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

by Jared C. Wilson

“Believing God has a plan for me even when I’m afraid he doesn’t.” “Believing God loves me even when I feel like nobody else does.” “Trusting that God is doing something for my good even though my life has always been terrible up till now.” “Following Jesus even though my feelings speak more loudly.” “Denying myself in order to do what’s right although I don’t really want to.” “Imagining a time when I won’t hurt as much as I do now.” “Imagining a time when my spouse or child won’t hurt as much as they do now.”

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. (Rom. 8:1–3)

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.

You introduce the truth of Romans 8 to every corner of the room, every dark place in your heart, as often as you can, as much as you can, as fiercely as you can.

What we need to do is roll up our sleeves, lift up the hood, and take a look at our inner selves. We need to get the instructions out, get our hands on some tools. The soul is a tricky thing, and needy. We have to feed it well, keep it well-nourished and well-lubricated. We have to speak to it rightly, like the psalmist—“Hey, soul, what’s going on with you? Why are you messed up today?”2

We see the tendency to self-worship, the tendency to stray from God’s will and to rebel against his good orders,

Look at what that songwriter is doing in Psalm 42. He’s preaching to himself. But it’s not advice that he’s preaching. He knows throwing good advice into the darkness of the soul is like throwing popcorn into outer space. No, he doesn’t need good advice; he needs good news. Wouldn’t you rather have the antidote for sin than an eight-step treatment plan to simply medicate against it?

By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. (42:8)

I take a look at my messed-up soul every day. I feel completely overwhelmed and underequipped. And so I hold on to the gospel. I pour some gospel into my soul. I am good to go another day. I might be crawling through that day or I might be balled up in my bed, unwilling to charge the Valley of Elah that is my life, but the smile of God is over me continually. Day and night his steadfast love sustains me.

By God’s grace, then, disciples of Jesus look for the places we have yet to surrender to him, the places where we’ve given up ground, the tender spots we want to hide, the stubborn spaces we want to protect, and we ask him humbly to help us. He will never say no to that. Bit by bit, day by day, turning and returning, we reorient the engine of our life around Jesus. The problem is the same every day but the mercies are new, and the disciples of Jesus will plunder them with abandon. He wants us to!

And it’s not just the sins that don’t seem to go away; it’s the wounds too. These two things are not the same! We have to get that straight, first of all. 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.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matt. 5:2–11)

Think of every category of person spoken to in the Beatitudes: The spiritually impoverished. The emotionally devastated. The psychologically weak. The culturally oppressed. The inwardly pure. The relationally calm. The physically abused. The personally accused.

The marginalization of Jesus’s people was mainstream. They lived lives of mostly quiet desperation in the land that once was theirs. And when Jesus began his messianic ministry, he did not avoid any of this. He took the full weight upon his back and shoulders and buckled under it. He dove into it. He went around throwing it in everyone’s face, drawing the circumference of the universe around it with himself at the dead center.

Jesus wasn’t blowing smoke. His major contribution to the world was not a set of aphorisms. He was born in a turdy barn, grew up in a dirty world, got baptized in a muddy river. He put his hands on the oozing wounds of lepers, he let whores brush his hair and soldiers pull it out. He went to dinner with dirtbags, both religious and irreligious. His closest friends were a collection of crude fishermen and cultural traitors. He felt the spittle of the Pharisees on his face and the metal hooks of the jailer’s whip in the flesh of his back. He got sweaty and dirty and bloody—and he took all of the sin and mess of the world onto himself, onto the cross to which he was nailed naked. In his work and in his words, Jesus is making promises to the beaten, the torn, the broken, the depressed, the desperate, the poor, the orphan, the abandoned, the cheated, the betrayed, the accused, the left-behind. He is, believe it or not, promising to fix it all.

Our discipleship has to deal with this tension—the tension between the glorious reality we believe in and yearn for and the hard reality we currently live in every day—or else it’s not the real Jesus we’re following. So here we are sitting in the dark. Maybe you and I are sitting across from each other. Maybe I’m discipling you. Maybe you’re discipling me. Or maybe we just found ourselves thrust together in this cave, helping each other untangle wounds from sins like monkeys picking nits from each other’s fur. We need that monolith, man.

I tend to believe that most of us do not truly treasure Jesus until we’ve run out of alternatives to him, until every last option has turned up dry. And think about this: What if Jesus actually brings us to the very moment of these no-more-rope situations in order that we might actually, finally trust him? I mean, what if he called us dogs?

Jesus is extraordinarily merciful to those at the bottom of the barrel. This woman has come needy and vulnerable, and she is admitting her shame. She really has nothing to lose. It’s desperation that makes her so bold, and Jesus knows it. Their back and forth certainly looks cold. In calling her a dog, Jesus is basically affirming the ages-old relationship between Israelites and Canaanites begun way back in Genesis 9. But the woman’s circumstances are deeper than that divide. Her sense of brokenness goes all the way down to Genesis 3. And she owns her shame. She admits her poverty. She knows she deserves nothing. Yet she pleads for favor: “Lord. Help. Me.”

You need to hear the gospel words of Zephaniah 3:19: “I will save the lame and gather the outcast, and I will change their shame into praise.” You need to hear the promise of Romans 10:11: “For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’” Why? Because Jesus Christ went to his death on the cross, “despising the shame,” as Hebrews 12:2 says, enduring its agony in the full blazing weight of the wrath of God, that you might be forgiven and covered and secured and free. Colossians 2:15 says, “He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.” He puts the shamers to shame! 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.

Ray Ortlund writes: Every one of us knows the shame of guilty self-awareness and the fear of exposure. But we don’t want to live in the isolation of that darkness. We long for freeing relationships with others, especially God. But without the gospel, we hide, conceal, falsify ourselves, in order to appear better than we are. Or, conversely, we may trot out our failings with assertive self-display, demanding acceptance—a more modern response. The gospel says, “Your shame is real, even more real than you know. But this is what God has done. He put it all onto Christ at the cross, where your Substitute was utterly shamed and exposed and condemned for you. Now your shame no longer defines you. What defines you, what reveals your future forever, is this word: ‘. . . adorned. . . .’ Not shamed. Adorned. Lovely. Attractive. And the moment is coming when he will look into your eyes with glad adoration, and you will look into his eyes with confident surrender. And nothing will ever, ever spoil it again.”3

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?

I see my light come shining from the west unto the east. Any day now, any day now I shall be released. Bob Dylan1

In John 1:16, the apostle tells us that the fullness of Jesus provides “grace upon grace.” I love that phrase. John tells us that Jesus is some kind of spiritual subterranean hot spring, bubbling up healing water through the icy ground. The reservoir of blessings in Jesus never runs dry. For all eternity, he is a fountain of life running free, overflowing, spilling over levies and dams, flooding our hearts—and eventually the entire earth (Hab. 2:14)—with the boundless radiance of his majesty.

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory. (Ps. 63:2) Then he brought me by way of the north gate to the front of the temple, and I looked, and behold, the glory of the LORD filled the temple of the LORD. And I fell on my face. (Ezek. 44:4) Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! (John 1:29) And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. (2 Cor. 3:18)

In other words, he’s not merely saying “look at him.” He’s telling us to look with consideration, with appreciation, with fixation and transfixion. To behold something is to “hold” something in our vision, to let the weight of it rest on our mind and heart.

John 1:29: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

Truly, I think one reason we aren’t captivated by Christ’s glory is because we have a diminished capacity to be captivated by anything big.

We are preoccupied with small things. And, in fact, we somehow have an inverted sense of measurement in that big things seem to us small or familiar while small things become big to us, at least in terms of our time and attention and energy.

I can’t tell you how profoundly settling in God it is for me at the end of a day in the study, in meetings at the coffee shop, in the pixelated trenches of Word docs and social media feeds to go out on my back deck and sit and stare at the mountains.

But until we learn to simply sit there, to be still, to be settled, to look at the great big world around us, to consider with wonder all these incredible humans made in God’s image, to look at his endlessly fascinating creation in long, steady concentration, we will continue in spiritual myopia and spiritual boredom. When our vision is constantly occupied by small things, we are tempted to yawn more at the glory of God.

Do you want to see glory? “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). 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.

G. K. Beale says, “What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.”4

Want a heart as big as the sky? Behold the sky. Want a soul as bright as day? Behold the day.

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.

Yes, the gospel is better than the law. And yes, in fact, beholding is better than behaving. 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. This is so important to understand. It is crucially important. It is so important that I want to violate a cardinal rule of sophisticated composition and employ every means of emphasis that I can to restate it: 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.

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.

what I really need is to rehearse what he’s already done for me, what he’s already done in Christ that has satisfied my desires, met my needs, and answered my longings. In the rush to emotional outburst, I miss affectionate remembering.

Of course, the fact that Jesus doesn’t call us his servants doesn’t mean we don’t have to do what he says! It only means that our relational context for doing what he says has changed. He is not distant from us, some kind of divine CEO dispatching orders from on high via emailed memo. He is certainly our king and worthy of our total allegiance and submission, but he is also our older brother and our friend. This relationship, born of the gospel, helps us see that his commands come from a place of love and are positioned for our good.

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.

But this is a different kind of passivity. It’s not laziness. And it’s not inactivity. It’s a passivity that’s more about receptivity. If you can figure out the difference, it’s really about working without striving.

passive activity. Or whatever you want to call it. According to the 2000 US Census, 79 percent of Americans live in urban or suburban areas. Most people who will read this book live in what we often simply call “the city” or in a suburb of the city. Every day those of us who live in these areas, particularly in the suburbs and the “nicer” areas of the city, demonstrate with our routines and our attitudes that we are experts at actively being filled with the spirit of something. It is deceptively and dangerously easy for even suburban Christians, because of the environment of convenience and consumerism they swim in, to become lovers of convenience and embracers of consumerism. Where we live, and how we live there, shapes us. It does so with our participation and permission even though most of us are not conscious of it. And that is the same sort of active passivity Paul appeals to in the confusing part of Ephesians 5:18.

Most of us certainly make time for God when we feel we have the time, doing our best to fit him in somehow between the paths from house to car, car to work, work to car, and car to home. The problem is that God owns all of life, and worshiping God means we must revolve around him, not he us. So God shouldn’t be confined to his own compartment in our schedule. Jesus does not abide in his assigned time slot; we abide in him.

As “be filled with the Spirit” indicates, and as Jesus’s command to “abide” (John 15:4) implies, there is an intentionality and active participation on our part. But the difference between the Bible’s teaching on obedience that pleases God and so much of the church’s teaching on obedience that pleases God is exactly where the relief of the good news comes in.

This, too, is good news: the Spirit who authors our faith will perfect it. The Spirit who justifies us will sanctify us, and the Spirit who sanctifies us will glorify us.

Feeling Scripture entails regular inhabitance in the Bible—Jesus likes the word abide—so that we have a practically instinctual sense of its threads and contours. Getting to that place does involve reading God’s Word over an extended period of time, but over time the effort we put into this practice begins to feel less like something carried out in our own power. What seems so unnatural and awkward before begins to feel more natural and reflexive.

Transformation is the primary reason the written Word of God exists.

We have at our fingertips the very revelation of God to us, and yet we treat Scripture like a blunt instrument, like a dry reference book, like a prop for our propaganda, anything but the wellspring of God’s truth to be drunk deeply from. If we’re going to look at following Jesus as “abiding in Christ,” we have to dwell in God’s Word. This means meditating on Scripture, chewing on it, and savoring it. This does not come easily at first, but the more we do it, the more natural it will feel. After a while, we will experience having been shaped by the message to automatically live the message.

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.

“For the Bible,” Martin Luther says, “is a remarkable fountain: the more one draws and drinks of it, the more it stimulates thirst.”3 Now, the Bible doesn’t change, but when we develop a feeling for its revelation, our familiarity with it will nevertheless continually strike us afresh.