Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners

by Dane C. Ortlund

Fallen humans are factories of filth.

We must see and feel our utter emptiness and innate rebellion and resistance in the presence of a God whose infinitude of beauty and perfection exposes such sinfulness.

Therefore: nothing can touch you that does not touch him. To get to you, every pain, every assault, every disappointment has to go through him. You are shielded by invincible love. Everything that washes into your life, no matter how hard, comes from and through the tender care of the friend of sinners. He himself feels your anguish even more deeply than you do, because you’re one with him; and he mediates everything hard in your life through his love for you, because you’re one with him.

His own life was reduced to bombed-out rubble. Why? So that he could sweep sinful you into his deepest heart and never let you go, having satisfied the Father’s righteous wrath toward you in his atoning death.

The world and its fraudulent offerings are like that poisonous tree. And our heavenly Gardener loves us too much to let us continue to commit soul suicide by getting more and more deeply attached to the world. Through the pain of disappointment and frustration, God weans us from the love of this world. It feels like we’re being crippled, like we’re dying. In point of fact, we are being freed from the counterfeit pleasures of the world.

Pain seeds glory.

If you want to be a solid, weighty, radiant old man or woman someday, let the pain in your life force you to believe your own theology. Let it propel you into deeper fellowship with Christ than ever before. Don’t let your heart dry up. He is in your pain. He is refining you. All that you will lose, Sibbes reminds us, is the dross of Self and misery that in your deepest heart you want to shed anyway. God loves us too much to let us remain shallow. How frothy and facile we would be if we lived all of life without pain. Your tears are his tools.

The Spirit is the effectual cause of your growth, but Christ is the object to contemplate in your growth.