A Singer, A Song

Scary how spot-on these kinds of tests can seem to be. But maybe you view me differently? This link lets you tell me what you think! 

In changing times like these, it’s nice to receive a little pat on the back, a reminder that everything’s gonna work out in the long run. Here are the four little affirmations that appeared after our most recent family visit to the local Chinese restaurant:

Excerpts from 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me) (John Fischer), pp. 28-31:

If the Pharisees could have seen themselve as Jesus saw them–as blind guides and fools–they could have come to Chirst and been given sight. As it was, they refused to accept their blindness, claimed they could see just fine–just as well as Jesus, for that matter–and never saw themselves for who they really were.

We all need people around us with enough courage and love to tell us the truth about ourselves. How do other people see us? We’re so self-centered that it’s hard to know. We need to be open to someone else’s perspective and, in some cases, to ask for it.

Our version of ourselves is always different than that of others. It’s the difference between seeing yourself in a regular mirror–the straight-on reflection we always get–and seeing yourself in a three-way mirror, where you suddenly see angles on yourself you’ve never seen before. It’s shocking when this first happens, almost like someone else is in the room.

It’s virtually impossible to get another view of yourself by yourself. Just like we need at least two mirrors to see the angles most other people see of us, we need other people to tell us who we really are. People can serve as our character mirrors, and we need to be vulnerable to what they tell us.

It would be wise to look at the groups we travel in and see how honest they really are. Do we have our own prejudices and secrets? Are we honest with one another, or do we protect one another’s weaknesses and sins? Do our groups foster an accurate portrayal of ourselves as we really are, or do they bolster a kind of corporate lie or propaganda? Alcoholics Anonymous and “drinking buddies” are two different groups handling the same problem in entirely different ways. One group admits a problem and discloses everything in the process of rooting it out. The other group covers up the problem and similarly bolsters the cover-up by rationalizations, denials, and judgments of others as “self-righteous.”

In other words, any group is a kind of mirror. The question is, is it an accurate one? We need friends who tell us the truth–other shoes in which we can stand.

John 9:39-41

From 12 Steps for the Recovering Pharisee (like me) (John Fischer), pp. 17-18:

Jesus… read into [the Phrasisees'] private prayers what was really going on in their minds. He knew the condition of their hearts, and his Father had heard plenty of these prayers, if indeed any of them ever made it to his place in heaven. One gospel account has a Phraisee praying to himself, which would have made the prayer irrelevant whether God ever heard anything or not. It wasn’t for God that he was praying; it was for his own benefit. “God, I thank you that I am not like other men–robbers, evildoers, adulterers…” (Luke 18:11-12). I am not like other men. I am different; I am better. It is the creed of the Phraisee to be better than everyone else and to devise means of measuring and comparing that support his assessment. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get. Thus the Pharisee establishes an attainable standard that becomes both a measure of personal righteousness and a yardstick for judging others. Certainly the robbers and evildoers and adulterers this Phraisee was referring to were not fasting or giving a tenth.

That’s because the robbers and evildoers and adulterers have no clue that this game is even going on. They don’t care. They don’t associate with the Pharisee any more than he does with them. Most likely they are completely oblivious to the idea of fasting and tithing, and yet they have been judged by their apparent disregard for both in the Phrisee’s mind.

This is one of the great pleasures of passing judgment. It isn’t a requirement to explain either the rules or the judgment to anyone; the fact is, one may raise and lower the bar at will. The purpose of this judgment is not the real betterment of anyone, nor is it to find the truth–to know what the real standard of judgment is and to put oneself under its scrutiny. Its purpose is only to establish a self-defined superiority over others.

We call the shots. We make the rules. We draw the line in the sand and then step over it, leaving everyone else on the other side. It’s a fool-proof way to feel good about ourselves.

From What’s So Amazing About Grace? (Philip Yancey), pp. 14-15:

I attended a Bible college. Years later, when I was sitting next to the president of that school on an airplane, he asked me to assess my education. “Some good, some bad,” I replied. “I met many godly people there. In fact, I met God there. Who can place a value on that? And yet I later realized that in four years I learned almost nothing about grace. It may be the most important word in the Bible, the heart of the gospel. How could I have missed it?”

I related our conversation in a subsequent chapel address and, in doing so, offended the faculty. Some suggested I not be invited back  to speak. One gentle soul wrote to ask whether I should have phrased things differently. Shouldn’t I have said that as a student I lacked the receptors to receive the grace that was all around me? Because I respect and love this man, I thought long and hard about his question. Ultimately, however, I concluded that I had experienced as much ungrace on the campus of a Bible college as I had anywhere else in life.

A counselor, David Seamands, summed his career up this way:

Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among evangelical Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness and grace to other people…. We read, we hear, we believe a good theology of grace. But that’s not the way we live. The good news of the gospel of Grace has not penetrated the level of our emotions.

In my last post I covered the three aspects of our salvation: justification, sanctification, and glorification. Paul’s writings state that just as there was nothing that we could have done to merit salvation, and just as there is nothing that we will ever accomplish to attain glorification, so today we are unable to make ourselves more pleasing or lovable to our righteous God in the process of sanctification. The work that God is performing in us today is a work that He undertakes thanks to the imputed righteousness of our Savior, not due to any goodness on our part. At the moment of salvation, God begins restoring in us the image of Christ that humanity was intended to bear before the fall. It is our joy to embrace that process, and to participate in it with abandon.

So a question that might arise at this point in the conversation concerns what role standards play in the Christian life. We already know by what we’ve read in Galatians 3 that “doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does.” We know that we cannot please God with what we do, because Scripture clearly teaches us that “all our righteousness is as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). There’s no qualifier on that passage in Scripture: “all righteousness is filthy before salvation, but after that, well, the stuff you do starts to look pretty good to God.” Nope. And time and time again in Paul’s epistle to the Galatians we’re warned to stay clear of rule-keeping systems (Galatians 2:15, Galatians 2:19, Galatians 3:11, Galatians 3:21, Galatians 5:2).

So why is it that some churches and institutions insist on a virtual litany of externalized standards? Christian schools around the nation are intent upon looking a certain way, cutting hair a certain way, making sure that some garments are long enough and that others aren’t too short. Churches that follow after these kinds of trends abound as well. But if these things have no impact on how God views us, then why observe them with such religious fervor? The answer often given is that we constrain ourselves to certain choices for expediency, “for the sake of ministry.” But what does keeping my hair short and my skirt long have to do with love? The usual answer is that we do these things because we do not want to offend, and so we defer on these issues in order to put the emphasis on Christ.

But to whom do we defer? The saved or the unsaved? The unsaved don’t recognize these external standards as having any connection to love. So we are deferring to the saved–and, obviously, really to those who hold these standards as important. Many other believers don’t hold these standards, but we must defer to those who do, for the sake of love, right?

But wait: what if some believers come up with an odd standard? (Feel free to insert your favorite regulation here: pleated pants, patterned hose, big-knotted ties, unpolished shoes, etc.) Am I supposed to follow this restriction for the sake of love? What are believers who hold these kinds of extra-biblical standards really saying? That any believer who wears pleated pants is unspiritual? Worldly? In some way deficient? This conclusion is equivalent to saying that unless I follow all of the man-made rules that might be conceived, I am not pleasing God. What then of grace? I cannot earn God’s pleasure with anything that I do. So when I place everyone else’s rules either equal to or above what I believe the Holy Spirit has led me to believe, am I not denying the grace that God has given to me?

This is exactly what Paul addresses in Galatians 5:1-6:

Christ has set us free to live a free life. So take your stand! Never again let anyone put a harness of slavery on you.

I am emphatic about this. The moment any one of you submits to circumcision or any other rule-keeping system, at that same moment Christ’s hard-won gift of freedom is squandered. I repeat my warning: The person who accepts the ways of circumcision trades all the advantages of the free life in Christ for the obligations of the slave life of the law.

I suspect you would never intend this, but this is what happens. When you attempt to live by your own religious plans and projects, you are cut off from Christ, you fall out of grace. Meanwhile we expectantly wait for a satisfying relationship with the Spirit. For in Christ, neither our most conscientious religion nor disregard of religion amounts to anything. What matters is something far more interior: faith expressed in love.

We all agree that Scripturally-prescribed external standards do exist. Scripture teaches that we are to conduct ourselves soberly, righteously and in a godly manner, for instance. We would also agree that there is a “synergy”– a working together of man and God in sanctification. But when the human side of that synergistic equation is out of balance, we tread on dangerous ground. Philippians 2:12, “work out your own salvation,” takes more precedence over Philippians 2:13, “for it is God that worketh in you.” Passages that clearly teach the work of God in salvation, such as Ephesians 3:17, “May Christ dwell in your hearts by faith,” take a back seat to human-centered imperatives: “Let Christ dwell in you.”

This kind of improper emphasis leaves us poorly equipped to deal with disagreements with fellow Christians about standards such as are covered by Paul in Romans 14. The congregant or the Christian school student hears that we must all be ruled by the weakest brother (for the sake of love/ministry). But Paul commands explicitly: “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth” (Romans 14:3). He does not say, “everybody stop eating so as not to offend the weaker brother.” (Some might be inclined to bring up I Corinthians 8:13 where Paul asserts that he will refrain from eating meat in order to keep from offending a brother. But what that argument is missing is the recognition that that Paul’s abstinence was a constraint he voluntarily placed upon himself. When institutions and churches impose their standards on a body of believers, they often insist that what they require is gospel truth and that there is no room for variance. Those who do vary are viewed suspiciously, or worse yet, find their entire spiritual condition called into question. There’s a very big distinction between the two.) Those who find themselves in the unfavorable situation of being asked to keep a memorialized set of standards and rules soon realize that it’s not an exercise in spirituality at all; religion ceases to be about Christ and instead becomes an exercise in works-righteousness, just as Paul warned that it would in Galatians 3:12:

Rule-keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule-keeping, a fact observed in Scripture: “The one who does these things [rule-keeping] continues to live by them.”

If salvation–including sanctification–is a work of divine grace in the life of a believer, then the process of growth proceeds at God’s pace and in God’s way. If a person is truly a child of God, then He is at work in each life, despite differing choices. We should let God work out matters of choice that are not in violation of Scripture. This is Paul’s argument in Romans 14. To say that failure to follow certain standards of behavior reveals spiritual deficit is to deny the fact that nothing we do will ever be enough to warrant God’s favor. Such misguided direction robs both the believer and the Spirit. Rather than having the opportunity to learn the leading of the Spirit and recognize inward motivation that leads to outward transformation, the Christian instead learns a counterfeit compliance borne of externalized enforcement. It’s this kind of “hothouse Christianity” that leaves people spiritually unprepared, struggling to survive in the winter of an inhospitable world.

To over-emphasize standards over-emphasizes the human side of sanctification and suggests that we can earn God’s favor. It cheats the believer out of two of the most precious truths of the gospel–grace and joy. While I might mess up again and again and again, I can rest in the fact God’s love for me did not begin with my own effort, and that His love for me now isn’t due to any work on my part. Instead of being saddled with the futile task of earning God’s favor, I can rejoice in the fact that He has favored me already because of Jesus.

So with these things in view, and with the acknowledged agreement that we must have some standards for conduct, how should we figure out what those standards should be? Our standards should reflect the emphases of Scripture. And Scripture does indeed emphasize externals. When you think about it, that’s the only thing that can be emphasized because we can’t see what’s in a person’s heart. But the externals prescribed by Scripture are far different than the usual list of do’s and don’ts that we hear. The “vices and virtues lists” in Scripture include these on the “do” list:

• Prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17)
• Witnessing (Matthew 28:19)
• Bible Reading (2 Timothy 2:15)
• Church Attendance (Hebrews 10:25)
• Giving (1 Corinthians 16:2)

Other Lists to Consider:

• Romans 12:1-2
• Ecclesiastes 12:13
• Galatians 5:19-26
• Ephesians 4:31 - Ephesians 5:4
• Colossians 3:5-15
• 2 Peter 1:5-7
• James 1:27
• John 3:34-35

When you look at what’s emphasized in these lists, you begin to realize the vast differences in the externals that are important to God and those that are important to man. Dress code, decorum, and obedience to authority are important, but these are the very same standards that are externally enforced in pagan corporate America. So why in the world do we take the same God-bereft, externalized approach when attempting to teach people how to live life from the inside out? If these standards are how a moral business man can live without Christ, then surely our institutionalizing and enforcing those same externals does nothing to foreground Christ. The emphases in the above Scripture passages are much, much more important. These are the things we should be foregrounding, not small-minded standards that change with the winds of culture.

I’m thinking of a couple of typical children’s songs: “Obedience is the very best way to show that you believe.” But what does Jesus say is the very best way to show that you believe? (See John 13:35.) This song does not match Scripture’s emphasis. And according to the song about Jonah we all know, what was Jonah’s problem? He “did not obey God immediately.” According to Scripture, Jonah’s problem was a lack of compassion. (See Jonah 4:2.) Obedience was not the real problem. We blunt the force of Scripture when we teach obedience and cheat compassion (the kind of compassion that allows us to live a Romans 14 Christianity). And when the cart of obedience gets before the horse of a transformed heart, the result usually ranges from numb compliance to hardened bitterness. The result is flawed because the approach was flawed.

The real issue, I believe, is not about internals or externals, law or grace, bondage or freedom–those issues too easily get us off-track. The true issue is about those things that are important to God. Spirituality is not about having some other spiritual “stuff” put inside us, and it is not about looking right and acting right. Looking right and acting right are important, but they’re due to our change of position before God, due to a change of values that God gradually works in us. Spirituality is axiological, not ontological. Being “spiritual,” therefore, means ordering your life by those things that are important to God. If that Spirit-led ordering is taken care of in a believer’s life, then the other minor, external details will, in time, take care of themselves.

The journey that a Christian takes with Christ is usually described in three tenses: justification, sanctification, and glorification. This is the path that’s mapped out for us when we come to know Christ. It’s a journey ordained by God that we will all someday complete. These aren’t discreet steps, and they’re not three separate actions that God performs in us. Rather all three “parts” are along the continuum of our salvation in Christ.

Scripture teaches us that our works do not play any role in salvation (Titus 3:5). We were absolutely, utterly dead in sin, unable to help ourselves, when Christ, in miraculous love, reached down to us, called us to Himself, and breathed His New Life into us. We had no ability to do that for ourselves; it was all due to God’s grace. This is the wonder of  justification that God performs in us.

Furthermore, God’s ultimate perfection of us in Heaven will obviously not be due to anything that we might be able to accomplish on our own (Philippians 1:6). This is the wonder of glorification that God will eventually accomplish in us.

But what’s this thing that’s going on in our lives today? What is this middle ground of sanctification all about? God began changing us at the cross, and we know that He will ultimately complete and perfect that change in Heaven, but what is this process that begins after salvation, this process of living the Christian life? Do our own good deeds as Christians earn us favor with God? Does God love us more when we’re good and less when we’re bad? Does the process of sanctification start and stop in our lives based on how much we read the Bible, how much we attend church, how much we tithe, pray, work, and strive?

Paul clearly spells out the answers to these questions in Galatians 3:2-14:

Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God’s Message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren’t smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing? It is not yet a total loss, but it certainly will be if you keep this up!

Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God.

Is it not obvious to you that persons who put their trust in Christ (not persons who put their trust in the law!) are like Abraham: children of faith? It was all laid out beforehand in Scripture that God would set things right with non-Jews by faith. Scripture anticipated this in the promise to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed in you.”

So those now who live by faith are blessed along with Abraham, who lived by faith—this is no new doctrine! And that means that anyone who tries to live by his own effort, independent of God, is doomed to failure. Scripture backs this up: “Utterly cursed is every person who fails to carry out every detail written in the Book of the law.”

The obvious impossibility of carrying out such a moral program should make it plain that no one can sustain a relationship with God that way. The person who lives in right relationship with God does it by embracing what God arranges for him. Doing things for God is the opposite of entering into what God does for you. Habakkuk had it right: “The person who believes God, is set right by God—and that’s the real life.” Rule-keeping does not naturally evolve into living by faith, but only perpetuates itself in more and more rule-keeping, a fact observed in Scripture: “The one who does these things [rule-keeping] continues to live by them.”

Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. Do you remember the Scripture that says, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”? That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross: He became a curse, and at the same time dissolved the curse. And now, because of that, the air is cleared and we can see that Abraham’s blessing is present and available for non-Jews, too. We are all able to receive God’s life, his Spirit, in and with us by believing—just the way Abraham received it.

“You didn’t begin this process,” Paul says, “so how is it that you believe your behavior can perfect it?” This is not Antinomianism, by the way, the idea that because of grace we have a license to sin. “God forbid,” Paul says (Romans 6:1-2).

So now we can see that just as our salvation was nothing we could have done for ourselves, and just as glorification is nothing that we’ll be able to accomplish for ourselves, so this middle ground of sanctification is also a work of divine grace in our lives. As God’s divine act, it is a stable, steady process that originates with Him and not with us. It proceeds at God’s pace and in God’s way. God calls us to enthusiastically join Him in that process, and when we do, our lives become a synergistic celebration of joy and grace. But the choice to join in or to resist does not impinge on God’s plan for us; rather, our choice determines whether or not we are living lives that are fulfilling, peaceful, and happy.

Our Christian culture (especially the slice I’ve grown up in) loves to get bogged down in Romans 7. You know, the “wish I could do the right thing, want to, really try to, but louse up time and time again” sort of stuff. We get stuck there, caught in the same downward spiral that Paul candidly reveals as something that he struggles with, too. We see Paul’s words, and suddenly feel that somehow our own efforts to do better, think better, work better, act better will set things straight. We see Paul’s words “I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing,” and we take out the flagellum, ready to get to work on beating the devil out of ourselves. Paul did the same, right? If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for us.

No, that’s not what Paul is saying, and that’s not where Paul stopped in his letter to the Romans. There’s another chapter that follows! Read Romans 8 and understand that Romans 7 was all about the miry, entangling bog that we find ourselves in as a result of the law. As sure as the Old Testament reveals our inadequacy to measure up to God’s righteousness, Paul’s words in Romans 7 are overcast with the impossibility of trying to live the Christian life in our own strength. He tells us as much in the “woulda, shoulda, coulda” of verse 15. Nearly the entire chapter (verses 1-24) is framed within the impossibility of fulfilling the law by our own efforts. But keep reading! In Romans 8 the sunshine of grace breaks through. The good news actually begins in verse 25 of chapter 7, but keep reading chapter 8:

With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.

God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.

Romans 7 is NOT the Christian life. Romans 7 is the law’s demand. Starting at salvation–starting at Romans 8–we have the new nature that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:17, and our natural inclination is now to whole-heartedly follow our Savior in doing what we’re supposed to do! Verses 9-14:

But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

Our walk with Christ–the process of sanctification–is not an arduous, difficult process; it’s the natural result of the new direction in which God pointed us at the moment of salvation. Christ lives in us, and His life is now our life, His righteousness is our righteousness. We wake each morning already having won the victory in Christ, not facing yet another day of defeat. As verses 15-17 tell us, our hearts run to God as naturally as a child’s innocent heart beats with love for his daddy:

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!

It’s time we let go of this idea that it’s all up to us. It’s time we quit telling ourselves and others that the Christian life is arduous, difficult, attainable through our own ill-conceived efforts, and borne of futile self-striving. It’s time we put down the cudgel of the law and take up the banner of grace. It’s time we fully embrace God’s work of salvation in us, that salvation that justifies us, that is now sanctifying us, and that will some day, in Heaven, glorify us.