The Imperfect Disciple: Grace for People Who Can't Get Their Act Together

by Jared C. Wilson

It turns out, actually, that—get this—Jesus is looking specifically for the people who can’t get their act together.

Every time we met she asked the same questions: How do I forget what happened to me? How do I forgive the people who hurt me? How do I control my temper? Is it okay if I’m angry with God? Does God stop loving me when I’m angry with him? What if I never get better? To tire of this routine was natural. She was tired of living the life, feeling the pain, battling the sin that made this routine necessary! But every time we’d rehearse the gospel again, clinging with furtive fingers to that well-worn message.

This woman was parched. She was starving. She was thirsty and hungry—for glory.

R C Sproul—if you thirst for Jesus, come to the table.

Every day when you encounter God—in your devotional time, in your time of worship, in your community groups or classes, or in any other moment in which you spend time with Jesus—you face the choice of simply looking at Jesus or actually trying to see him.

Our screens give us a constant stream of things to look at but very little to see.

When our vision is constantly occupied by small things, we are tempted to yawn more at the glory of God.

The sky is a great power against lust. Pure, lovely, wholesome, powerful, large-hearted things cannot abide the soul of a sexual fantasy at the same time. I remember as I struggled with these things in my teenage years and in my college years . . . one way of fighting was simply to get out of the dark places—get out of the lonely rooms. . . . Get out of the places where it is just small—me and my mind and my imagination, what I can do with it and get to where I am just surrounded by color and beauty and bigness and loveliness.

This is true, I think, for all sin because it all feeds on darkness and flourishes there. I know it to be true in battling anxiety and depression.

Resting from the spaces, then, where you are an acting sovereign and instead getting out into the spaces where God’s sovereignty is more palpable, believe it not, will help you see Christ as bigger.

What all this boils down to is this: we have, fundamentally, a worship problem, and so long as we are occupying our minds with little, worldly things and puny, worldly messages, we will shrink our capacity to behold the eternal glory of Jesus Christ, which is the antidote to all that ails us.

Beholding Is Better Than Behaving I have shamelessly stolen the title of this chapter from my friend Ray Ortlund, who once exhorted his congregation to “stare at the glory of God until you see it.”

The glory of Christ so exceeds the glory of the law, as Jonathan Edwards once said, it is like the sun rising in its strength and eclipsing the stars.5

This is why, as odd as it sounds, making your entire Christian life about trying to look like a good Christian is a great way to become a terrible Christian. Or at least a weak and defeated one.

YOU CANNOT GET POWER TO OBEY THE LAW FROM THE LAW ITSELF!!! POWER TO CHANGE CAN ONLY COME FROM THE GLORY OF CHRIST!!!

And so it turns out that the direct route to God-honoring behavior is born not of good behavior but of good beholding.

And this is why so many people who may not have completely correct doctrine are still very Christlike. Because they do know how to worship Him.

Sometimes people are so busy trying to do great things for God they forget to look at his glory and therefore never quite behold it. And

But it does place effort in its proper proportion to the true credit in our spiritual account. We are not holy because we work. We work because we are holy. If we don’t get this order right, we don’t get Christianity right. And we will always struggle with the so-called spiritual disciplines—struggle against them, even. But if we center on the gospel, the essential duties of maintaining a relationship with God begin to seem less like duty and more like delight. They seem less like rules and more like rhythms.

The more we dwell in Scripture, developing a greater taste and feel for it, the less sweet and less comforting the things of the world will taste and feel.

to read it as we read it. The great British poet George Herbert wrote this poem about the holy Scriptures: Oh Book! infinite sweetnesse! let my heart Suck ev’ry letter, and a hony gain, Precious for any grief in any part; To cleare the breast, to mollifie all pain. Thou art all health, health thriving, till it make A full eternitie: thou art a masse Of strange delights, where we may wish and take. Ladies, look here; this is the thankfull glasse, That mends the lookers eyes: this is the well That washes what it shows. Who can indeare Thy praise too much? Thou art heav’ns Lidger here, Working against the states of death and hell. Thou art joyes handsell: heav’n lies flat in thee.4 Herbert is not just describing the Bible here. He is feeling it!

It

is an infinite sweetness! It is a sweet morsel to suck on and savor. It is a delicious medicine, a tantalizing antidote. It is a mirror that both reflects our true sickness and at the same time heals us. It is a fountain whose water reflects our dirtiness and at the same time cleanses us. What is the Bible to Herbert? It is “heaven laid flat.” In other words, when we open up the Bible, it is like opening up a window into the divine world of celestial delights. It is a Word straight from God! Clearly, how Herbert reads and re...

If you plan on keeping Christ at the center of your life, you must plan on keeping Christ at the center of your Christian practice, including your Scripture reading. Colossians 1:17 tells us, “And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

I am drowning in noise and it all makes me anxious. Chances are it has the same effect on you. One little verse in the Bible cuts through the clutter, the noise, the stress, the dutiful obligations, the mismanaged priorities, the rushing, and the busyness and offers me an antidote to what ails me: “But he would withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:16). I like the word choice of the NIV, which renders the phrase “lonely places.”

Pastor and author John Ortberg writes, “We suffer from what has come to be known as ‘hurry sickness.’ One of the great illusions of our day is that hurrying will buy us more time.”1 Ortberg goes on to define clutter, superficiality, multitasking, and speeding up daily activities as causes of hurry sickness. One of the symptoms of hurry sickness, he warns, is the diminished ability to love those to whom we have made the deepest promises. Hurry sickness makes us too tired and too distracted to love well. We immediately think of our family and friends, worried about what our hurry sickness may cost us in our relationships with them. But do we slow down enough to also think about what it may be costing us in our relationship with God? Are you too busy “living” to enjoy abiding in Christ?

Even our transparency, our “authenticity,” is a posture. We show what we want to show. I think, for instance, of the social platform Instagram. Apparently everybody lives in a golden field, in a renovated farmhouse whitewashed with organic paint and decorated with bowls of ripe fruit positioned just so. The children all wear adorable galoshes, the men flannel, the women paisley sundresses they have made themselves from fabric bought down at the ol’ mercantile “in town.” When they’re not taking pictures of their permanently vintage-filter family (#blessed), they are posting inspirational quote graphics. The whole thing is brilliant and lovely and heartwarming and cute as a button. It’s also fakey fake-fake. It’s a ruse. Ninety-eight percent of family life is simply Not Ready for Instagram.

The dirty little secret of modern church programming is that small group programs are not working well.4 We all recognize they are key to cultivating the need for community in our churches, but most of us also recognize they are notoriously difficult to pull off.

Because the division caused by sin is an all-encompassing division—cutting us off from God and, therefore, from each other—the gospel is an all-encompassing remedy. Jesus’s atoning work reconciles us to God but it also reconciles us to each other. Or, rather, it should. The gospel creates the culture of reconciliation, which the New Testament calls the church.

As long as the focus is on reconciliation, it will not fully happen. The focus must be on Christ, as in the old triangle marriage illustration.

We all had to constantly fight against the temptation to find prayer expendable. None of us is ever in danger of praying too much.

The gospel requires self-denial; applying the gospel to our community means bearing with the failings of the weak, not trying to please ourselves first, and pleasing our neighbors for their good, to build them up (vv. 1–2). The gospel cannot puff us up; it cannot make us prideful; it cannot make us selfish; it cannot make us arrogant; it cannot make us rude; it cannot make us gossipy; it cannot make us accusers. So it stands to reason that the more we press into the gospel, the more the gospel takes over our hearts and the spaces we bring our hearts to, the less we would see those things. You cannot grow in holiness and holier-than-thou-ness at the same time. Now, this scares people who believe God has delegated his sovereignty to them. But it honors the gospel of Jesus, in whom there is no condemnation and through whom we are being built together—as we welcome each other—as a place of welcome for the Spirit of the living God. In the kingdom to which the church is meant to bear witness, people flourish and become at the same time more like their real selves and more like Jesus Christ.

The different personalities and personal idiosyncrasies that make Christian community so vibrant also make it fraught with relational peril. Extroverts sometimes use the community to give the illusion of relational intimacy when really they’re just using people. Introverts often distance themselves from Christian community, retreating into the alleged safety of their solitude, effectively saying, “I have no need of you.” Bonhoeffer says about this dual dynamic: “Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone.”8

problem with so many approaches to Christian discipleship—they are predicated primarily on doing different rather than becoming different.

We think joy is a feeling. In a way, it is. But in the Bible joy is both a command of the law and an implication of the gospel. Over and over again, worshipers of God are commanded to rejoice. A sampling:

And yet what God has commanded of us, he also gifts us as an entailment of salvation.

Augustine—Command what You will, and give what You command.

I have already mentioned how Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thoughts about the “wish dream” strike me as crucially helpful. Again, the wish dream is basically what the Bible calls idolatry. And the thing about idolatry, the thing about wish dreams, is that we so identify with them we lose all true bearings about ourselves. Often, we don’t know who we are apart from them.

We all have wish dreams about just about everything in our life—we have wish-dream jobs, wish-dream spouses, wish-dream families, wish-dream lives. And we’re constantly comparing the wish-dream versions of these things with the versions we actually have. Many a marriage struggles because spouses keep holding each other up against the impossible standard of the wish dream. And many a pastor struggles because he keeps holding the church he’s been stewarded against his wish

If you find yourself constantly measuring, constantly frustrated, constantly seeing all you don’t have, Bonhoeffer actually says this is a good predicament, because it puts you on the verge of having your wish dream shattered and fi...

We all have a vision for how life is supposed to go, what life is supposed to be like—what we want and how we want it and the way we want to feel about it—but then actual life happens, and when our heart is tuned to only find joy in the dream we will never find joy, because we’ve placed it in a mirage.

Well, one of the litmus test questions I’ve been fond of giving out to others in diagnosing idolatry is this: What, if taken away from you, would cause you a great crisis of identity?

I wanted to know, “For how long, God? For what time?” He wouldn’t say; he still hasn’t said. So I don’t know.

namely this: If I’m not in pastoral ministry, what am I? I started thinking of all the things people would say. I started to suffer from imaginary words.

Like Abraham’s wife, Sarah, I worried about the laughter of others. I worried about their criticism, their questions, their disapproval. That’s a big one for me: disapproval. But ten years ago God broke into that little guest bedroom where suicidal me was crying and praying my guts out, and he grabbed hold of me and proclaimed by his Spirit, I love you and I approve of you.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is our only hope and security of enduring approval, of eternal validation, of spiritual fulfillment, of eternal joy.

My availability to God’s call to sacrifice—Abraham’s availability to God’s call to sacrifice, your availability to God’s call to sacrifice—is predicated on understanding that God doesn’t need any more messiahs.

I am not needed. Ah, but I’m wanted. That’s liberating, isn’t it? To not be needed but wanted?

The real you is the you who comes out in times of trouble. As Charles Spurgeon said, “Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.”2

Because we are fragile, and when we are broken what’s inside is revealed. What we worship shows through. Every time we take a hit, our true self comes out. We can try to hide it in times of comfort and ease, but we can’t keep our true self covered. The jar will crack. The fig leaves will rot and fall. Your true, rotten self will come out. But here’s the good news. That real you, the you inside that you hide, the you that you try to protect, the you that you hope nobody sees or knows—that’s the you that God loves.

One day, when the Lord returns and vanquishes sin, sickness, grief, injustice, and death itself, we who are united to Christ will receive a body like his. Like ours, but like his. Tangible, real, fleshy. And yet perfect, spiritual, glorious. Oh, man, am I looking forward to this resurrection body! But I’ll tell you what: I’m looking forward more to having this stench of failure and this dark cloud of disapproval gone.

1). To find pleasure, satisfaction, meaning, or purpose in anything and everything under the sun is like chasing wind or trying to catch smoke. It’s like worshiping flakes of rust or bowing down at a powdery mound of dust. In and through the gospel we know that all of the things we actually long for can only be found in God.

9 Does Grace Go All the Way Down? (When You Wonder If It Could Get Any Worse) It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Ecclesiastes 7:2

wanted

think of that silly little story about