One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (12 page)

After a month with an uneasy conscience, I was finally found out. Another neighbor had seen me sneaking around and told my parents. My father called me in from playing outside with my friends and asked me if I remembered anything important about the flooding incident. I knew something was up, but I felt I had to stick with the lie at this point. Finally, my dad told me that I was busted. I experienced an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt for my sins, as well as an intense fear of the consequences. I sobbed and muttered, “Dad, I’m so sorry. I’ve been asking God to forgive me for so long, and I don’t know if He ever will.” In a moment of parental love and great wisdom, my dad said, “If you asked God to forgive you, then you are forgiven. You deserve to be punished, and this will cost a lot of money to fix. But, son, you are forgiven. Go back outside and play.”
6

The fruit of one-way love in Justin’s life was not only a renewed love for his father and genuine willingness to behave (for a while, at least!) but a faith in God’s mercy and love that has gripped and carried him to this very day. As of this writing, Justin’s most recent book is titled
On the Grace of God
.

A FINAL WORD

The grace that Jesus showed Zacchaeus is only a preview of what awaited him at the cross. The cross is where his mission to “seek and save the lost” was ultimately accomplished. Remember, he died a criminal’s death. In that fateful moment, Jesus not only associated himself with tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers and movie stars and addicts and preachers and mischievous teenagers, he bore their sin on his shoulders. He bore
our
sin—every last drop. There was nothing partial; it was and it is the apex of one-way love. Jesus suffered the scorn, the punishment, and the wrath we deserve, and in return gives us the gift of his righteousness. It cannot be undone. Those who are lost are found, and where there was once judgment, there is now only love, extravagant and free. Where there was once guilt by association, now there is only glory by association.

So … that cactus you’re so cozy with? You can hug it all you want—the needles have fallen off.

NOTES

CHAPTER 7

GRACE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

In 2007, the New York–based website Gawker.com named John Fitzgerald Page “The Worst Person in the World.”
1
John, a young professional in Atlanta at the time, was awarded the dubious title after an exchange he had with a young woman on Match.com, an online dating site, was made public. The young lady in question had made an overture by “winking” at John, admitting in retrospect that she probably should have thought twice “considering his screen name was ‘IvyLeagueAlum.’”

John responded with a short, introductory message, listing several facts about himself, some relevant, some less so (height, weight, schools attended, fitness regimen). He also asked a couple of pointed questions of his new admirer—where she had gone to school, the kind of products she enjoyed, and what activities she currently participated in to stay in shape. He seemed especially concerned that his would-be date was not misrepresenting herself physically. John had apparently been “deceived before by inaccurate representations”—given the circumstances, an honest concern. More problematic was the self-satisfied tone in which his concern was expressed.

Something about his message must have rubbed its recipient the wrong way, as she replied with a perfunctory “No thanks.” Presumably the end of the story. But a spurned John shot back:

I think you forgot how this works. You hit on me, and therefore have to impress ME and pass MY criteria and standards—not vice versa. 6 pictures of just your head and your inability to answer a simple question lets me know one thing. You are not in shape. I am a trainer on the side, in fact, I am heading to the gym in 26 minutes!

So next time you meet a guy of my caliber, instead of trying to turn it around, just get to the gym! I will even give you one free training session, so you don’t blow it with the next 8.9 on Hot or Not, Ivy League grad, Mensa member, can bench/squat/leg press over 1200 lbs., has had lunch with the secretary of defense, has an MBA from the top school in the country, drives a Beemer convertible, has been in 14 major motion pictures, was in Jezebel’s Best dressed, etc. Oh, that is right, there aren’t any more of those!

In the face of rejection, poor John defended himself. In fact, he did more than that; he justified himself. He listed his achievements, his attributes and accolades—some of which are, on the surface, impressive. John’s problem isn’t his résumé; it’s what he
thinks
about his résumé. He used it to justify his existence, leaning on it for righteousness, and therefore, life and love. Yet no one can love a résumé, and not just because we can know a million things about a person and still not know them. No, love that depends on certain standards of performance isn’t really love at all. It’s more like emotional bartering, a two-way dynamic if ever there was one. It alienates.
2

We might like to think John is an extreme case, but he’s not—at least not as much as we might wish he were. Maybe there is someone in your life who makes you feel insecure; someone whose very existence you find to be threatening—a walking judgment, if you will. Maybe you find yourself dropping names around that person, talking about things you think might impress them. We may not (hopefully) be as brazen or impulsive as John Fitzgerald Page in flaunting our advantages or achievements, but all of us are performancists in some arena, wired for control and proving.

The truth is, narratives of self-justification burble beneath more of our relationships and endeavors than we would care to admit. In fact, the need to justify ourselves drives an enormous amount of daily life, especially the exhausting parts. This chapter seeks to lay out some of the specific implications one-way love might have in the lives of self-justifying men and women, especially in how we relate to our spouses, our children, and ourselves.

GRACE AND PERSONAL IDENTITY

Starting at the back of the line, the area of personal identity is a place where the rubber of grace meets the road of everyday life in an especially palpable way. If an identity based on “works of the law” looks like John Fitzgerald Page, what might one based in the one-way love of God? For an answer, we need look no further than the apostle Paul, who once wrote a letter not too dissimilar from that of John Fitzgerald Page:

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. (Phil. 3:4–6)

Paul, it would seem, had plenty to be proud of. His pedigree, his track record, his religious standing were all impeccable. If he had wanted to justify his existence, he would have had a comparably solid basis on which to do so—the first-century Jewish equivalent of blue blood, Ivy League, Fortune 500 status. But unlike John Fitzgerald Page, Paul doesn’t end there. Or you might say, that’s
exactly
where he ends:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. (Phil. 3:7–9)

The contrast Paul makes here is between a “righteousness of my own that comes from the law” and “the righteousness from God that depends on faith [in Christ].” One is earned, and the other is bestowed, or you might say one is a paycheck while the other is a gift. One is based on our own efforts and attributes; the other is based on God’s. One has to do with getting, the other with receiving; one with action, the other with faith. The funny thing is that while the latter is so clearly preferable to the former, we almost always choose the wrong one!

Paul’s identity is anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not his own; Christ’s strength, not his; Christ’s pedigree and track record, not his own; Christ’s victory, not Paul’s. What a relief. If Paul, whose accomplishments are not exactly small potatoes, saw this as something so good that he was willing to suffer “the loss of all things,” then how much sweeter for those of us who didn’t start umpteen churches or write a sizeable chunk of the New Testament! Achievements, reputations, strengths, weaknesses, family backgrounds, education, looks, and so on—these things still exist, of course, but only for their own sake. They are divested of the weight they were never meant to bear in the first place, and as such, they can be enjoyed or appreciated without being worshipped. In fact, Paul counts them as loss, which is perhaps a little ironic, since most of the things we tend to define ourselves by are things we’re going to lose anyway, if not through aging (beauty, strength, smarts, etc.), then through death (name, wealth, regard).

An identity based in the one-way love of God does not take into account public opinion or, thankfully, even personal opinion. It is a gift from Someone who is not you. As my friend Justin Buzzard wrote recently, “The gospel doesn’t just free you from what other people think about you, it frees you from what you think about yourself.”
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In other words, you are not who others see you to be, and you are not who you see yourself to be; you are who God sees you to be—His beloved child, with whom He is well pleased.

I’ll say it again, because I need to hear it as much as anyone: the one-way love of God frees us from the oppressive pressure to perform, the slavish demand to “become.” God is not waiting for us to do or not do something in order to unlock His love. The Gospel declares that in Christ, we already are everything we need to be. His righteousness has been imputed to us, just as our sin was imputed to him, and as a result we are “found in him.” Actually, Paul goes even further than that. He speaks of our “having been buried with
[Christ] in baptism, in which [we] were also raised
with him
through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead” (Col. 2:12, emphasis mine). Our old identity—the things that previously “made us”—has been put to death. Our new identity is “in Christ.”

We have been given a worth and purpose and security and significance, next to which the things of this world are revealed to be transitory at best. What more could we possibly want or need?

SELF-FORGETFULNESS

We are talking here about freedom from self, what Tim Keller calls “the freedom of self-forgetfulness.” Preoccupation with our performance actually hinders our performance, does it not? Constant introspection makes us increasingly self-centered—the exact opposite of how the Bible describes obedience or goodness. We might even say that, in one sense, sanctification is the process of forgetting about ourselves. “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Decreasing is impossible for the person who keeps thinking about himself. C. S. Lewis said that we’ll know a truly humble man when we meet him because “he will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.”
4
When we spend more time thinking about ourselves and how we’re doing than we do about Jesus and what he’s done, we shrink into ourselves. As any gardener will tell you, no seed can grow if it is constantly being dug up to check on its progress.

To be clear, we are not talking about self-loathing or false humility. The opposite! One-way love frees us from the burden of having to establish our own worth, which means we can actually enjoy and appreciate the gifts God has given us on their own terms rather than as means to an end, condemning ourselves for not being good enough stewards. German theologian Oswald Bayer makes the important point that, far from being a “deadening of self,” forgetting yourself leads to life and freedom:

Those who are born anew are no longer entangled with themselves. They are solidly freed from this entanglement, from the self-reflection that always seeks what belongs to itself. This is not a deadening of self. It does not flee from thought and responsibility. No, it is the gift of self-forgetfulness.
The passive righteousness of faith tells us: You do not concern yourself at all! In that God does what is decisive in us, we may live outside ourselves and solely in him. Thus, we are hidden from ourselves, and removed from the judgment of others or the judgment of ourselves about ourselves as a final judgment. “Who am I?” Such self-reflection never finds peace in itself.
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Make no mistake, as long as we’re living in this world, we will be tempted to locate our identity in something or someone smaller than Jesus. Not just tempted, we
will
locate our identity in all sorts of things that will disappoint us. That is what it means to be addicted to control, after all. We will listen to the words we read on billboards and hear on TV, the voices inside our own heads that tell us we are not enough, that we have to go out and “get it,” that it is up to us to secure our significance, legacy, and impact. We may even find ourselves writing emails that sound like John Fitzgerald Page’s. Fortunately, the gift of identity we have been given in Christ is not contingent upon our grasping it tightly enough, either spiritually or intellectually. If it were, it wouldn’t be much of a gift! It is contingent only on Christ’s dying and rising again. It persists even when we resist.

The Gospel, in other words, liberates us to be okay with not being okay. We can stop pretending that we are anyone but who we actually are. Which means we can admit our weaknesses to ourselves without feeling as if the flesh is being ripped off our bones. We can take off our masks and explore our self-justifying compulsions from a safe distance.

When you understand that your significance, security, and identity are all locked in Christ, you don’t have to win—you’re free to lose. And nothing in this broken world can beat a person who isn’t afraid to lose! You may even find you’re free enough to say crazy, risky, counterintuitive stuff like, “To live is Christ and to die is gain”!

GRACE IN RELATIONSHIPS

As we discussed in chapter 3, every relationship, to some degree or another, is assaulted by an aroma of judgment—the sense that we will never measure up to the expectations and demands of another. Critical environments are contexts that, while never explicitly stated, shout: “My approval of you, love for you, and joy in you depends on your ability to measure up to my standards, to become what I need you to become in order for me to be happy.” It’s a context in which achievement precedes acceptance. We’ve all felt this. We’ve felt it at school, in churches, in the workplace, with our friends, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, and most painfully, at home with our spouses, our children, our siblings, and our parents. This is why any relationship where criticism is constant, where you always feel like you’re being evaluated and falling short, is an unhappy relationship. Relational demand always creates relational detachment.

The funny thing is that while such situations often seem to be dominated by law, it’s usually the cheap kind. That is to say, as we noted before, hypercritical and oppressively legalistic environments are not dominated
enough
by law! They run on an inflated view of human nature, the idea that, through hard work and determination, we can meet whatever standard has been set. And so we become demanding of ourselves. We become our own personal taskmasters, perfectionistic and inflexible. “Just do it” becomes our mantra. And when we finally realize we can’t measure up, what happens? Maybe we despair and withdraw, or maybe we start pretending to be someone capable of meeting whatever standard we’ve fallen short of: “I hope people don’t find out who I really am, because I am a train wreck. I am not pulling this off. I’m not getting it done. I may have achieved a great level of success in business, but my kids can’t stand me. My wife is just going along for the ride, because she needs me to support her, but she doesn’t want to be around me. I’m lonely. I have no friends. I’ve lived my life for the wrong things and for the wrong reasons.” A high view of human nature can turn life into a friendless masquerade in pursuit of self-acceptance. A graceless existence, in other words.