One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (17 page)

When Jesus was asked in John 6:28, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” he answered, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Jesus was making the indisputable point that unbelief is the force that gives birth to all of our bad behavior and every moral failure and the pain and heartbreak those things cause. In his preface to his commentary on Romans, Martin Luther writes:

… only unbelief is called sin by Christ, as he says in John, chapter 16, “The Spirit will punish the world because of sin, because it does not believe in me.” Furthermore, before good or bad works happen—which are the good or bad fruits of the heart—there has to be present in the heart either faith or unbelief, the root, sap and chief power of all sin. That is why, in the Scriptures, unbelief is called the head of the serpent and of the ancient dragon which the offspring of the woman, i.e. Christ, must crush, as was promised to Adam (cf. Genesis 3).
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Disbelief, in other words, lies at the root of self-absorption. Without a belief in anything beyond or outside of us, we become so burdened with ourselves that we don’t have time to love and serve and give to others. The reason we fight sin, then, is
not
because our sin blocks God’s love for us, but because our sin blocks our love for God and others.

So I am all for effort, good works, fighting sin, and resisting temptation as long as we understand that it is not our work for God but God’s work for us that has fully and finally set things right between God and sinners.

Still, I would be lying if I didn’t say that the older I get, the more convinced I become that the slide toward projecting our horizontal life onto our vertical one is as universal as it is subtle and even unconscious. Any talk of sanctification, therefore, that gives the impression that our efforts secure more (or less) of God’s love is a nonstarter that needs to be put to death. As my friend Scott Clark once told me, “We cannot use the doctrine of sanctification to renegotiate our acceptance with God.” The good works that naturally and spontaneously flow from faith are not part of a transaction with God—they are for others. Pure and simple.

THE KEYS IN YOUR POCKET

As long as human beings are addicted to their own sense of control, objections to one-way love will never stop. Their precise form may change, but once they stick in our ear, they can erode our confidence in the assurance that is ours in Christ. They can make us forget about the freedom he won for us. Before long, we will find ourselves re-enslaved to the Law, running around like mad trying to earn what we already have. But thankfully, God uses even our deluded, furious activity to remind us of His Gospel. He uses our exhaustion! As George Herbert once wrote, from the perspective of God speaking about man, “If goodness lead him not, yet weariness / May toss him to my breast.”
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As an embarrassing illustration, on more occasions than I would care to admit in the past year, I have been late for a meeting or an appointment because I haven’t been able to find my car keys. Certain that either my wife or one of my three children has misplaced them, I have frantically searched from room to room, looking for someone to blame: “Has anyone seen my keys? I’m late for a meeting. Who was playing with my keys? I put them right here on the counter and now they’re gone. They didn’t just vanish into thin air! Who picked them up? Where are they? I’m late.” And right about the time I’m ready to order mass executions in my home, after I’ve taken that one last look in my bedroom (huffing and puffing, moaning and groaning), I put my hand in my pocket, and there they are. Like a clown who can’t find the sunglasses perched on his own head, the keys had been there the entire time.

Every time I tell that story, people laugh. And rightfully so. What forgetful moron frantically looks for car keys that are in his pocket? Me, that’s who.

Unfortunately, this is the way so many of us Christians live: searching high and low for something we already have, trying to earn something we’ve already been given, forgetting that everything we need, we already possess in Christ. Or perhaps it’s not that we forget, perhaps it’s that we prefer having the “elf on the shelf” keeping track of our every move. It makes us feel safer. We would rather work under duress than live under freedom. Yet this is precisely why we need to hear, each and every week, the basic good news that because of Jesus’s finished work, we already have all of the justification, approval, significance, security, freedom, validation, love, righteousness, and rescue for which we desperately long—and look for in a thousand things that are infinitely smaller than Jesus.

Fortunately for morons like me, the moment we finally give up our desperate search is the same moment we hear that still, small voice. Its message is clear: “The keys are in your pocket.”

NOTES

CHAPTER 10

THE END OF TO-DO LISTS

People used to say, half seriously, that when a person turned forty, they were “over the hill.” Life would be a downward slope from there on, with your best days behind you. You don’t hear that very often anymore. These days, it’s things like “forty is the new thirty”—whatever that means—or the tried and true “life begins at forty.” Like any birthday, forty is largely an arbitrary marker, the accompanying slogans being more a way to sell corny greeting cards than anything else. So I admit to some surprise at how much that last refrain has been ringing in my head since I hit the big four-oh. In certain respects, life
did
begin at forty.

When I was twenty-five, I believed I could change the world, and I set about that task with all my strength. I was a go-getter. I had plenty of fuel in the tank and wind at my back. At forty, I have come to realize that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people’s. Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns—whatever it is for you—live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person. Instead of the constantly moving escalator of progress I thought I was on when I was twenty-five, my life has looked more like Samuel Johnson’s.

Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth-century thinker and writer, documented in his diary his efforts over the years to fight sloth by getting up early in the morning to pray. He wrote:

1738: “Oh, Lord, enable me to redeem the time which I have spent in sloth.”

1757: “Oh, mighty God, enable me to shake off sloth and redeem the time misspent in idleness and sin by diligent application of the days yet remaining.”

1759: “Enable me to shake off idleness and sloth.”

1761: “I have resolved until I have resolved that I am afraid to resolve again.”

1764: “My indolence since my last reception of the sacrament has sunk into grossest sluggishness. My purpose is from this time to avoid idleness and to rise early.”

1764 (5 months later): He resolves to rise early, “not later than six if I can.”

1765: “I purpose to rise at eight because, though, I shall not rise early it will be much earlier than I now rise for I often lie until two.”

1769: “I am not yet in a state to form any resolutions. I purpose and hope to rise early in the morning, by eight, and by degrees, at six.”

1775: “When I look back upon resolution of improvement and amendments which have, year after year, been made and broken, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because reformation is necessary and despair is criminal.” He resolves again to rise at eight.

1781 (3 years before his death): “I will not despair, help me, help me, oh my God. I resolve to rise at eight or sooner to avoid idleness.”
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Dr. Johnson’s attitude reminds me much of myself over the years. Try and fail. Fail then try. Try and succeed. Succeed then fail. Two steps forward. One step back. One step forward. Three steps back. Every year, I get better at some things, worse at others. Some areas remain stubbornly static. For example, I have it on good authority that I’ve become a bit slower to make my point in conversations with my wife—that I listen more and talk less (one step forward!). Perhaps I find it slightly easier to let things go, and criticism doesn’t cripple me quite as much. I’ve even been told I’ve grown more patient and outwardly trusting of God (cha-ching, cha-ching!). But that’s only part of the story. As the years go by, the slings and arrows of life are such that I’ve also become more self-protective and closed off to other people (one step back). More than ever these days, I keep people at bay—I may trust God more, but I trust those around me less than ever (gong! gong!).

Then there are those areas in which there has been no movement in either direction. No matter how hard I try, I still get frustrated by the same things that frustrated me fifteen years ago: traffic jams, unexpected interruptions, long lines, complainers, feeling misunderstood, people who play it safe, and so on and so forth. To complicate matters even more, there’s the paradoxical nature of the whole enterprise—which makes it so difficult to write about. Namely, feeling proud of improvement is almost always a sign that we’ve gotten worse. Yet when we honestly acknowledge the ways in which we’ve gotten worse, that tends to be a sign that we are actually getting better. Round and round we go. You get the idea.

In his classic treatise on grace,
The Ragamuffin Gospel
, Brennan Manning wrote, “When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and I get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games.”
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That’s the way it is for all of us. That’s the way it is for me. Life isn’t what I thought it would be when I was younger. And I’m not what I thought I would be as I’ve gotten older.

If this sounds like a depressing sentiment, it isn’t meant to be one. Quite the opposite. If I am grateful for anything about these past fifteen years, it’s for the way God has wrecked my idealism about myself and the world and replaced it with a realism about the extent of His grace and love, which is much bigger than I had ever imagined. Indeed, the smaller you get—the smaller life makes you—the easier it is to see the grandeur of God and His Gospel, the more grateful you become. While I am far more incapable than I may have initially thought, God is infinitely more capable than I ever hoped.

In other words, the older I get, the more smitten I become by the fact that God’s love for me, His approval and commitment to me, does not ride on my transformation but on Jesus’s substitution. Jesus is infallibly devoted to us in spite of our inconsistent devotion to him. The Gospel is not a command to hang on to Jesus. It’s a promise that no matter how weak your faith and how unsuccessful your efforts may be, God is always holding on to you. In this light, life is simply the chronicle of God’s successes perfectly meeting our failures.

THE END OF TO-DO-LIST CHRISTIANITY

You see, I grew up believing that the whole goal of being a Christian was to be good, to get better, to progress, to become stronger and stronger, more and more competent. Jesus was essentially Santa Claus. He knew if I had been naughty or nice and would only bring me presents if I behaved. I am pretty sure that I’m not the only American Sunday schooler who picked up on this train of thought. “Santa theology” is commonplace, because it is in our nature to be performance-driven when it comes to our relationship with God. We thank God for saving us, for justifying us, and getting us into the kingdom, but then we drift from grace to performance.
Now that I’ve been saved, my job is to make sure God doesn’t regret His sacrifice,
we think.
I needed Jesus to get me in, but now that I’m in, it’s up to me to make sure I stay in.

Perhaps you remember that Kenny Loggins song from the early 1990s, “Meet Me Half Way”? It could be the theme song of much of modern American Christian preaching. The formal name for this heresy—which can be paraphrased in that unfortunate cliché “God helps those who help themselves”—is Pelagianism. “I do my part, and God does His.” We are not Creator and creature; we are partners. In this schema, no matter what the intention may be, Jesus is eventually eclipsed, peripheral at best.
We
become the center of the story. Our faith is no longer about Christ’s performance on our behalf, but our performance for him. We become the driver of our lives, and Jesus—if he’s in the car at all—is in the backseat shouting instructions as we progress on down the road of sanctification. It took a few major setbacks to open my eyes to how false a conception of Christianity I, and many others like me, had unconsciously swallowed.

I have written elsewhere about the painful experience of merging two congregations in 2008–09, New City and Coral Ridge here in Florida. Divisions, petitions, clandestine meetings, public votes, mudslinging, the whole nine yards—it was awful. Yet God used a pretty nasty experience all the way around, one that coincided with the death of my father, to reveal just how much I was relying on the very idols I was preaching against. When the validation and adoration I was so addicted to were taken away, I realized how much I had been depending on what other people thought of me rather than God’s unshakeable love for sinners. Like anyone going through withdrawal, it was extremely painful. I was brought face-to-face with the persistence of sin in the life of Christians, both others and myself. I wanted out. I wanted to quit preaching. I wanted to quit ministry. I wrestled with God and lost. Big-time. It took what was one of the worst times of my life to open my eyes both to the reality of who I was and who God is.

As the subtitle suggests, one of the main inspirations for this book was a desire to bring the good news of God’s one-way love to bear on the exhaustion that seems to define so much modern life. You see it in the nonstop world of secular performancism, where people are exhausted by the endless demands of a plugged-in existence. You see it in the to-do list behaviorism of the American church, where well-intentioned Christians run themselves and their fellow believers ragged trying to keep up appearances by doing more and trying harder. For many, their experience in church, theoretically a sanctuary from striving, has perpetuated, not relieved, their exhaustion.

In the midst of such draining circumstances, what allows me to wake up in the morning is the same thing that has made this long, strange trip so worthwhile: the Gospel. Specifically, the breakthrough in understanding the Gospel to be just as much for Christians as it is for non-Christians. I once assumed (along with the vast majority of professing Christians) that the Gospel was simply what non-Christians must believe in order to be saved before advancing to deeper theological waters after their conversion. I didn’t realize that once God rescues sinners, His plan isn’t to steer us beyond the Gospel but to move us more deeply into it. The good news that Jesus paid it all not only ignites the Christian life but fuels it as well. As my friend J. D. Greear puts it, “The gospel is not just the diving board off of which we jump into the pool of Christianity … it is the pool that we swim in each and every day.”
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The church’s failure to extend God’s one-way love to its members has resulted in the burnout and hypocrisy that characterizes far too much American Christianity, not to mention its perception from the outside as a vehicle of control and judgment.

Ironically, this confusion is not strictly a modern problem. It has roots in the human condition—people addicted to their own sense of control—and so it is something that has plagued the church since its inception. Fortunately, it is also something that Jesus more or less directly addressed.

THE PHARISEE AND THE TAX COLLECTOR

The parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is probably Christ’s most famous and confounding deconstruction of behaviorism:

Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted. (Luke 18:10–14)

For most, if not all of us, the word
Pharisee
has negative connotations. If we are familiar with the New Testament, what springs to mind are those self-righteous religious leaders who persecuted Jesus at every turn, men who embellished God’s Law with rules and regulations that fed their sense of superiority. That is why we have incorporated words like
pharisaical
into our vocabulary, which is synonymous with
legalistic
except that it has an even deeper sting to it.

The contemporaries of Jesus would have had much more positive associations. They would have thought of good men—good dads, good husbands, faithful men who were disciplined to the core and committed to keeping the Word of God. These were true Jewish patriots who were highly honored and esteemed for their commitment to God, morality, goodness, and virtue. If you had told a first-century Jew that he was being pharisaical, he would have accepted that as a compliment with humble appreciation.

In this parable, Jesus made it very clear that the Pharisee
was
as outwardly good as he claimed. His problem, much like good old John Fitzgerald Page, was how he thought about his goodness. His pride, in other words. His record really was something to behold, and he knew it. Look again at his description of himself. He lived an outwardly righteous life. He practiced a consistent religious devotion. It was undoubtedly his practice to go up to the temple regularly to pray. He was honest in his dealings with his fellow man, committed to God, family, church, and country. He was the kind of person you would want for a neighbor.

The radical reversal in this short parable—and in the entire narrative of the New Testament—is that Jesus was saying that the “good” need to repent just as much as the “bad.” Religious people need to be forgiven just as much as nonreligious people. To tell a Pharisee that he was the one in need of repentance was mind-blowing to the point of nonsense. “Wait a minute, Jesus,” his hearers would have responded. “Are you sure you’ve got this right? These are the model citizens that we’ve always tried to emulate … and now you’re saying that
they
are the ones who need to repent? What?” Think about it. The same thing happened in the story of the woman washing Christ’s feet that we looked at in the last chapter.