__________________________________________________
[The gospel] is not a question to be answered or a puzzle to be solved. It is a paradox to be relished, a wild, outrageous secret to be astonished at and then snitched to the world as the greatest joke ever told...The Mystery of Christ is a festival of weakness and foolishness on the part of God...something that makes no more sense than the square root of minus one--something that is deaf to our cries for intelligible explanations but that works when it is put into the equation of the world--something that can only be marveled at because it is preposterously Good News. The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, has one Word for us: God has upped and done the damnedest thing. Or, to get the direction and adjectives right, God has downed and done the blessedest thing we could ever not have thought of.
-Robert Farrar Capon
__________________________________________________
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Monday, November 16, 2009
Step Seven
__________________________________________________
I have been reading 12 Steps For The Recovering Pharisee (like me), John Fischer. This book uses the 12 step model of recovery, though he rewrites the steps to be applicable to Phariseeism and overcoming such legalistic, self-righteous habits in our own life. The following is chapter 7. I know it's a rather lengthy passage, but hopefully you can find the time to read and consider it. It has especially spoken to me.
Step 7
We embrace the belief that we are, and will always be, experts at sinning.
In the course of one private conversation between the two of them, my mother informed my wife that I didn’t sin. Now, my wife had been married to me for over ten years at the time, and, as you can imagine, she had a somewhat differing opinion on the subject of my sinfulness or lack of it. I was pretty shocked myself to hear of my supposed perfection, and though I would love to believe my mother, I’m afraid my wife knows better. Though we often joke about this now, I wonder what would bring my mother to pose such a preposterous claim about me. Aside from the expected parental my-son-can-do-no-wrong myth, was there anything more indicated in this dubious assessment? I believe that there might have been.
Many evangelicals mistakenly believe that a person’s spirituality and closeness to God are inversely proportionate to the amount of sin in that person’s life. More sin, less of God; more of God, less sin, the ultimate goal being sinlessness—a state that no one we know has actually achieved, but is theoretically plausible nonetheless. I guess my mother had me so close to God that I had to be sinless in her mind.
This equation is carefully bolstered by glowing testimonies and the close-to-perfection reputations of those who are close to God. Ministers and those in “full-time Christian service” are closer than anybody and thus the furthest from sin. This is why it is so devastating to the church when these close-to-perfect people fall prey to a terrible moral failure. The result is shock and disbelief. They were so spiritual; how could this have happened?
The big Christian lie
In his charming coming-of-age novel, Portofino, Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, two of the most important Christian thinkers in the last three decates, strips the veneer away from what many must have thought was the ideal Christian family.
Frank—formerly Franky—paints a picture in this novel of a fundamentalist evangelical family on vacation in Italy over the course of two summers. The parallels between the story and what I know about Frank’s own family and childhood are everywhere. In the story we see a distant, silent father, who in public is fighting for a culturally relevant biblical orthodoxy but in private is prone to huge mood swings and a violent temper, a wife who fights with him over which one of them is more spiritual, and children who are forced to be “biblical” before they know what any of it means. Though some of the situations are humorous and charming, others are too painfully real to just be funny. Having grown up in a similar evangelical family caught in a public and private dichotomy, I find Portofino cathartic, to say the least.
In looking into this story, I discovered that I have two reactions to this dysfunctional Christian family. The first is to take some pleasure in their shortcomings because then I can feel somehow better about mine. The second reaction is to be disappointed. Something inside me wishes Frank hadn’t uncovered this flawed family portrait because then I could go on believing that at least someone I revered, like Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had gotten it right.
It occurs to me that this second reaction could be thought of as the big Christian lie. That is, the belief that somebody, somewhere, got it right. Don’t we flock to speakers and singers who are up front and important because they are getting it right, and aren’t they up ther be we expect that of them? When it comes painfully obvious that in some area of their lives they did not get it right, aren’t they promptly removed from their place? Aren’t all those smiling people on the covers of Christian books telling us how we, too, can get it right if we follow their advice? If we didn’t worship at the altar of getting it right, there wouldn’t be a market for half this stuff.
But have no fear, Christian entrepreneurs, the market is not in any danger, because this appeal has held human beings in its grip ever since Moses came down the mountain with God’s top ten list for getting it right. And we all carry on with the lie.
The lure of ‘almost’
Unfortunately, getting it right is not the issue. If we were all facing sin more realistically, we would not be so surprised when it shows up in the life of a spiritual leader. (I sometimes fear what my children will write about me!) If we were being truthful about who we really are—all of us—we would know that our leaders are human, just as we are.
Sometimes I wonder if we want our spiritual leaders to be perfect so we don’t have to be. As long as we believe somebody’s perfect, we can go on perpetuating the myth that perfection is possible and keep on shrouding our own sin safely behind the lie of ‘almost.’ We are almost there. We have almost arrived. We are almost holy. One more book, one more seminar, one more revival service, and we will be just like the person on the cover of the book or the brochure. That’s why when leaders fall, it blows the cover on this charade. Suddenly this elusive spiritual life we are trying to lead is further away than we thought. ‘Almost’ is not even close. If the pastor can fall, what does that say about our chances?
If we were more honest with ourselves, we would know that the real question is not how someone so high could fall so far, but rather why hasn’t it happened sooner in such an atmosphere of denial? What were these people doing up there in the first place; and what were we doing putting them up there? The real problem in this case is not with sin, it is with our false idea of who we think we are. We need to understand that wnen someone falls, it’s not the end; it’s just the truth finally being known. It’s actually a good thing if it sends us all back to the gospel, where we should have been all along.
I often wonder how a gospel based solely on the merits of one who has died to forgive sin could be perpetuated on the merits of those who don’t seem to need it. If the whole point of the gospel is forgiveness of sin, then why do we insist on continually parading these almost perfect lives in front of each other? How has it happened that the people who proclaim forgiveness of sin don’t seem to have any sins to be forgiven of themselves? How has a church that once was the happy possession of common fishermen and prostitutes and tax collectors become the home of the spiritually elite? There are, undoubtedly, numerous and complicated answers to these questions, but I believe at the root of them all is lurking the issue of the Pharisee.
The call of the ancient Pharisee
Sin has a way of showing up only on the front end of salvation. Sinners are those who need saved, but once they are saved we rarely hear about sin anymore. Yes, sin still turns up in the context of those sinners ‘out there’ who need Jesus, but don’t we ‘in here’ need Jesus just as much after we’re saved?
It’s as if we believe another standard takes over once we become Christians. The unbeliever receives forgiveness of sins; the believer, however, must simply stop sinning. The blood of Jesus Christ covered my sins when I became a Christian, but now that I am saved I’d better straighten up and fly right. Salvation is for those who need to be saved, not those who already have been. And whenever not sinning takes precedence over the forgiveness of sins…beware the Pharisee.
‘Who among you is without sin?’ is the damning question Jesus posed to the Pharisees. We should ask ourselves the same question. John put it another way: ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves’ (1 John 1:8). And yet we continue to want to be deceived—to perpetuate a myth about ourselves and our leaders that keeps our sin hidden from view because the alternative—to come clean—is just too scary. Although not sinning is not possible, we choose to perpetuate the false belief that it is, rather than face the truth. We created these perfect spiritual leaders in the first place to prove that it can be done; but they are living way beyond their spiritual means. If my assessment is true, it may actually be the grace of God that brings them down so we can all start facing the truth.
I grew up on hymn lyrics like, ‘What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.’ I noticed the hymnist put this in the present tense, meaning that sin is a daily reality in the believer’s life. But I have a hunch most people don’t sing it that way. We sing it as if it were, ‘What has washed away my sin?’ As if sin were now behind us—a remnant of our non-Christian past.
One can see how subtly we become prime candidates for the fraternity of Pharisees. When being perfect is more important than being saved—when not sinning takes precedence over honestly dealing with sin—all the same dynamics that tantalized Saul of Tarsus are waiting to empower us falsely. The supposed perfection, the arrangement of the standard so as to make the breaking of it almost impossible to do, the judgment of others, the hiding, and, of course, the hypocrisy, are simply too alluring to refuse.
Foolish Galatians
‘You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?’ wrote Paul in his letter to the same. ‘Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?’ (Galatians 3:1, 3)
Apparently this is not a new problem. We start with the Spirit; we start with salvation; we start with the undeserved grace of God, but then human effort creeps back into our spiritual lives like weeds returning to a weeded garden. We start looking to ourselves again, thinking we have to come up with what we need to be good Christians, and the minute we start looking to ourselves, we start covering up and being defensive and comparing ourselves to others, just like Pharisees. It’s inevitable: Where there is spirituality mixed with human effort, there will be all the pitfalls of the Pharisees, writhing like a brood of vipers waiting to entangle those who fall in.
If it took the Spirit to saves, Paul points out, it’s going to take the Spirit to keep us saved. Start with the Spirit, stay with the Spirit; start with salvation, stay with salvation; start with grace, stay with grace. How can we add to what Christ has done? We are saved each day the same way we were saved the first time. We brought our sinful lives before God, turned from relying on ourselves to relying on him, and received his life in exchange for ours. It’s no different now. It’s a moment-by-moment transaction.
The Galatians were trying to perfect through human effort what the Spirit had begun without their help, while all along denying that very Spirit the right to their lives. Their problem was the same as the Pharisees: they wanted to be in control of the process. They wanted to take back what they gave up in the beginning. Apparently they were too uncomfortable not being in control. Who else would turn down the grace of God but someone who didn’t want to be vulnerable to it? It’s a tragedy that while there is grace to cover all our sin, there are still sinners who don’t know about it and Pharisees who don’t want to know.
Salvation: then, now, and later
Confession of sin in our churches most often comes from those who are just being saved. We hear their stories as the equivalent of the ‘before’ pictures in liposuction ads with all that detestable flab hanging out over the edges of ill-fitting bathing suits. The assumption is that the rest of us have had all the sin sucked out of our abs and buttocks and are currently enjoying our slim, trim ‘after’ bodies. If sin does happen to show up later in a believer’s life, it is the result of a temporary backsliding. It happens to the best of us now and then. This is ‘solved’ by a simple rededication of our lives to God—a sort of ‘salvation refresher’. Sin is rarely, if ever, addressed as a normal part of a believer’s everyday experience.
Is salvation a one-time experience or something that we need every day of our lives? Yes and yes. These are actually two aspects of a three-pronged process of salvation—past, present and future. The theological names for these three aspects of salvation are justification, sanctification, and glorification. Justification is what has happened to us in relation to our sin, once and for all, on the cross. Jesus Christ’s death in our place has justified us forever before God and made possible our fellowship with him.
But this does not mean that we are sinless. Paul calls it a ‘body of death’ that we still have to carry around in this life even though we have received the firstfruits of the Spirit in our hearts (Romans 8:23). We are currently caught between our ultimate glorification when we will receive our resurrection bodies like Christ, and the past-justification of ourselves through the finished work of Christ on the cross. Everything in between is our present-tense experience of the process of sanctification. That experience includes both sin and forgiveness of sin as a daily occurrence. Though our salvation is secured in heaven, we experience it currently as we struggle with our sin nature and feel God’s knife cutting more deeply into the subtleties of our flesh.
The experience of sin in a believer’s life is not always backsliding. Nor is it always willful disobedience. Often it is what is simply revealed or brought into view because of the Holy Spirit’s work at peeling away our sin nature like the layers of an onion. The longer we follow Christ the more we discover how deep the sin goes and how deep and wide are his mercy and love. Realization of sin, confession, and forgiveness continue as we find out more about ourselves. This is why this process is both painful and rewarding. Painful because we keep discovering how far we still have to go, but rewarding because we keep discovering, as well, how far Christ has gone for us. This is also why the older believer always has an affinity for the new believer. It’s the same process. The new believer may be experiencing God’s forgiveness for the first time, but the experience is immediate, real, and necessary for both of them.
This is also why the new believer and the old believer can both sing the same song, tell the same gospel story, and talk of the same forgiveness fresh from each one’s current experience of it. Take the following hymn:
At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away;
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
Does a twenty-year believer sing this song thinking back on twenty years ago when she received her forgiveness? Is the twenty-year believer remembering and vicariously experiencing her former forgiveness through the tears of the new convert? Or does the twenty-year believer have her own tears welling up in her eyes as she sings this hymn for the umpteenth time, realizing it’s implications even more deeply than the last time she sang it because of the sin for which she has just received fresh forgiveness? This is how our salvation continues to be alive in our lives.
‘Tell Me the Old, Old Story’ is another old hymn I remember singing often as a child. Well, the old, old story has a way of always being a new, new song when we understand and experience the painful and glorious process of our sanctification.
More sin; more God
‘The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more’ (Romans 5:20).
At the beginning of this chapter I talked about this erroneous equation: More sin, less of God; more of God, less sin. I would like to suggest at this point a totally different equation. I would like to suggest that more of God in my life actually means more sin, if by more sin it is clear I mean the awareness of sin. The person who is closer to God is more aware of sin than the one who is distant, and thus that person will be having a more relevant experience with God as he or she grows in the faith.
This is why older Christians keep getting more humble as they grow older. They keep finding out how much of a sinner they are and how patient God is with them.
Paul puts it this way. ‘Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life’ (1 Timothy 1:15-16).
Here Paul makes a truly daring claim. One would think great leaders like Paul would be able to claim themselves as examples of righteousness and holiness, but Paul does not. He claims quite the opposite; he brags about being the worst sinner among sinners. He chose to exemplify himself in this manner so that others might have hope. If Christ would have patience with Paul—the worst of sinners—then no sinner could claim to be outside the reach of God’s grace.
These are truly unusual bragging rights. In essence Paul is saying he has more sin than anyone so no one can have any legitimate reason not to believe the forgiveness of God. If there’s hope for him, the worst of sinners, there’s hope for anyone. ‘For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect’ (1 Corinthians 15:9-10).
To extrapolate somewhat on Paul’s statement, I offer the following paragraph:
You think your sin is so great that God could never forgive you? Well, think again. I murdered Christians for their faith. I carried out the judgment of God upon the very people he was calling out to do his work. The cloaks of the murderers ended up at my feet. Awful things were done, at my command, to more people that I can count who were and are now my brethren, and the responsibility for all these things rests on me.
More of God, more awareness of sin. The more I see of God, the more I am aware of that in me that is not of God. That’s why Paul’s statement is in the present tense: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.’ Paul experiences a continual awareness of his sin nature. I would want to say I was the worst of sinners…but not Paul. The reality of his sin was as current and fresh as the reality of God’s grace. Paul knew that he couldn’t really know God’s grace without knowing his sin and how little he deserved what he was receiving. Deserve it, and it is no longer grace.
If we are going to recover from this pharisaical phoniness, we are going to have to get a present-tense awareness of our sin. We need to be experts at finding and rooting out our own sin—no one else’s. We have plenty to deal with right here in our own heart without having to take on anyone else’s sin as our personal campaign. I am the worst sinner I know, simply because I know myself better than anyone. My sin is the worst because it is mine. I am intimately involved with it. I know all its subtle nuances, its illusions, its rationalizations, and its cover-ups. Of my sin I am an expert. Anyone else’s sin is not my business to evaluate.
And follow this: Jeremiah informs us that our ‘expert’ knowledge of sin is still limited at best. Deeper than what we know about our sin lies that which we don’t know. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure,’ cried Jeremiah. ‘Who can understand it?’ (17:9). This is a reminder that, however much we know about our sin, we still do not know it all.
Paul picks up this theme in 1 Corinthians 4:4: ‘My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.’ Paul never claims sinlessness, but he does claim a clear conscience. The sin Paul knows about, he has brought to the Lord already and received forgiveness; what he doesn’t know about is known by God and will be revealed in due time.
A clear conscience, therefore, does not mean we are sinless. It means we are covered by the blood of Jesus for what we know and what we don’t know. That should keep us humble until the time when the Lord returns. ‘He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God’ (1 Corinthians 4:5).
The recovering Pharisee’s creed
When I speak of sin, I will no longer talk of it as something in my distant past. When I speak of forgiveness, I will not speak of it as something I received years ago when I became a Christian. I will speak of the sin and forgiveness I experienced today—that I am experiencing right now—that enable me to be human and real and truthful with who I am and who I am becoming. And when the conversation turns to talk of sinners, I will realize the conversation is really about me. I will always know that I am the worst of sinners. I put Jesus on the cross; my sin nailed him there. And if I ever catch myself thinking that there exists, somewhere in the world, a worse sinner than I, regardless of the gravity of the crime, it is at that point that I have stepped over the pharisaical line and am speaking about something of which I know nothing. When it comes to sin, I can only speak of myself with absolute certainty, and in regard to myself and sin, I am certain of this: that I am an expert in both my sin and my forgiveness. One brings me sorrow; the other brings me great joy. The remarkable thing is not that I sin, but that, in spite of my sin, I am capable of having fellowship with God and being used by him for his purposes in the world.
‘So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!’ (1 Corinthians 10:12)
__________________________________________________
I have been reading 12 Steps For The Recovering Pharisee (like me), John Fischer. This book uses the 12 step model of recovery, though he rewrites the steps to be applicable to Phariseeism and overcoming such legalistic, self-righteous habits in our own life. The following is chapter 7. I know it's a rather lengthy passage, but hopefully you can find the time to read and consider it. It has especially spoken to me.
Step 7
We embrace the belief that we are, and will always be, experts at sinning.
In the course of one private conversation between the two of them, my mother informed my wife that I didn’t sin. Now, my wife had been married to me for over ten years at the time, and, as you can imagine, she had a somewhat differing opinion on the subject of my sinfulness or lack of it. I was pretty shocked myself to hear of my supposed perfection, and though I would love to believe my mother, I’m afraid my wife knows better. Though we often joke about this now, I wonder what would bring my mother to pose such a preposterous claim about me. Aside from the expected parental my-son-can-do-no-wrong myth, was there anything more indicated in this dubious assessment? I believe that there might have been.
Many evangelicals mistakenly believe that a person’s spirituality and closeness to God are inversely proportionate to the amount of sin in that person’s life. More sin, less of God; more of God, less sin, the ultimate goal being sinlessness—a state that no one we know has actually achieved, but is theoretically plausible nonetheless. I guess my mother had me so close to God that I had to be sinless in her mind.
This equation is carefully bolstered by glowing testimonies and the close-to-perfection reputations of those who are close to God. Ministers and those in “full-time Christian service” are closer than anybody and thus the furthest from sin. This is why it is so devastating to the church when these close-to-perfect people fall prey to a terrible moral failure. The result is shock and disbelief. They were so spiritual; how could this have happened?
The big Christian lie
In his charming coming-of-age novel, Portofino, Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, two of the most important Christian thinkers in the last three decates, strips the veneer away from what many must have thought was the ideal Christian family.
Frank—formerly Franky—paints a picture in this novel of a fundamentalist evangelical family on vacation in Italy over the course of two summers. The parallels between the story and what I know about Frank’s own family and childhood are everywhere. In the story we see a distant, silent father, who in public is fighting for a culturally relevant biblical orthodoxy but in private is prone to huge mood swings and a violent temper, a wife who fights with him over which one of them is more spiritual, and children who are forced to be “biblical” before they know what any of it means. Though some of the situations are humorous and charming, others are too painfully real to just be funny. Having grown up in a similar evangelical family caught in a public and private dichotomy, I find Portofino cathartic, to say the least.
In looking into this story, I discovered that I have two reactions to this dysfunctional Christian family. The first is to take some pleasure in their shortcomings because then I can feel somehow better about mine. The second reaction is to be disappointed. Something inside me wishes Frank hadn’t uncovered this flawed family portrait because then I could go on believing that at least someone I revered, like Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had gotten it right.
It occurs to me that this second reaction could be thought of as the big Christian lie. That is, the belief that somebody, somewhere, got it right. Don’t we flock to speakers and singers who are up front and important because they are getting it right, and aren’t they up ther be we expect that of them? When it comes painfully obvious that in some area of their lives they did not get it right, aren’t they promptly removed from their place? Aren’t all those smiling people on the covers of Christian books telling us how we, too, can get it right if we follow their advice? If we didn’t worship at the altar of getting it right, there wouldn’t be a market for half this stuff.
But have no fear, Christian entrepreneurs, the market is not in any danger, because this appeal has held human beings in its grip ever since Moses came down the mountain with God’s top ten list for getting it right. And we all carry on with the lie.
The lure of ‘almost’
Unfortunately, getting it right is not the issue. If we were all facing sin more realistically, we would not be so surprised when it shows up in the life of a spiritual leader. (I sometimes fear what my children will write about me!) If we were being truthful about who we really are—all of us—we would know that our leaders are human, just as we are.
Sometimes I wonder if we want our spiritual leaders to be perfect so we don’t have to be. As long as we believe somebody’s perfect, we can go on perpetuating the myth that perfection is possible and keep on shrouding our own sin safely behind the lie of ‘almost.’ We are almost there. We have almost arrived. We are almost holy. One more book, one more seminar, one more revival service, and we will be just like the person on the cover of the book or the brochure. That’s why when leaders fall, it blows the cover on this charade. Suddenly this elusive spiritual life we are trying to lead is further away than we thought. ‘Almost’ is not even close. If the pastor can fall, what does that say about our chances?
If we were more honest with ourselves, we would know that the real question is not how someone so high could fall so far, but rather why hasn’t it happened sooner in such an atmosphere of denial? What were these people doing up there in the first place; and what were we doing putting them up there? The real problem in this case is not with sin, it is with our false idea of who we think we are. We need to understand that wnen someone falls, it’s not the end; it’s just the truth finally being known. It’s actually a good thing if it sends us all back to the gospel, where we should have been all along.
I often wonder how a gospel based solely on the merits of one who has died to forgive sin could be perpetuated on the merits of those who don’t seem to need it. If the whole point of the gospel is forgiveness of sin, then why do we insist on continually parading these almost perfect lives in front of each other? How has it happened that the people who proclaim forgiveness of sin don’t seem to have any sins to be forgiven of themselves? How has a church that once was the happy possession of common fishermen and prostitutes and tax collectors become the home of the spiritually elite? There are, undoubtedly, numerous and complicated answers to these questions, but I believe at the root of them all is lurking the issue of the Pharisee.
The call of the ancient Pharisee
Sin has a way of showing up only on the front end of salvation. Sinners are those who need saved, but once they are saved we rarely hear about sin anymore. Yes, sin still turns up in the context of those sinners ‘out there’ who need Jesus, but don’t we ‘in here’ need Jesus just as much after we’re saved?
It’s as if we believe another standard takes over once we become Christians. The unbeliever receives forgiveness of sins; the believer, however, must simply stop sinning. The blood of Jesus Christ covered my sins when I became a Christian, but now that I am saved I’d better straighten up and fly right. Salvation is for those who need to be saved, not those who already have been. And whenever not sinning takes precedence over the forgiveness of sins…beware the Pharisee.
‘Who among you is without sin?’ is the damning question Jesus posed to the Pharisees. We should ask ourselves the same question. John put it another way: ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves’ (1 John 1:8). And yet we continue to want to be deceived—to perpetuate a myth about ourselves and our leaders that keeps our sin hidden from view because the alternative—to come clean—is just too scary. Although not sinning is not possible, we choose to perpetuate the false belief that it is, rather than face the truth. We created these perfect spiritual leaders in the first place to prove that it can be done; but they are living way beyond their spiritual means. If my assessment is true, it may actually be the grace of God that brings them down so we can all start facing the truth.
I grew up on hymn lyrics like, ‘What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.’ I noticed the hymnist put this in the present tense, meaning that sin is a daily reality in the believer’s life. But I have a hunch most people don’t sing it that way. We sing it as if it were, ‘What has washed away my sin?’ As if sin were now behind us—a remnant of our non-Christian past.
One can see how subtly we become prime candidates for the fraternity of Pharisees. When being perfect is more important than being saved—when not sinning takes precedence over honestly dealing with sin—all the same dynamics that tantalized Saul of Tarsus are waiting to empower us falsely. The supposed perfection, the arrangement of the standard so as to make the breaking of it almost impossible to do, the judgment of others, the hiding, and, of course, the hypocrisy, are simply too alluring to refuse.
Foolish Galatians
‘You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you?’ wrote Paul in his letter to the same. ‘Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?’ (Galatians 3:1, 3)
Apparently this is not a new problem. We start with the Spirit; we start with salvation; we start with the undeserved grace of God, but then human effort creeps back into our spiritual lives like weeds returning to a weeded garden. We start looking to ourselves again, thinking we have to come up with what we need to be good Christians, and the minute we start looking to ourselves, we start covering up and being defensive and comparing ourselves to others, just like Pharisees. It’s inevitable: Where there is spirituality mixed with human effort, there will be all the pitfalls of the Pharisees, writhing like a brood of vipers waiting to entangle those who fall in.
If it took the Spirit to saves, Paul points out, it’s going to take the Spirit to keep us saved. Start with the Spirit, stay with the Spirit; start with salvation, stay with salvation; start with grace, stay with grace. How can we add to what Christ has done? We are saved each day the same way we were saved the first time. We brought our sinful lives before God, turned from relying on ourselves to relying on him, and received his life in exchange for ours. It’s no different now. It’s a moment-by-moment transaction.
The Galatians were trying to perfect through human effort what the Spirit had begun without their help, while all along denying that very Spirit the right to their lives. Their problem was the same as the Pharisees: they wanted to be in control of the process. They wanted to take back what they gave up in the beginning. Apparently they were too uncomfortable not being in control. Who else would turn down the grace of God but someone who didn’t want to be vulnerable to it? It’s a tragedy that while there is grace to cover all our sin, there are still sinners who don’t know about it and Pharisees who don’t want to know.
Salvation: then, now, and later
Confession of sin in our churches most often comes from those who are just being saved. We hear their stories as the equivalent of the ‘before’ pictures in liposuction ads with all that detestable flab hanging out over the edges of ill-fitting bathing suits. The assumption is that the rest of us have had all the sin sucked out of our abs and buttocks and are currently enjoying our slim, trim ‘after’ bodies. If sin does happen to show up later in a believer’s life, it is the result of a temporary backsliding. It happens to the best of us now and then. This is ‘solved’ by a simple rededication of our lives to God—a sort of ‘salvation refresher’. Sin is rarely, if ever, addressed as a normal part of a believer’s everyday experience.
Is salvation a one-time experience or something that we need every day of our lives? Yes and yes. These are actually two aspects of a three-pronged process of salvation—past, present and future. The theological names for these three aspects of salvation are justification, sanctification, and glorification. Justification is what has happened to us in relation to our sin, once and for all, on the cross. Jesus Christ’s death in our place has justified us forever before God and made possible our fellowship with him.
But this does not mean that we are sinless. Paul calls it a ‘body of death’ that we still have to carry around in this life even though we have received the firstfruits of the Spirit in our hearts (Romans 8:23). We are currently caught between our ultimate glorification when we will receive our resurrection bodies like Christ, and the past-justification of ourselves through the finished work of Christ on the cross. Everything in between is our present-tense experience of the process of sanctification. That experience includes both sin and forgiveness of sin as a daily occurrence. Though our salvation is secured in heaven, we experience it currently as we struggle with our sin nature and feel God’s knife cutting more deeply into the subtleties of our flesh.
The experience of sin in a believer’s life is not always backsliding. Nor is it always willful disobedience. Often it is what is simply revealed or brought into view because of the Holy Spirit’s work at peeling away our sin nature like the layers of an onion. The longer we follow Christ the more we discover how deep the sin goes and how deep and wide are his mercy and love. Realization of sin, confession, and forgiveness continue as we find out more about ourselves. This is why this process is both painful and rewarding. Painful because we keep discovering how far we still have to go, but rewarding because we keep discovering, as well, how far Christ has gone for us. This is also why the older believer always has an affinity for the new believer. It’s the same process. The new believer may be experiencing God’s forgiveness for the first time, but the experience is immediate, real, and necessary for both of them.
This is also why the new believer and the old believer can both sing the same song, tell the same gospel story, and talk of the same forgiveness fresh from each one’s current experience of it. Take the following hymn:
At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light,
And the burden of my heart rolled away;
It was there by faith I received my sight,
And now I am happy all the day.
Does a twenty-year believer sing this song thinking back on twenty years ago when she received her forgiveness? Is the twenty-year believer remembering and vicariously experiencing her former forgiveness through the tears of the new convert? Or does the twenty-year believer have her own tears welling up in her eyes as she sings this hymn for the umpteenth time, realizing it’s implications even more deeply than the last time she sang it because of the sin for which she has just received fresh forgiveness? This is how our salvation continues to be alive in our lives.
‘Tell Me the Old, Old Story’ is another old hymn I remember singing often as a child. Well, the old, old story has a way of always being a new, new song when we understand and experience the painful and glorious process of our sanctification.
More sin; more God
‘The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more’ (Romans 5:20).
At the beginning of this chapter I talked about this erroneous equation: More sin, less of God; more of God, less sin. I would like to suggest at this point a totally different equation. I would like to suggest that more of God in my life actually means more sin, if by more sin it is clear I mean the awareness of sin. The person who is closer to God is more aware of sin than the one who is distant, and thus that person will be having a more relevant experience with God as he or she grows in the faith.
This is why older Christians keep getting more humble as they grow older. They keep finding out how much of a sinner they are and how patient God is with them.
Paul puts it this way. ‘Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe on him and receive eternal life’ (1 Timothy 1:15-16).
Here Paul makes a truly daring claim. One would think great leaders like Paul would be able to claim themselves as examples of righteousness and holiness, but Paul does not. He claims quite the opposite; he brags about being the worst sinner among sinners. He chose to exemplify himself in this manner so that others might have hope. If Christ would have patience with Paul—the worst of sinners—then no sinner could claim to be outside the reach of God’s grace.
These are truly unusual bragging rights. In essence Paul is saying he has more sin than anyone so no one can have any legitimate reason not to believe the forgiveness of God. If there’s hope for him, the worst of sinners, there’s hope for anyone. ‘For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect’ (1 Corinthians 15:9-10).
To extrapolate somewhat on Paul’s statement, I offer the following paragraph:
You think your sin is so great that God could never forgive you? Well, think again. I murdered Christians for their faith. I carried out the judgment of God upon the very people he was calling out to do his work. The cloaks of the murderers ended up at my feet. Awful things were done, at my command, to more people that I can count who were and are now my brethren, and the responsibility for all these things rests on me.
More of God, more awareness of sin. The more I see of God, the more I am aware of that in me that is not of God. That’s why Paul’s statement is in the present tense: ‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst.’ Paul experiences a continual awareness of his sin nature. I would want to say I was the worst of sinners…but not Paul. The reality of his sin was as current and fresh as the reality of God’s grace. Paul knew that he couldn’t really know God’s grace without knowing his sin and how little he deserved what he was receiving. Deserve it, and it is no longer grace.
If we are going to recover from this pharisaical phoniness, we are going to have to get a present-tense awareness of our sin. We need to be experts at finding and rooting out our own sin—no one else’s. We have plenty to deal with right here in our own heart without having to take on anyone else’s sin as our personal campaign. I am the worst sinner I know, simply because I know myself better than anyone. My sin is the worst because it is mine. I am intimately involved with it. I know all its subtle nuances, its illusions, its rationalizations, and its cover-ups. Of my sin I am an expert. Anyone else’s sin is not my business to evaluate.
And follow this: Jeremiah informs us that our ‘expert’ knowledge of sin is still limited at best. Deeper than what we know about our sin lies that which we don’t know. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure,’ cried Jeremiah. ‘Who can understand it?’ (17:9). This is a reminder that, however much we know about our sin, we still do not know it all.
Paul picks up this theme in 1 Corinthians 4:4: ‘My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.’ Paul never claims sinlessness, but he does claim a clear conscience. The sin Paul knows about, he has brought to the Lord already and received forgiveness; what he doesn’t know about is known by God and will be revealed in due time.
A clear conscience, therefore, does not mean we are sinless. It means we are covered by the blood of Jesus for what we know and what we don’t know. That should keep us humble until the time when the Lord returns. ‘He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and expose the motives of men’s hearts. At that time each will receive his praise from God’ (1 Corinthians 4:5).
The recovering Pharisee’s creed
When I speak of sin, I will no longer talk of it as something in my distant past. When I speak of forgiveness, I will not speak of it as something I received years ago when I became a Christian. I will speak of the sin and forgiveness I experienced today—that I am experiencing right now—that enable me to be human and real and truthful with who I am and who I am becoming. And when the conversation turns to talk of sinners, I will realize the conversation is really about me. I will always know that I am the worst of sinners. I put Jesus on the cross; my sin nailed him there. And if I ever catch myself thinking that there exists, somewhere in the world, a worse sinner than I, regardless of the gravity of the crime, it is at that point that I have stepped over the pharisaical line and am speaking about something of which I know nothing. When it comes to sin, I can only speak of myself with absolute certainty, and in regard to myself and sin, I am certain of this: that I am an expert in both my sin and my forgiveness. One brings me sorrow; the other brings me great joy. The remarkable thing is not that I sin, but that, in spite of my sin, I am capable of having fellowship with God and being used by him for his purposes in the world.
‘So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!’ (1 Corinthians 10:12)
__________________________________________________
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
