Grace

Love Sin / Hate Sin

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My church held their annual picnic this last weekend. One of the church-wide contests was a chili cook-off. I told my wife I was going to enter and win the whole thing. This blogger can cook a scrumptious bowl of chili. I whipped up a batch, entered it, and indeed won the whole thing.

Upon winning that coveted blue ribbon, I let out a huge whoop, raised the hands high, and let everyone there know that I was triumphant. And later I felt bad about doing so.

Was it too much? The more time passed, the more I felt that I’d been a tad over the top in my moment of chili glory. While the other contestants trash talked before the judging, I was relatively quiet—I let the chili do the talking. But afterwards I really wanted to rub their noses in it, at least a little.

It’s been a tough last few weeks. The tenor in the household is “muddle through” stage. That stage has been common around here far more than it should, and I’ve grown to hate it. You feel that things will never get better.

So is a little rejoicing for a silly contest too much? Can a little hollering be good for the soul here? Or am I just exulting at someone else’s expense?

Sin is perpetually crouching at the door. The smell of it lingers in the air. And though we are told to flee it, despise it, and rail against it, there are times that I must confess—to my own dishonor—that I love it.

During my tenure in the Lutheran Church, I never got a handle on Martin Luther’s famous aphorism on sin that he penned to his buddy Philip Melanchthon 484 years ago:

If you are a preacher of grace, then preach a true and not a fictitious grace; if grace is true, you must bear a true and not a fictitious sin. God does not save people who are only fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness, but, as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small? Pray boldly—you too are a mighty sinner.

Now that I am older, though, it makes more sense to me. As much as I am commended to loathe sin, there are still parts of me that love it just a little more than I should.

  • I love/hate reveling in accolades bestowed upon me.
  • I love/hate watching foes—real or imagined—get their comeuppance.
  • I love/hate convincing myself that I’m smarter than most people.
  • I love/hate gazing just a breath too long at the pretty young thing in line ahead of me at the grocery store.
  • I love/hate cutting down an opponent with a witticism worthy of Oscar Wilde or Will Rogers.
  • I love/hate knowing that the terrorist who just blew himself up and took out a dozen other people is going to burn in hell for eternity.
  • I love/hate watching haughty people taken down a peg or two.
  • I love/hate the dark fantasies I entertain.
  • I love/hate my own pride.

As a younger Christian, I would deceive myself into thinking that I wasn’t like this. But faux innocence is just that—a denial of the reality that in this world there will be sin. No one is immune no matter how perfect the persona we project to others.

I think the Christian blogosphere perpetuates this. Cruise around enough blogs on a daily basis and it’s fairly easy to see the hate portion of the love sin / hate sin equation. Yet there’s not quite as much of the love sin portion displayed. MasksToo much confession may alienate the more righteous readers. Too much confession may cast doubt on how well ANY of us Christians are doing in walking the walk as well as we talk the talk.

Far more of us are dying for confession than almost anything else, I suspect. Whitewashing takes exorbitant amounts of work, and legions of Christians are propping up an image of a fictitious sinner, the error Luther warns of, to their own detriment.

I crave grace, don’t you? What a marvelous gift, sublime, healing, and transforming all in one. Because of my love for grace, I can never be a fictitious sinner. My errors will always be bold. I can only ask that my prayer of repentance be yet bolder still.

Are you laboring to maintain the façade of a rosy righteous glow when darkness has become your friend instead? Christian, stop fighting and let someone else know!

…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God….
—Romans 3:23 ESV

There is peace in confessing your sins not only to God, but to someone else:

Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.
—James 5:16 ESV

Don’t be a fictitious sinner. It will steal your joy away. If you love a particular sin, acknowledge that before someone else and allow someone to draw up alongside you in the name of the Lord:

…a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.
—Ecclesiastes 4:12

Most of all, rest in the peace that the Lord Jesus bought with his own blood, the very blood that takes away the sins of the world. He said:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
—John 14:27 ESV

Beloved, now is the day to come into the light of Christ’s grace.

On Disappointment

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I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD
In the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
Be strong and let your heart take courage;
Yes, wait for the LORD.
—Psalms 27:13-14 NASB

Disappointed
— 36,600,000 occurrences on Google

Disappointment is always lurking. Due to astonishing similarities to an existing series of books by a bestselling novelist (who was a complete unknown to me just a few weeks ago), my novel and the series that I hoped would spring from it may be dead. At the advice of another author who was familiar with that other novelist's recently published trilogy, FaceplantI read those books. Having finished them this last Sunday, I sit here now and wonder how it is possible.

It wasn't too long ago that I landed my dream job at Apple Computer bashing Windows and the PCs that ran it. Newly married, I was on top of the world. We moved cross-country, thrilling to the hope held out before us. However, less than six months later my department was disbanded and we were stuck in Silicon Valley, a place where "it's all about who you know," without knowing anyone.

My mother was a "mom's Mom" in every sense of the word. And though she worked with young children every day, she had no grandchildren. How excited we were to learn of our pregnancy just days before we flew back to Cincinnati to stay with my folks for Christmas. There was even talk of moving back to be near the soon-to-be grandparents. Two months later, Mom was diagnosed with brain cancer. We moved back to Cincinnati, and I was fortunate to find a great job. My Dad died a couple weeks before the Christmas that followed the joyous one just a year before; Mom followed just over three months later. My exciting new company started having money trouble in the wake of the looming Internet bust and the layoffs came. My wife kept her good job, but we had a new baby and Dad's estate was troubling, so I stayed home to try to solve all the issues of losing both parents in rapid succession. We moved into our first home just a few months later—and then my wife was laid off, too. New house, new child, no parents, no income.

And so it goes.

In the last ten years I've stared in the face of more disappointments than I can remember. After a while you take a look at your list of goals in life and ask, "What was I thinking?" And while that's not the commonly accepted Christian response to goal-setting—at least from what all the bestsellers on the Christian bookstore shelves say—it may be closer to the truth than some wish to admit.

When the Tower of Siloam fell on eighteen hapless residents of long-ago Palestine, Jesus wasn't trapped by the question of the source for their rotten sense of timing and luck, He simply said, "…unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." He had a much different perspective, didn't He?

For centuries people have made the Bible into a talisman for good fortune. Entire theologies are woven around what God is mandated to give us if we apply the right alchemy of verses to our woeful situations. Yet who claims to force the hand of the Almighty? Who is that prideful? Well, Lucifer comes to mind….

What no one asks is if it's okay to pray what David prayed in Psalm 27. He said, "Lord, without the assurance of goodness provided to me in the here and now, I'm ruined!" God never intended for us to go through life without goodness evident this side of Heaven.

Now this is not prosperity thinking. You won't see any links to Rod Parsley on Cerulean Sanctum. But isn't the status quo, either.

I believe that we as a Church need a readjustment. Our idea of goodness is possessing every glossy item featured in the latest Neiman-Marcus catalog, plus a few from Family Christian Stores. We've let America infest our idea of what is good. In many ways, we've traded in a few of our "worldly" trinkets for "approved and redeemed Christian" versions. (A step down if you ask me.)

When we die in real life, what do we take with us? Nothing. But what about when we die at the foot of the cross? The answer's the same. Yet the problem with so many of us American Christians is we aren't fully ready to leave it all at the foot of the cross. And since we aren't, we never fully appreciate what the Father gives us in exchange for all the junk we lug around.

And what does the Father give us at the cross? Jesus.

Folks, do we want Him? Or will we cling to what is ephemeral, what is gone with one pink slip, heart attack, fire, or theft.

The goodness David waited upon, the anchor to goodness that held him, was the Lord Himself. There is no disappointment in the Father for in His right hand are pleasures forever (Psalm 16:11.) And we know who sits in that strong right hand.

When we know Jesus Christ and are known by Him, how can we be disappointed?

A hymn says it all:

I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold;
I'd rather be His than have riches untold;
I'd rather have Jesus than houses or lands;
I'd rather be led by His nail-pierced hand

    Than to be the king of a vast domain,
    Or be held in sin's dread sway;
    I'd rather have Jesus than anything This world affords today.

I'd rather have Jesus than men's applause;
I'd rather be faithful to His dear cause;
I'd rather have Jesus than worldwide fame;
I'd rather be true to His holy name

He's fairer than lilies of rarest bloom;
He's sweeter than honey from out the comb;
He's all that my hungering spirit needs;
I'd rather have Jesus and let Him lead

Beloved, never be disapponted that Jesus is all you ultimately have.

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction

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I actually had my testimony heckled at an Assemblies of God church.

At issue was the fact that my testimony goes something like this:

I was a good kid who did everything his parents asked of him, and a straight-A student who was reading Irving Wallace by the time I was in fourth grade. Cub Scouts, Webelos, Boy Scouts. Never smoked, cussed, drank, did drugs, or anything classified by most people as “wrong.” I was in church every Sunday and Sunday school before the service.

Then, at age 14, I put my faith in Christ.

Some lady thought that wasn’t dramatic enough and let me know it.

Plenty of Christians out there believe there’s a scale for measuring human depravity, with -10 being the nadir of human existence and +10 being eligible for your own Elijah-inspired, one-way ride in a fiery chariot straight into the arms of God—no lines, no waiting. I think my heckler believes I started at +8 and had nowhere to go. Shame on me; I never made it to my heroin-addled, white-slave-ring-leading, patricidal, hell-raiser stage like I was supposed to.

Thank you, Jesus; thank you that I was spared a dissolute life.

You talk to any solid Evangelical about justification and you’ll usually get a decent answer that would satisfy most people asking about it. Sanctification is another issue.

The Bible says this:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
—2 Corinthians 3:17-18 ESV

Sanctification is a process; we “are being transformed,” not we “are transformed immediately.” The light of the Holy Spirit flicks on in that place of our formerly dead spirit and we are justified, but that soul of ours is still in need of a heap o’ work. Years of it, in fact.

I swore I wasn’t going to talk anymore about what I’m reading on the Christian blogosphere, but this topic is too important to pass up: It is a grave error and a massive conceit to attempt to usurp the role of God in another person’s sanctification process, telling God, “As far as I’m concerned, you’re not working fast enough.”

But what are we to expect when someone starts at -9? Is +7 a week after meeting Jesus possible? A month? A year? A decade? If we can’t distinguish the difference in the sun’s arc across the sky from one minute to the next, how confident are we that we see with the eyes of God that one minute difference in the arc of a person’s sanctification process? To go back to the 2 Corinthians 3 passage and its note on “degrees of glory,” there are 180 degrees in a U-turn. A long obedience in the same directionThat’s a lot of tiny steps to take. Being made to look like Jesus is not a blink-of-an-eye affair, but one of a lifetime of minute, resolute steps. As Eugene Peterson’s classic book on discipleship is titled, it’s “a long obedience in the same direction.”

There’s not a person reading this now who doesn’t know at least one Christian out there who’s taking a long time to break out of the negative numbers on the depravity scale and into those higher, positive sanctification digits. Yet what does it say about us when we screw up our faces and rail that the ex-biker who spent ten years smoking crack isn’t where he should be after meeting Jesus two years ago because he smokes cigarettes now instead of crack? Sure, he’s down to just a pack a day from five a year ago, but still. And just why is it that he takes so long locating the Book of Habakkuk?

I’m listening to the first CD I’ve purchased in two years, Derek Webb’s She Must and Shall Go Free, and the tune playing right now has these lyrics:

My life looks good I do confess
You can ask anyone
Just don’t ask my real good friends
‘Cause they will lie to you
Or worse they’ll tell you the truth
‘Cause there are things you would not believe
That travel into my mind
I swear I try and capture them
But always set ’em free
Seems bad things comfort me

Good Lord I am crooked deep down
Everyone is crooked deep down
Good Lord I am crooked deep down
Everyone is crooked deep down
Everyone is crooked deep down
—”Crooked Deep Down”

Good Lord, we are so crooked deep down. How long it takes to make the crooked as straight as the Lord Jesus! No matter how smart or holy we looked before we were saved, we were all miserable sinners. God doesn’t believe in scales of depravity. If He did, we’d all be coming from a place close to negative infinity. That’s a big hole to work out of for anyone. Much grace is needed—more than we can imagine this side of eternity.

Look, if we’re not happy with how fast someone is moving along that narrow road, then maybe that’s God telling us in our own sanctification process to draw alongside that slow person and give them the benefit of what we’ve come to learn from our own place farther on down the way. Otherwise, perhaps it’s better that we let God do on His own what needs to be done in the life of another—without our smug color commentary.

Because, in the end, He makes all things beautiful in His time, not ours.