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

by Jared C. Wilson

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

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. We have to look at big things in order to increase our capacity to see big things.

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. And I know that when I used to sit in my front yard at 122 Bradley Boulevard with a notepad in my hand and a pen trying to write a poem, at that moment, my heart and my body were light years away from the sexual fantasizing that I was tempted by again and again in the late night, quiet, secluded in-house moments. There is something about bigness, something about beauty that helps battle against the puny, small, cruddy use of the mind to fantasize about sexual things.

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.

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 another provocative idea Paul explores just before he lays out his life-altering claim that beholding the glory of Jesus is what actually changes us. By contrast, he’s willing to say, focusing on the law cannot change us. The gospel is better than the law.

This radiant glory was so intense that Moses covered his face with a veil to shield the children of Israel from its intensity. But as stark and intense and awe-inspiring as that glory was, Paul says, it is eclipsed by the ministry of the Spirit, the ministry of righteousness, the ministry of the gospel of Jesus.

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!!!

We think we know what will do the job of making us holy: us doing the job of making us holy. And seeking holiness is integral to discipleship. But more central to our discipleship is the news that actually makes Christianity Christianity: we are holy not because of what we’ve done but because of what Jesus has done. This is why the good news is so good! The essential message of Christianity isn’t “do” but “done.” 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.

And when I put Genesis 3:1 (“Did God actually say . . . ?”) together with Romans 7, I see why I believed it was ultimately better at the time to feel good doing what I wanted instead of suffering the internal agony of not being who I was. It felt so much better to give in than to fight. Which is why so many porn users don’t fight it at all. The porn promises release. The abstinence promises pain. And then there’s this voice saying, The pain means you shouldn’t be trying to change who you are. But there’s nothing else in me God wants to change except who I am.

And the reality, for many, is that the resurrection kind of life in these areas of death isn’t always postponed until the life to come. But you won’t know that until you’re willing to go to the cross for as long as it takes to die.

I was preoccupied with and perversely interested in pale imitations of glory. I was committing clear sins in engaging in this behavior. And staying away from the porn shop would have been a good decision to make. But it was the allure inside of me—the desire for the glory that was being falsely promised—that just avoiding pornography wouldn’t kill. I didn’t simply have a behavior problem but a belief problem, a worship problem. And what eventually served to cure my taste for this shiny death was not “getting my act together” but finally, truly seeing the glory of my crucified Savior. In the warp and woof of this struggle every day, we cannot rely on the law to empower its own implications. We need the more glorious vision.

So long as we are living in the bittersweet limbo of Romans 7 through 8—simul justus et peccator, as the Reformers so nerdily put it in the Latin (righteous and at the same time a sinner)—we will be struggling ...

Jesus. I just mean that our ability to actively and persistently follow Jesus will be centrally driven by our comprehension of his glory.

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 sometimes looking is all the rest of us have the energy for. We are, whether spiritually or physically, out of “get up and go.” But as this “stupid” preacher reminds us, any ol’ fool can pick his head up and look.

think many of the old hymns, the ones that have endured—and plenty of the newer hymns too, actually—tap into a deeper reality than a lot of the more explicitly emotive stuff. In a strange way, the old gospel hymns affect us more emotionally by not dealing primarily with how we feel. There are plenty of emotional exclamations in the old hymns, of course—“How marvelous, how wonderful,” “Then sings my soul . . . how great Thou art,” “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,” and so forth—but these songs don’t make our emotion the primary point. They make emotion the response to something much sturdier—namely, the gospel. Most of these old hymns follow the gospel story line. The first verse usually presents the problem of sin in some way. The second and third verses typically introduce Christ and his cross, the work of the Spirit, or some other proclamation of the redemptive narrative of the gospel. And the last verse typically puts the Christian in heaven, focusing on the blessed hope of Christ’s return and our glorification. The classic hymns, like the gospel they help us exult in, are much bigger than they appear.

A lot of the new songs—not all of them, of course, but a lot of them—head straight to how I feel about Jesus but never take me into the depths of why I ought to feel that way.

But 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. Here, I’ll tell you what it’s like: the difference between a lot of modern, emotional worship songs and the classic, gospel-rich hymns is the difference between the romantic ruminations scrawled in a preteen girl’s diary and the decades-long marriage etched upon the hearts of a tired-but-God-dependent husband and wife. We take our old marriages for granted too; they become too familiar to us, old hat.

This is, of course, where the spiritual disciplines come in. But what if we approached these behaviors less as religious duties—they are that, obviously, but they are more than that—and more as relational delights? 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? What if—in other words—we saw Jesus as our friend more than our boss? Jesus is certainly our master. He is certainly our commander. He is our sovereign Lord, and thus when he says “Jump,” we ought to ask “How high?” But our divine king also says this to his disciples: No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. (John 15:15)

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. And it helps us see that our obedience is not the grounds of our relationship but the overflow of it!

As Dallas Willard says, “Grace is not opposed to effort, but is opposed to earning.”

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.

Perhaps we should think of “being filled with the Spirit” like we do about sailing. Did you know that there are roughly sixty working parts on a sailboat? There’s plenty of work to do when sailing. You can break a sweat. You have to stay attentive. But there are two things you can’t control on a sailboat, and they make all the difference in the world. No amount of elbow grease will (1) control the tide or (2) bring the wind. You can hoist the sail, but only the wind can make a sailboat go. There are plenty of approaches to Spiritual formation that amount to teaching us how to row our own boat. Some put us in a sailboat but have us blowing deep breaths into the sail. Consequently many of us get really tired on the way to nowhere. But what about those of us who were tired before Jesus even got to us? What about those of us who find ourselves constantly short of breath? What is the use of telling a guy in bare feet to pull himself up by his bootstraps? I mean, if you had a motor already, you wouldn’t need the wind, would you? Unless your motor was broken.

Jesus said, one must “take up his cross”—one must, in some way, die. The beauty of this command is that it is, in fact, “easier” for those who already feel in some way dead to feel very close to the kingdom. (And the ugly truth of this command is that it actually makes it more difficult for people who feel like they already have their act together to see any appeal in Christ or his kingdom.) Those who live in a near-constant state of desperation are typically the ones most receptive to Jesus.

The Spirit who empowers our conversion will empower our discipleship.

With this gospel in proper perspective, followship of Jesus does not cease to involve effort. 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.

The way we tend to approach God’s Word is by looking for a purely informational exchange—to learn something. And the Bible has the wisdom of God in it, enough knowledge for a hundred lifetimes! But the primary reason to read the Bible is not to learn stuff but to be stuff. Transformation is the primary reason the written Word of God exists.

Feeling Scripture requires discipline and consistency, like most Bible study plans do, but the aim of feeling Scripture is to treasure God’s Word in our hearts and delight ourselves in God’s laws. 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. But this all begins with simply listening.

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.

It might seem like we are taking the long way around, but being able to “feel Scripture” involves zooming out from the mechanics of Bible reading and Bible study and seeing the way the relationship between the messages we hear and the posture we hear them in affects us.

Like the rich man, we assume that seeing is believing. But it turns out that hearing is believing. It turns out, actually, that to see we have to first hear. But to really hear we have to really listen.

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.

Look, I do believe the Spirit speaks to Christians in other ways. I am not a cessationist. But the primary, most common, and authoritative way God speaks to us is in the Bible. And so we never lack for his voice, his guidance, his instructions, even his very will for our life (1 Thess. 5:16–18). 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? Let’s get the wax out of our ears. Let’s tune our hearts to Scripture and look for Jesus there. If we do that, I suspect we will find “Bible study” much less routine, much less boring. Jesus cannot be boring.

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.

When you’re in the Old Testament, wherever you are, ask yourself questions like, “What does this say about Jesus? How does this point to Jesus? Did Jesus ever quote or refer to this? What is the importance of this in the light of Jesus?” In the New Testament, finding Jesus in the Gospels is easy, of course, but making the Jesus connection in the Epistles is vitally important. Scholar N. T. Wright says that we ought to read the New Testament as if Jesus in the Gospels is giving us sheet music for a masterwork symphony and as if Paul and the other New Testament authors are teaching the church how to perform it.

The point of the Christian life is not self-improvement or more Bible knowledge but Christlikeness.

The message we receive from consumer culture is that we are the point—that we are the center of the universe and all things revolve around us. And when we buy into that it becomes very easy to think of our days as belonging to us, our finances as belonging to us, and even our spiritual lives as belonging to us. It’s possible, in fact, to be “doing discipleship” in some very Christ-uncentered ways. Therefore, how you come to the Word will help shape your capacity to see Christ’s glory there. We see the glory of Christ most compellingly, most powerfully, most authoritatively, and most unerringly in his Word, but we have to look for Christ and his gospel there.

I was just doing what I always do: hurrying. For no good reason. And the whole time I was annoyed with the guy in front of me for acting like the world revolved around him, I was acting like the world revolved around me, as if this guy should just know that I want to get somewhere quickly and adjust his pace accordingly.

It’s bizarre what hurry can do to us. I can blame this on my personality because I’m a pretty nervous, neurotic guy, but my personality does not bear all the blame. The pace of life in industrialized America whispers insistently every day, Hurry up!

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).

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. The microwave doesn’t create free time. It frees up time for us to fill with other things, and that’s just what we’ve done. We may think watching television or surfing the web or playing video games is all leisure time, and oftentimes it is, but the constant connection to artificial noise—visual, aural, or both—gradually quenches our spirit. And the constant filling of idle hands with idol pleasures will result in our looking like the gelatinous masses passing for humans at the end of Wall-E, if not physically then at least spiritually.

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.”

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?

Hurry sickness means we are so awash in the noise of busyness that we compensate for it by accepting silence with God and loved ones. The way I have tried to make up for neglect of prayer is to incorporate prayer into my life. Sounds great, right? And it can be. Surely if we are to pray without ceasing that means we should be praying while eating, reading, driving, paying the bills, watching movies, listening to music, reading blogs, exercising, and working at our jobs. We should bathe those activities in prayer, in part to keep ourselves tuned Godward throughout our routines and in part to better “take every thought captive” (2 Cor. 10:5) that can enter our minds during times of preoccupation or distraction.

The outcome was hurried prayer. Prayer just became another thing to fit in. I wasn’t feasting on God’s presence but just giving him crumbs. I was multitasking prayer.

It turns out that doing several things and consuming several things all at once not only stresses the brain but also prevents us from doing tasks and understanding information with accuracy.

In Colossians 4:2, Paul commands, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.” There are two aspects to this verse that are crucial to a proper rhythm of prayer: (1) continuing steadfastly in it and (2) being watchful in it. Continuing steadfastly in prayer speaks to commitment, to routine practice, to endurance, and even to duty. Being watchful in prayer speaks to focus, clarity, and awareness.

You can be neither devoted to prayer nor alert in it if you do not commit to a time where you are doing nothing but praying. This practice is called intentional prayer. Now, prayer is never really accidental; neither should it be incidental. Followers of Jesus need to commit to times of intentional solitude, with all artificial noises blocked out and adequate time to focus on talking to God scheduled in. As busy as we think we are, none of us has as large a burden placed on us as Jesus did. And even though Jesus was perfectly sinless, he still needed to disconnect, detach, and devote solitary time to the Father.

Over time, the religious expectation of quiet times doesn’t compel us to seek them out but rather tempts us to bristle under their burden. Even fifteen minutes, a blip on the radar of our day, seems too long and unwieldy for prayer, because we approach it as pure duty, not pure desire.