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

by Jared C. Wilson

(I really hoped I’d be able to get married and have sex before Jesus returned, which might tell you a little something about how poorly we’d been pitched the concept of Christ’s glorious second coming.)

“Witnessing” wasn’t really about bearing witness to others about the grace of God in your life; it wasn’t even about telling somebody the good news, really. It was about getting somebody to admit they were a sinner and then somehow getting them to pray a formulaic prayer. I like to call this “closing the deal.”

It’s just that whenever I actually think about how I’m doing, it doesn’t seem as though I’m doing very well at all. In fact, most of the good that I’ve accomplished in my life and most of the good things that have happened in my life have come nowhere close to fixing what’s really going on inside of me.

Nevertheless, whether Paul is discussing pre-conversion or post-conversion struggle, I read Romans 7 and think, Man, Paul, you get me—you really get me.

It turns out, actually, that—get this—Jesus is looking specifically for the people who can’t get their act together. I know, right? I swear I am not making this up!

God is collecting all these little storms. He is doing something beautiful with us and even in us and through us. This is the great light that overcomes the shadow world of Romans 7. It is the good news for all of us who can’t get our act together. We are exactly the kind of people God is looking for. We are exactly the kind of people God is using. We are exactly the kind of people God loves.

Sheep tend to go astray because they are dumbly distracted. That’s a little like us. But cats go astray because they are smug investors in their own narcissistic autonomy. That’s a lot like us.

My soul is not much to look at but it is safeguarded by the One who paid himself for me. This is really the only hope we’ve got. Sin is our problem. Jesus is the answer. There’s no two ways about it.

Too many foolish teachers in the church equate wounds with sins, and vice versa, and this needlessly frustrates people’s following of Jesus. We further traumatize victims when we tell them their wounds are sins, and we demotivate repenters when we tell them their sins are wounds.

You cannot vanquish what you cannot expose.

We just don’t get the Sermon on the Mount, or Jesus’s ministry in general, like his immediate hearers did. Jesus wasn’t turning things upside down. He was turning them right side up.

What Jesus has done is good news for losers! What Jesus has done is good news only for losers. If you’re not a loser, in fact, you can’t have Jesus.

When we turn the Sermon on the Mount—or any of Jesus’s teachings, really—into a handy compendium of pick-me-ups for spiritual go-getters, it proves we don’t get it. It proves we don’t get the gospel.

What is discipleship, then, but following Jesus not on some religious quest to become bigger, better, or faster but to become more trusting of his mercy toward our total inability to become those things?

When Jesus calls you a dog, in other words, you don’t argue with him—you own your dog-ness. It’s those who would find this admission beneath them, who think themselves above Christ and his ...

Because we don’t really look at the things we think we already know. We don’t study the familiar. The very fact we consider something familiar sort of stifles any impulse to study it.

Really, nine times out of ten, I’d be totally cool with all of you people just leaving me alone. But here’s lesson 4,036 that disciples of Jesus learn about their Master: when it comes to your personal space, he doesn’t give a rip.

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

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.

But here’s the problem: there’s not enough glory in the commands themselves to help us obey them. There is a lot, but not enough. There’s insufficient glory in the law of God to empower us to obey it.

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!!!

The good news is news, not instruction, and it announces to us not “get to work” but “it is finished.” And so it turns out that the direct route to God-honoring behavior is born not of good behavior but of good beholding.

Beholding Christ’s glory is the number-one directive for following Jesus. And, in fact, it’s sometimes the only effort we lousy disciples can muster up.

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.

don’t we wish that for ourselves? I don’t know about you, but it hurts my feelings to know that it takes my wife a lot of effort to love me. I like to think I am incredibly lovable! But I’m not. I am hard to love. And I get harder to love the more of the real me you see.

What if the work we put into our relationship with Christ more directly flowed from our already-secured position in him than from some idea that we’ve got to maintain our spiritual state?

As Dallas Willard says, “Grace is not opposed to effort, but is opposed to earning.”2 So it’s not about “letting go and letting God” or some other similarly sincere but shallow spiritual hooey.

To cultivate Spiritual* formation, then, means to find ways to immerse ourselves in the work of the Spirit—to re-sync ourselves to the rhythms of the kingdom of God.

The Holy Spirit is committed to this glorious gospel inversion. He is committed to making sure that those who follow Jesus are becoming holy. Or, rather, the Holy Spirit is committed to making sure that those who are holy are following Jesus!

The Spirit who empowers our conversion will empower our discipleship.

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.

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.

This is the whole point of reading and studying the Bible—to encounter the glory of Jesus—and if we aren’t reading and studying to encounter the glory of Jesus, we are missing the whole point. In fact, I suspect the struggles so many of us have in sticking with Bible study are directly related to our failure to listen and look for the glory of Christ there.

I know lots of people who complain about God’s silence. As a pastor, I heard it more times in the counseling room than I’m able to count. “Pastor, I just feel like God is holding out on me. I’m talking to him, but he’s not talking to me. God is giving me the silent treatment.” But so long as we have the Bible, this is simply not true. In fact, because we have the Bible, it is an incredibly selfish and sinful thing to say.

How arrogant we are to hold this Bible we could never fully master in a million years, the book that contains the Word of God that stands forever, and think, Yeah, but what else you got?

Jesus preached a message about himself, using the entire Bible. What can we learn from this? That all of Scripture either points to Jesus’s life and teaching or emerges from it. All of it.

The glory of Christ is actually blaring from the pages of the Bible. God is not only not giving you the silent treatment, he is practically yelling. The problem is not with his voice but with our ears. The more and harder we listen, however, the more of heaven’s glorious music we will hear, and thus the more of heaven’s glory we will see. And then our soul finds the rhythm of heaven.

Once upon a time in our not-so-distant past, experts predicted that with the rapidly increasing advances in technology, Americans would have a shorter workweek and so much time on their hands for recreation that they wouldn’t know how to fill it. Well, we figured it out. We filled it up with more work and more busyness.

I think one of the primary reasons Christians do not make quality time for prayer is that they have been trained to think of prayer in legalistic terms of duty.

However, if prayer is not just another thing for the checklist but rather the thing that makes the checklist doable, and if we looked not for “results” in prayer but relationship, we might find it more appealing.

When we think of worshipful prayer as a duty, we can easily lose our taste for it. But when we think of duty as a worshipful prayer, the tables get turned on the entire concept of obligation. Prayer in its essence is simply that: daily explicit worship of the one who loves you more than anyone else does and saved your life as no one else could.

In the same way, intentional prayer is the daily, private worship service of those who are awake to the amazing greatness of the gospel.

He is, in fact, more eager to listen than you are to speak.

There is no cause for frustration, guilt, or shame in prayer. The good news is that our Father loves us and knows our weaknesses. He sees our hearts, whether they are inclined to him or not. And the gospel tells us that Christ died for hearts not inclined toward him. Now that we are reconciled to the Father, despite our sin and stupidity, the Son and the Spirit pray for us even still, pleading the blood of Christ on our behalf for all time. The gospel of prayer is that we need not pray to earn favor with God but rather to enjoy God’s favor already given to us in Jesus. And the good news about prayer is that this favor is applied by the Trinity praying within itself about and for us. Isn’t that amazing?

I was young, green, and vulnerable. And I got chewed up and spit out. If this is what church behind the public curtain of Sunday mornings is actually like, I thought, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. But it was church that rescued me from church.

We saw what judgment does to the honest and it was very, very bitter. Then we tasted what grace does to the honest, and it was very, very sweet.

The church has got to be a place where it’s okay to not be okay.

Our faith, like our sins, is personal. But this doesn’t mean that our faith ought to be private.

But what the coffee shops (and the cafés, and probably even the bars these days) have actually provided is a place for neighbors to come to be alone together.