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October 17 - December 24, 2019
I tend to think that a lot of the ways the evangelical church teaches discipleship seem designed for people who don’t appear to really need it. It’s like the über-toned CrossFit junkie who adds a spin class to his weekly schedule, because, well, why not?
For those of us who have struggled our whole life to get our act together, what does a discipleship built around getting your act together eventually do? Well, I don’t know about you, but it about made me give up.
I mean, I wanted to, but I couldn’t figure out how to get from being called “fags” by some stupid meat-head with his stupid meat-head face hanging out the window of his stupid meat-head El Camino, or having a baggie of water thrown at us, to God having a wonderful plan for Steve’s life.
The gospel of Jesus was there and every sinner heard it—every sinner, that is, except those who’d already heard it. The idea that grace was for Christians too was somewhat of a foreign concept; grace was Christianity 101. Once you had God’s grace, you had to move on to bigger things, to what we called “deeper” things, things like charts of the end-times and pledging abstinence until marriage. (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.)
There were endless checklists and progress charts tracking my growth in the Christian life. By the time I got to junior high school, I was committed to looking like the best Christian kid I could be. This is a hard place to be if you’re not exactly sure Jesus loves you, or even likes you. I kind of felt like I was a Christian only because the Bible says “God is love,” and so if I signed on the dotted line, he had to take me. I was exploiting his own loophole.
In a lot of ways, I have felt haunted by those gale-force tones all my life. And when it comes to my spiritual state, I very often still feel like that little boy—hidden, small, and trembling, waiting on a welcome to come get clean, and finally getting clean by the skin of my teeth.
Here’s a plainer way to put it: I do things that I know are bad and I avoid doing things that I know are good. This makes me imminently unqualified to write one of those awesome, take-the-next-hill, “be the change you want to see in the world” books on discipleship churned out ever-presently by the evangelical leadership-industrial complex.
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! Paul’s sense of hopeless exasperation reaches a crescendo in verse 24: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” He feels caught, trapped, like the corpse of his old life is still hanging on to his ankle and he can’t move on. He’s tried pulling himself up by his bootstraps but he got them tangled around his neck and now he’s choking to death. This is exactly the kind of self-despair Jesus is listening
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How do we get out of this mess? We can’t. But God does what we cannot do. So while the storm of Romans 7 rages inside of us, the truth of Romans 8 has us safe and sound. Within the spiritual ecosystem of God’s saving sovereignty, in fact, our struggle is like the little squall stirred up in a snow globe. 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
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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.
Every day. It has to happen every day. Because what’s wrong with you and me is that we’re still on this side of glory, and so long as we’re on this side of glory, there will always be more sanctifying to go through. I’ve met some people who think they’re all good-and-sanctified already, and I like to tenderly suggest to them that they have much further to go than they realize.
But any seasoned ministry veteran will tell you that pastoral ministry is very often less like herding sheep and more like herding cats. The prophet Isaiah says that “all we like sheep have gone astray” (53:6), and I wonder if it’s because he wasn’t around cats very much. 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.
We see the tendency to self-worship, the tendency to stray from God’s will and to rebel against his good orders, and like an enlightened mechanic we say, “There’s your problem, right there.” The diagnosis is helpful. If we don’t diagnose the problem correctly, we cannot address it effectively. We see that our soul is prone to slipping out of gear, dropping quite easily and quickly from Romans 8 to Romans 7. So here we go again, bringing Romans 8 to bear on ourselves. Some of us like to call this work “preaching the gospel to ourselves.”
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?
In the end, as in the beginning, it is not our good intentions or even our good deeds that will get us out of the muck of ourselves. It is God’s rescuing hand. It is his enduring announcement over us messed-up creatures, “I love you,” that changes everything.
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!
After a few decades of living, I imagine we’d both agree that life is kind of a mix of The Running Man and getting baggies of warm water thrown at your back. But I wouldn’t struggle so much to tell him about the hope I’ve found. Because I’ve actually found hope in that little message I used to feel nervous about. Now it’s me I feel nervous about. The only thing I feel confident in is that message!
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. But this confusion is somewhat understandable in that both sins and wounds linger. Our deepest wounds and our deepest sins are both awfully persistent.
And then sometimes—lots of times—all I could do was share that gospel. The darkness would drift over us, the pain too heavy, the grief too fresh, like this person was sending out shock waves, radiating some kind of spiritual EMP shorting out all our circuits. We’d end up sitting shiva, saying nothing, simply mourning the reality that we were back here again, facing the same deals and devils. Sometimes I’d think of things to say, but if I was wise that day I wouldn’t say them.
More had been exposed than my accuser had known. She had triggered the deep sense of inadequacy and disqualification that always lay under the surface of my soul. I don’t truly believe I failed her the way she thought I had, but her words ripped my frail assurance apart. If I could go back in time, I would tell many church folks I pastored that I didn’t need any help feeling like a failure. Feeling like a failure is my default state. And so this woman’s words hurt not just in the way they were false but more in the way they were true.
He got right to the point, cutting to the quick and penetrating to the heart, not because he got some weird thrill out of making people uncomfortable but because he found it imminently agreeable to air out people’s shame that he might cover it for them.
You cannot vanquish what you cannot expose.
The problem with this perspective is evident when one actually reads the pages of the Gospels. In these pages we find Jesus equating lust with adultery and hatred with murder, promising to bring a sword instead of peace, commanding people to love those who are trying to kill them, telling a guy to skip his father’s funeral, calling men to quit their jobs, and cursing random fig trees. Most people understand that Jesus was shaking things up, but most people assume he was doing so to disrupt those other people. (He had a few things to say about that kind of thinking too.) There is virtually no
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I once read one of those self-helpy quasi-Christian leadership books for type A personalities where the author turned “Blessed are the meek” into law. Instead of being an announcement it became an action point. Being meek is how we get the blessing, he was saying, but in doing so he had to redefine everything else about the Sermon on the Mount, including turning Jesus’s promised blessings into success in our project or workplace—basically, anything that Jesus wasn’t referring to.
You know, because God forbid anybody admit they’re weak or deal with weakness or wrestle at all with Paul saying in 2 Corinthians 12 that, strengths be damned, he’s going to boast in his weakness.
The Beatitudes are beautiful entailments of the good news of God’s kingdom, which has come in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ—that is to say, they do not come in and through the strategies of therapeutic Christian moralizing.
What about Christian culture? Do we buy these people’s books by the millions? Do we go to conferences to hear them? Do we podcast them? Do we listen to them on the radio? No. We’re too busy being played by those who’ve learned to game the system. We don’t really care to hear from these people. They’re messy, a little weird, socially awkward, kind of needy, and not very put together. What can they teach us? I mean, what can they teach us about what we really want? They aren’t winners. We don’t want a word from them. And we don’t typically have a word for them. And yet these people are exactly
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We live in a world that’s desperate for the real Jesus. Not some synthetic version of him. The real Jesus and what he really said and really did. The despair is getting thicker in this world. It will not be remedied by the syrupy platitudes that often pass for Christianity.
To flinch, to turn away, to ignore is only an option for the privileged. Coates delves into the reality he’s been thrust into by the collision between America and his blackness. It’s in the depths of reality that he finds—and we find—sentimental religion and self-help Christianity of no use.
He writes soon after, “Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there. . . . But how? Religion could not tell me.”2 Look, our Beatitudes must encompass this reality. They must encompass all reality. The higher reality of Jesus and his gospel must speak into this prevailing mode of existence, or we shouldn’t expect anybody
But this reality is exactly what the Beatitudes are acknowledging and encompassing. We may have them painted in calligraphy on some lacquered cutting board hung on Grandma’s wall, but they belong in West Baltimore, Walbrook Junction, Park Heights, and the city jail, for that is the reality Jesus was stepping into.
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
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Obviously this stuff isn’t fixed yet. We can see right now that it isn’t fixed. Ta-Nehisi Coates sees it isn’t fixed; he doesn’t even seem to know if it can be fixed. Your neighbor across the street tries not to think about it, but when he’s alone with his thoughts he suspects it can’t be fixed either. 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.
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?
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.
This is a prayer Jesus will answer. There are no strings attached, no caveats, no power plays, no manipulation, no guilt trips, no claiming of rights. Simply “Lord”—acknowledging that he is God and she is not—and “help me”—expressing her need by laying it at Christ’s feet.
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.
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
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But God says their efforts at self-cover aren’t good enough and he covers them himself with the flesh of sacrifice.
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.
Look, you know what a penny looks like. You probably see one every day, but I bet you couldn’t answer all of the questions in the previous paragraph. Why? 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. I think this is the big problem disciples of Jesus have with the gospel. I think this is the big problem disciples of Jesus have with Jesus. We take him for granted. In John 1:16, the apostle tells us that the fullness of Jesus provides “grace upon grace.” I
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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.
Eventually, like he does with the Canaanite he’s called a dog, Jesus exposes this woman’s greatest vulnerability. But not to shame her. No, not to shame her. The blunt, direct, command-giving, merciful Jesus brings her shame to the surface in order to cover it.
You and I come to Jesus looking for some kind of pick-me-up, and Jesus offers his flesh. We come looking for Jesus the life coach when what we really need is his glory. We need to behold him.
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.
The problem is that many Christians have stifled their ability to behold the glory of Christ without realizing it. They have stunted their capacity to see some measure of his all-encompassing excellencies, not because they are generally disinterested in him but because all of their other interests have dulled their spiritual senses. All of the other things they look at dull their vision. They struggle to behold Christ’s glory because they have a generally decreased capacity for bigness in the first place.
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.
