One Way Love: Inexhaustible Grace for an Exhausted World (4 page)

Even the briefest glance at a newspaper confirms this claim. We are not good people getting better, but flawed men and women who, at worst, seem to be stuck in a cycle of heartbreak and self-destruction and, at best, are learning to live with some pretty serious limitations. We are, without a doubt, broken people living with other broken people in a broken world.

This does not mean that there aren’t plenty of bright spots in our lives and in our world. It simply means that as much as we might wish it were not so, our weaknesses tend to define us more than our strengths. We live where our problems are; they are the first things we think about when we wake up in the morning and the last things we worry about before we go to sleep. To know someone is to know them at their least flattering, not their shiniest.

Now you may not think of yourself as someone who is particularly rebellious or self-seeking. “I pay my taxes and read my Bible,” you might say. Perhaps you read my story at the beginning of this chapter with disbelief and maybe a little disdain. “How could he?” In the parable of the prodigal son, you probably identify more with the elder brother. Yet as we will explore later, the elder brother was just as much at odds with his father as the younger one.

Rebellion and conformity are often flip sides of the same coin. To be sure, sin takes all different forms—some of them overt, some more covert, some more damaging than others (in the short term)—but none of them benign. Once we understand that sin has more to do with what’s on the inside of us than what we do on the outside, we begin to see our own desperate need for grace, whether it takes the form of trying to find freedom and fullness of life by breaking the rules (younger brother) or keeping them (elder brother). The problem is that we are so accustomed to thinking about sin exclusively in terms of external behavior and outward rebellion.

DOING THE RIGHT THING FOR THE WRONG REASONS

Ethical behaviorism
is a term psychologists use to describe a schema where a person’s righteousness is defined exclusively in terms of what they do or do not do. In this sense, a righteous person is one who does the right things and avoids the wrong things. An unrighteous person is one who does the wrong things and avoids the right things. Defined this way, righteousness is a quality that can be judged by an observation of someone’s behavior. Virtue and uprightness is purely a matter of outer conduct without any hint of what goes on inside you.

William Hordern illustrates how this definition of righteousness is the definition our culture at large has adopted:

The law enforcement institutions of society are concerned with right behavior. They do not care why people obey the law, so long as they obey it. The person who breaks no laws is righteous in their sight regardless of the motivation that produces law-abiding behavior.
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In Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, he radically amplifies this definition of righteousness. He insists that righteousness is not simply a matter of what we do or don’t do but rather a question of why we do or don’t do it. His view of righteousness goes deeper than behavior and outward action. It always looks into a person, at the motivation of the act.

A few years ago, when my boys were younger, they would gather all the neighborhood kids in our yard to play football. And every once in a while, a pass would be overthrown, landing in my neighbor’s grass. My neighbor (an angry, grumpy old curmudgeon) would always come outside and scream at my boys and their friends, threatening to confiscate the ball if it happened again. My boys, being young at the time, would always come inside with tears in their eyes, lips quivering, because they were scared of our neighbor. Being the scrapper I am, there were countless times when I wanted to march over to my neighbor and give him a piece of my mind. I wanted to make it clear that if he ever yelled at my boys again … Well, you get the idea. I never did, though. I would stare him down from time to time, but I never went next door to let him have it. Some would assume that my refusal to let loose on my neighbor was an act of righteousness: I was exercising love, patience, and self-control. But was it?

Only God and I (and now you!) know the real reason I never went off on my mean neighbor: the potential risk to me was too high. I didn’t want to get in trouble. I didn’t want him calling the police. I didn’t want him filing a complaint against me to our neighborhood association. I didn’t want him gossiping about me and causing people in the neighborhood to think less of me. After all, everyone knows I’m a pastor, and I didn’t want to tarnish my image. And on and on and on. In other words, the very thing that may have, on the surface, seemed righteous was motivated by something terribly unrighteous: selfishness.

So the apparent “righteousness” of my deed was destroyed by the motivation that inspired it. It wasn’t as “righteous” as it seemed, to say the least. Hordern goes on, spelling this out very clearly:

Before an act of murder or adultery is committed there has first been the motivations of the person involved. In his or her heart there has been a murderous anger or an adulterous lust. What Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount is that many people may have the same motivations in their hearts without ever carrying out the external actions. There may be many reasons for not acting upon our motivations, but obviously one of the most common reasons is a fear of the consequences. The laws of all societies make it perilous to commit murder and laws or social pressures of all societies make it costly to commit adultery. Therefore when a person refrains from such actions it may not be because their heart is pure but simply a matter of self-protection. Jesus is saying that where the motivation for not acting on one’s desire is selfish, that person is as unrighteous in God’s eyes as the person who actually commits the crime.
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The reason this is so important is because many people inside the church think God cares only that we obey. In fact, many believe that it is even more honorable—and therefore more righteous—when we obey God against all desire to obey Him. Where did we get the idea that if we do what God tells us to do, even though “our hearts are far from Him,” it’s something to be proud of, something admirable, something praiseworthy, something righteous? Don’t get me wrong, we
should
obey when we don’t feel like it (I expect my children, for instance, to clean their rooms and respect their mother and me even when they don’t feel like it). But let’s not make the common mistake of proudly equating that with the righteousness that God requires.

The truth is that doing the right thing with the wrong motivation reveals deep unrighteousness, not devout righteousness. T. S. Eliot said it best:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
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If any kind of obedience, regardless of what motivates it, is what God is after, He would have showcased the Pharisees and exhorted all of us to follow their lead, to imitate them. But He didn’t. Jesus called them “whitewashed tombs”—clean on the outside, dead on the inside. They had been successful in achieving behavioristic righteousness and thought that’s what made them clean. But Jesus said, “So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matt. 23:28).

A large part of Jesus’s goal in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly in Matthew 5:17–48, is to make it painfully clear that whatever we think our greatest vice is, it is actually much worse: if we think it’s anger, Jesus claims it is actually murder; if we think it’s lust, Jesus shows us that it is actually adultery; if we think it’s impatience, Jesus says idolatry. By equating action with motivation, he kicks the legs out from under our carefully orchestrated self-salvation projects, painfully revealing our righteousness for the house of cards that it really is. His words leave no doubt that we are in need of a righteousness we can never attain on our own, an impossible righteousness that is always out of our reach. The purpose of the Sermon on the Mount is to demolish all notions that we can attain the righteousness required by God on our own.

External righteousness is something we believe we can achieve on our own with a little self-discipline (and a lot of self-righteousness). But Jesus wants us to see that regardless of how well we think we are doing or how righteous we think we’re becoming, when “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” becomes the standard and not “how much I’ve improved over the years,” we realize that we are much further gone than we imagined ourselves to be—that our unrighteousness is inescapable, that even the best things we do have something in them that needs to be forgiven.

This is not an easy message to accept. After all, it is much harder to defend our motivations, which we can rarely dictate or fully define, than our actions, over which we have a modicum of control (most of the time!). Which is ironic, since our motivations—both our fears
and
our hopes—are universally bound up with our desire to be in control of our lives. “Give me my inheritance now. I want to be on my own, thank you very much. Now leave me alone.” We want, in essence, to be our own Gods. In fact, the definition of human nature—of original sin—that I’d like to use in this book is simply that we are all people who are addicted to control (remember the serpent’s words to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3: “You will be like God”). The sad irony of our lives is that our desire to be in control almost always ends up controlling us.

In his book
Grace in Addiction
, John Z. describes our situation as that of actors who think they are directors:

Can you imagine the chaos that would break out on set if one of the actors tried suddenly to usurp the director’s job? The chaos probably wouldn’t last very long, because the actor would soon be on his way out the door and in search of a new job!

… Imagine further the insanity that would ensue if
all
of the actors in a show somehow got the same wrong idea about their roles, and they
all
started trying to control the production simultaneously, each with a different idea of how the story should be written.
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This may not be an optimistic or happy picture, but it is one that accounts for much of the pain and worry that marks our lives. This rather sober view of human nature means that the great question of life is not
if
our addiction to control will cause us to act in foolish and self-seeking ways, but what will happen
when
it does. It means that the great theme of human existence is the presence or lack of love we experience in those times of defeat. It’s when we come to the end of ourselves that we come to the beginning of grace.

Fortunately, and not coincidentally, the Bible is centrally occupied with these very subjects as well.
God
is centrally occupied with them. How does the Director relate to all these actors who are compulsively trying to do His job for Him (and producing disastrous results)? Does He fire them? Or does He save them?

The great hope we find in the Christian faith is that God is not us. In fact, the cross tells us that His response to people addicted to their own control is like that of the father in the parable. No matter how many times we’ve blown it, no matter how many years we’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get better, God attaches no strings to His love. None. His love for us does not depend on our loveliness. It goes one way. As far as our sin may extend, the grace of our Father extends further.

WRITING CHECKS YOU CAN(NOT) CASH

One final story to illustrate before we move on. A couple of years after I was kicked out of my home, when I was living in an apartment with some friends, I called my dad (after losing yet another of my many dead-end jobs—I called him only when I needed something) and said, “Rent’s due, and I don’t have any money.”

My dad asked, “Well, what happened to your job?” I made up some lie about cutbacks or something. He said, “Meet me at Denny’s in an hour.” I said okay.

After we sat down, he signed a blank check, handed it to me, and said, “Take whatever you need. This should hold you over until you can find another job.” He didn’t probe into why I lost my job or yell at me for doing so. He didn’t give a limit (“Here’s $1,000”). And I absolutely took advantage! I not only remember taking that check and writing it out for much more than I needed, I remember sneaking into my mom and dad’s house on numerous occasions and stealing checks from out of his checkbook. I mastered forging his signature. I went six months at one point without a job, because I didn’t need one! Any time I needed money, I would go steal another check and forge his signature—five hundred dollars, three hundred dollars, seven hundred dollars. I completely abused his kindness—and he knew it! Years later he told me that he saw all those checks being cashed, but he decided not to say anything about it at the time. It didn’t happen immediately (the fruits of grace are always in the future), but that demonstration of unconditional grace was the beginning of God doing a miraculous work in my heart and life.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this is
the
pattern every time for every child in every situation. What I’ve given is a snapshot of one thing my father did at a very particular time for a very particular reason. As I described above, my dad handled me differently in a variety of situations. For example, my parents literally tried everything from private school to public school to homeschool to counseling, before they eventually kicked me out.

But on this occasion, at this time in my life—knowing me the way only a father can know his son—my dad did something I’m sure was scary for him, and God used it.

My father died in 2010, twenty-one years after he sent his disrespectful, ungrateful son on his way. And it was his unconditional, reckless, one-way love for me at my most arrogant and worst that God used to eventually bring me back. Until the day he died, my father was my biggest cheerleader and my best friend. I miss him every day.