beggar' by AnonymousI talk with a baby Christian who doesn’t have his doctrine down right and “I’m better than you” rattles around in my head, bouncing off every slightly off statement that newbie pronounces. I consider all the things I own, then look to some poverty-stricken soul in Africa, and I start singing the “I’m better than you” song.

Only that tune grates on the ears. Maybe not mine, but the Lord’s.

It’s easy to call it pride, but it’s more than pride. Even someone who considers herself a loser can still find someone to be better than. The poverty-stricken guy in Africa looks at the poverty-stricken child who lost a leg to a landmine and thinks, Well, at least I’m better than he is.

Isn’t this “Better than you” mantra the source of many of our problems in our churches? Get to the root of any church split and “Better than you” grows like a fungus. I wonder if the Godblogosphere promotes a lot of this poisonous “Better than you” smack that gets talked up on this blog and that. All it does is ruin people in their souls, though.

The Bible says this:

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus…
—Philippians 2:3-5

When I considered that yelling mother in Kroger, did I have the mind of Christ when I trotted out the comparison? Not at all. Did I look to her interests in any way? Hardly. What I looked to was my own need to feel better about myself by judging another human being.

What is the mind of Christ in this regard? Humility—plain, unadulterated humility.

It pains me to say that I don’t know many truly humble people. Seems to me that the ones that overflow with this most godly of traits sport plenty of gray hair, as if being around long enough qualifies one to grasp humility. Perhaps it’s the fading of the flesh’s power that renders us more humble. All I know is that I could learn a few things from those senior saints.

What would a truly humble church look like? I would suppose that most persecuted churches know humility. Kind of hard to swagger with a boot heel on your neck. If that’s what it’s going to take to make for a humble Church in America, then perhaps we should be joining in prayer with our Chinese brothers who are praying that persecution comes to this country so that the Church here wakes up.

As for me, I would hope instead that our humility comes by another means, that the Spirit might change us from the inside. For all this talk of “Better than you” starts on the inside in the natural man, a straggler unwilling to budge save that Christ budges him for us.

This “Better Than You” talk kills us in the long run, makes us impervious to grace, blackening our souls. I suspect if we truly did esteem others better than ourselves, someone outside the Church might sit up and take notice.

I pray that’s sooner rather than later.