Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change

by Matt Chandler

But when the message meets you in the right place, at the right time, the meaning that’s always lived there can suddenly start to spill all over you.

you’ve had a hard time consistently enjoying and experiencing what God’s supposedly done to remedy this self-defeating situation.

Seems as though trying to be good is too much work for what it gets you.

Because you’re never good enough.

He’ll never persuade you now that you don’t need to be earning it. That’s why you’re trying so hard, isn’t it?

But that’s not the gospel. Never has been.

Bottom line, when we’re not living in constant danger, seems like we’re dealing with consistent disappointment—in ourselves, in others, or just in general.

Surely there’s more to life than this. All right, let’s hold it here, because what we want you to see in that very statement—in that feeling—is how this desire in your mind for something more and better is not the depressed ramblings of a bad mood, but is truly a God-wrought invention. It comes straight from your Creator.

In order for good news to be good—like the gospel is good (literally means “good news”)—it must invade bad spaces.

The bad parts of what we see and feel around us serve a purpose in God’s mission to recreate something that’s been lost and destroyed.

God created, God created, God created, it was good.

Peace. His world was at perfect peace.

Try to imagine it. Here. On this blue planet. The same one where perhaps you kick off your shoes after work and peel open a lonely can of ravioli and a Diet Pepsi for dinner. The one where you wake up stiff from a cross-training routine, feeling older than ever, moaning yourself out of bed with whatever’s grown knotted up in a ball overnight. The one where sexual lusts can sail through your head when you swear you were just stopping to fill up your tank at the gas station. The one where your kids need braces and glasses in the same year—the same year your company stops giving cost-of-living raises due to budget cuts.

creation was perfect, they were perfect, everything was perfect. And life was just there to be lived within the unbroken freedom and shame-free fellowship that existed between mankind and God.

He created us from the very beginning to live in a loving, dependent relationship with Him.

we focus on our conscience-dragging depravity, the things in us that need change and recovery. We concentrate on how sinful we are. Which is true.

the emptiness we’re feeling and trying to fill is for what our relationship with God, by His loving choice, was always meant to be.

We’re not what mankind truly was in the beginning with God.

We can never grasp the extent of our depravity until we recognize the excellencies of our created dignity. And this is what God has chosen to redeem for us. Through His grace. Through the gospel.

The Bible sort of boils down the damage report into two broad categories: futility and pain.

We surrender. We don’t try to force our fixes. We don’t continue in worry and fear, nor in bitterness and bad attitudes, nor in self-willed attempts to gain God’s favor in hopes of regaining the relief of His blessings.

while the good news of the gospel may not appeal to everyone, the bad news of the gospel still applies to everyone.

We’re fixers.

What you’ll see in the four buckets we’re about to bring out into the open is that no matter how much we may feel dependent on them or drawn to them for the support they give us and for the quick fixes they sometimes provide, they eventually bottom out, dry up, and quit working.

but we have thoroughly convinced ourselves that the cure for what’s wrong with us is the well-oiled creation of a better version of us.

But even while we’re breathing the scented smoke of our own betterment plans—declaring this self-hyped person to be a better god than God is, applauding our independence and sovereignty—we are simultaneously proving to be our own worst enemy.

And as long as you keep looking to yourself as your next best solution, you will never stop vacuuming up the mess you leave behind. You will never be good enough to suit yourself, much less be good enough for God. Because we cannot redeem ourselves.

Marriages will always struggle and will often fail whenever we make the person who wears our wedding ring into a god who’s supposed to make us complete.

The expectation that others can somehow become for us the answer to all our problems is to put an impossible weight on them that they were never intended, created, or equipped to carry. It’s going to make life miserable for everybody.

There’s a brief window of time—rarely more than a week, usually much, much less—when we let this stuff convince us how smart and well-off we are, how much more complete and put-together than we were before these things were part of our lives.

The things of this world—no matter what cool shape of toy or trinket they assume—are all on a collision course with the junkyard at some point in their life cycles.

We’re using the gifts of God as if they themselves are gods. We’re chasing them beyond the proper, beneficial boundaries where we were designed by God to enjoy them, deciding instead that these items and activities can satisfy us all by themselves. We’re elevating created things above their Creator.

Religious attempts at redemption are no more failed and foolish than the ones where you try to solve your problems by getting better at being you

it out to the tune of a praise band? By the way, let’s set the record straight on this “scales” business once and for all. Can’t tell if this comes as good news or a surprise to you or not, but these scales we keep trying to tip in our direction? The scales that God uses to measure how we’re doing? The scales that tell whether He’s happy with us or not? Those scales don’t exist. There are no scales. You’re either completely justified by the blood of Jesus Christ, or you’re not justified at all. It’s that simple.

girls are the ones who go to heaven. In reality, it’s bad little boys and girls transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ who go to heaven—those whose sins are covered by His redeeming work, and who love Him so much because of it, they live now to flesh out these new desires He’s placed within them as a way of expressing their willing worship.

But what you really have—what all of us have, by birth—is more than anything a heart problem.

You’re trimming things up, making them look almost okay for a little while. But just wait—they’ll be coming back in full force before you know it,

we’re not made unclean by the things we do, allow, or entertain, but rather, He said, “the things that come out of a person are what defile him”

Because “while we were still weak”—when the time was just right—“Christ died for the ungodly.”

“So are you saying we’re all just damned? There’s nothing we can do?

Yeah, that’s pretty much what we’re saying.

“We can’t change, then? We’re not capable o...

Nope. That’s kind of ...

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The beauty of Christ’s gospel is the great “unless” of life.

no matter where He found you, you’ve felt some serious weakness along the way.

not all the dark spaces went away when you succumbed to the call of His grace and received Him by faith. But the good news of His eternal gospel is still working reconnaissance and going in for the invasion

Let’s take another swing through those four things again, making note of what the gospel’s done to them.

Ask yourself what you ever did to pull yourself out of the muck and mire of your sin.

Get over yourself. You were saved by grace alone through faith alone. Therefore, God gets all the glory alone. And when you understand this one basic issue, you’ll stop going into you and start going into the Lord—just