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Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair.
-Blaise Pascal
I may have trouble seeing, but I’m not blind. The harder I have tried to make the people in my life prouder of me and happier for knowing me—the more I realize I have disappointed instead. I have failed others as well as myself. I know my failures are obvious and we’d rather ignore them—although some may wish to publicize them for reasons of their own. Does my life exist to make a name for myself or build a legacy I can be proud of? I am more apt to be a colossal failure than I an amazing success. I don’t much like it really—and my friends tell me I need to stop beating myself up and over it.
Alright—point made.
I concede.
But it don’t change the facts.
He told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people: “Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.”
”Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’”
Jesus commented, “This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.” (Luke 18:9-14, The Message Bible)
I’m not giving myself a hard time. I’m really being pretty easy on myself considering. I’m not going to write to beat myself up. Likewise, I didn’t decide to write to build myself up. And just as I’m not going to talk about my accomplishments—I’m not going to flog myself. The excruciating details surrounding my failures are irrelevant, there’s no good to come of that for goodness sakes. What I will do is write about how much my inability to save myself or anybody else only highlights the sufficiency of God in Christ Jesus.
And in the end I won’t rise up to be anyone in and of myself—Jesus has leaned over and helped me up.
I will need more of the same in the days to come.
Whenever faith seems an entitlement, or a measuring rod, we cast our lots with the Pharisees and grace softly slips away.
-Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor
Pastor Mark Driscoll has laid out what I believe to be the best list I have run across in some time on the distinct differences between the Gospel and religion. Jesus delivered the very Gospel we preach today within the context of his earthly ministry and his fulfillment of the Holy Scriptures. It was the religion of the Pharisees (and any other man-devised system of connecting with the Almighty) that he came to abolish with his very life.
When you get down to brass tacks—Jesus is the Gospel and Jesus is about setting us free. And since I have been outlining what freedom is and what it isn’t (the Gospel shouts Freedom! after all)—I figured it would be fitting to share Driscoll’s list while we are taking the time to expose the fallacies of religion that are constantly at work to undermine the message of freedom.
Religion says, ‘If I obey God, God will love me.’ Gospel says, ‘Because God love me, I can obey.’
Religion has good people and bad people. Gospel has only repentant and unrepentant people.
Religion values a birth family. Gospel values a new birth.
Religion depends on what I do. Gospel depends on what Jesus has done.
Religion claims that sanctification justifies me. Gospel claims that justification enables sanctification.
Religion has the goal to get from God. Gospel has the goal to get to God.
Religion sees hardships as punishment for sin. Gospel sees hardship as sanctified affliction.
Religion is about me. Gospel is about Jesus.
Religion believes appearing as a good person is the key. Gospel believes that being honest is the key.
Religion has an uncertainty of standing before God. Gospel has certainty based on Jesus’ work.
Religion sees Jesus a the means. Gospel sees Jesus as the end.
Religion ends in pride or despair. Gospel ends in humble joy.
As Driscoll so explicitly points out, the Gospel of freedom Jesus embodies and the religion he came to expose are at polar ends of the spectrum—they are at diabolical odds with each other.
Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified. (Galatians 5:23b-24, The Message Bible)
Upon a life I did not live, upon a death I did not die; another’s life, another’s death, I stake my whole eternity.
Jesus is who we run to when we escape the clutches of religion.
I have some Christian brothers I will call them—who share my faith in Jesus and just happen to be very dear to my heart. I have written about these guys a time or two in days gone by. These are the same guys who hugged me when the one person I loved most in this life walked away from a lifetime together—and more painfully, from me—never to return.
These guys are true-blue guys. And what I mean by that is simply this: They are sports-minded, red-blooded, beer-drinking, and girl-liking guys (several are married mind you—so they would be one-girl-liking guys). I know I said they were Christian brothers—and to tell you the truth (I do write about Christian spirituality—you wouldn’t expect me to lie), I’m not so sure if I have ever met too many men over the course of my adult life that I have enjoyed the company of more than these guys. The group was born out of (at least in part) a shared discontentment with religion—it’s limitations, trappings, and barriers in regards to meaningful relationships. Religion can be very isolating and some of you reading this know very well what I am talking about. The group’s rise and success in large measure has been in simply responding to those recovering from the damaging effects of religion and a dire need for true community.
What I took away from my time with these guys was real—a new appreciation for the freedom Jesus came to bring us in his coming to earth two-thousand years ago.
I do have reason for pause however—my concern is that my friends don’t get so caught up in their new found comradeship and shared authenticity, humility, and anti-religious sentiment—that they leave Jesus in the dust in the process of their rebelling against toxic religion and in turn forget the very freedom they celebrated to begin with. We must never forget that true freedom begins at the foot of the Cross and that any lasting freedom must remain there to continue—to forget Jesus would be to abandon the very freedom of God.
To see Jesus is to look freedom in the face—in all it’s fullness.
There were some Greeks in town who had come up to worship at the Feast. They approached Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee: ‘Sir, we want to see Jesus. Can you help us?’ (John 12:20-21, The Message Bible)
Do you want to see Jesus?
You can—he’s not hiding from you.
There are some who have no understanding to hear the truth of freedom and insist upon their goodness as means for salvation. These people you must resist, do the very opposite, and offend them boldly lest by their impious views they drag many with them into error. For the sake of liberty of the faith do other things which they regarded as the greatest of sins… use your freedom constantly and consistently in the sight of and despite the tyrants and stubborn so that they may learn that they are impious, that their law and works are of no avail for righteousness, and that they had no right to set them up.
-Martin Luther
Some of you must to be shaking your heads and saying by now—Come on Ken, there has to be some rules, you are giving people the idea that they can live any way they choose and still be a Christian.
I have said nothing of the sort. I will concede—the gospel of grace is abused—but we don’t pull the medicine off the shelves just because some would use it recklessly. What I have said is that we want rules instead of relationship. We like religion over Jesus. We’ll take self-serving outward religious fashion shows over inward and uncomfortable revivals. It’s much more difficult to be genuine than it is to be religious. And it’s much more advantageous when it comes to our fragile and attention-starved egos to follow a man-made code than to follow the Son of the Living God. Let’s face it—we want people to pat us on the back when it comes to our being so religious, so giving, or even so Christlike—we’ll trade the freedom that’s ours for an ata-boy not even thinking a split second about what we are giving up to get the small worthless token.
11-12 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.”
13a Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself. (Galatians 3:11-13a, The Message Bible)
God understands something that we just can’t seem to get through our thick skulls: A heart set free doesn’t need rules any longer. If you want the unadulterated-unfiltered-cold-hard truth—our hearts never needed rules to begin with. Our hearts were plenty lost without any help. Rules or no rules, we were wretched without Jesus.
You see, a heart set free wants to follow Jesus—it doesn’t need seventy-five rules about how to do anything. Rules got us no where before Jesus and I can’t understand what on earth makes us think they will post-Jesus. Seriously—it’s like learning where to get a spectacular gourmet meal and then returning to the place we were paying the same money to get a maggot covered plate of slop—as if we never found the new restaurant. Maddening behavior really.
What possesses us to return to rules and religion when we have Jesus?
…my faithful request and admonition is that you join our company and associate with us, who are real, great and hard-boiled sinners. You must not, by no means, make Christ to seem paltry and trifling to us, as though He could be our helper only when we want to be rid of imaginary, nominal and childish sins. No! No! That would not be good for us. He must rather be a Savior and Redeemer from real, great, grievous and damnable transgressions and iniquities, yea, and from the very greatest and most shocking sins; to be brief, from all sins added together in a grand total… Dr. Staupitz [Luther's mentor] comforted me on a certain occasion when I was in the same hospital and suffering the same affliction as you, by addressing me thus; Aha! you want to be a painted [meaning having a good external appearance] sinner, and accordingly, expect to have in Christ a painted savior. You will have to get used to the belief that Christ is a real Savior and you a real sinner. For God is neither jesting nor dealing in imaginary affairs, but He was greatly and most assuredly in earnest when He sent His own Son into the world and sacrificed Him for our sakes.
-Martin Luther, (in a letter to his dear contemporary George Spalatin after learning of counsel Spalatin had given someone which proved to be sinful advice—which Spalatin was then heart-broken over).
The above account reminds me of a story former Presidential (Nixon) aide Chuck Colson shares (who now heads Prison Fellowship—which reaches inmates and their families across the globe in 112 countries with the Gospel of Jesus Christ). Colson re-counts of a man approaching him after he had finished up a speech. The man was considerably offended by Colson’s portrait of each of us as sinners as Colson tells it and decided he’d take Colson to task. Colson heard the man out and responded, “I have more in common with Adolf Hitler than Jesus.”
We need pardon no less than Hitler needed it.
King David understood this—he prayed to the Lord after his adultery covered up by a carefully executed murder:
1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. 2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
3For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. (Psalm 51:1-3, ESV)
If God forgives any of our sins he forgives the worst of them. Jesus wasn’t given up as the peace child on account of our trivial or minor offenses—no—it was for our real offenses. Trivial sin is our idea—each and every sin is serious and grave business with God. If you took your smallest infraction it would have been quite enough to require the payment of God’s very own Son.
In other words—there are no misdemeanors with God—only felonies.
Is the prayer of your heart as David’s was?
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!
To accept forgiveness means to admit that you’ve done something unspeakable that needs to be forgiven, and thus both parties must swallow the same thing: their pride.
This seems to explain what Jesus means when he says to God, ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ Jesus is ‘not’ saying that God’s forgiveness is conditional upon our forgiving others. In the first place, forgiveness that’s conditional isn’t really forgiveness at all, just fair warning; and in the second place, our unforgiveness is among those things about us that we need to have God forgive us most. What apparently Jesus ‘is’ saying is that the pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride that keeps us from accepting forgiveness, and will God please help us do something about it.
-Frederick Buechner (Beyond Words)
Buechner is a genius. He is my favorite writer for more reasons than I can list. His ability to simplify and hit the nail on the head without being neither dry or dogmatic is one of the many reasons I so admire his writings. Here, he is addressing the forgiveness we extend to one another for certain but he is also eluding to the forgiveness God extends to each of us who come to him for it. He spares no words in getting right to the heart of what can be by far our biggest obstacle in receiving forgiveness—pride. He’s not slow to name it. And while God has no pride that stops him from granting us forgiveness—we certainly can have a fair share of it ourselves when it comes to receiving the forgiveness we need so badly—and want so desperately. Have ever been in a spot where you really wronged someone and forgiveness was something you certainly didn’t deserve (like we ever do)—can you remember having the hardest time asking for it? I can. And no—I won’t tell why.
God is looking for humility.
13 When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, 14 if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. 15Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place. (2 Chronicles 7:13-15, ESV)
Our pride blocks the flow of a forgiving and a forgiven lifestyle. How we need to be forgiven! But it’s like we don’t want to forgive ourselves because if we are transparent—we then become vulnerable—but forgiveness requires vulnerability if anything. We have to submit ourselves to someone else’s mercy—that is, if they have any. And we can even run a little low on mercy with ourselves—imagine that, and it explains maybe why we have such trouble forgiving ourselves. God has mercy to give and more than we ever give him credit for. But we still fight the temptation to get sucked up into believing that he’s going to one of these days say—Alright, you have asked one too many times and I’m tired of forgiving you—you have had plenty of time to clean up your act and get this one right, of all things. Look at you, you are pitiful. I have forgiven you and forgiven you and here you are again!
But God never says anything of the sort.
It’s us who have the pride.
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