Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners

by Dane C. Ortlund

So we need to begin by getting clear on who this person is in whom we grow. And we start just there—he is a person. Not just a historical figure, but an actual person, alive and well today. He is to be related to. Trusted, spoken to, listened to. Jesus is not a concept. Not an ideal. Not a force. Growing in Christ is a relational, not a formulaic, experience.

When today’s world leaders gather together, they themselves are held in the hand of a risen Galilean carpenter.

He continues to work on our behalf—he goes “to the uttermost” for us—advocating for us when no one else will, not even we ourselves. He is more committed to your growth in him than you are.

When it happens, will we not lament our complacency about growing in Christ? Will we not be mystified at how our bank accounts and reputations loomed so large in our minds, so much larger than our actual spiritual conditions?

The old British preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones explains: “You will never make yourself feel that you are a sinner, because there is a mechanism in you as a result of sin that will always be defending you against every accusation. We are all on very good terms with ourselves, and we can always put up a good case for ourselves.”

Christian salvation is not assistance. It is rescue. The gospel does not take our good and complete us with God’s help; the gospel tells us we are dead and helpless, unable to contribute anything to our rescue but the sin that requires it. Christian salvation is not enhancing. It is resurrecting.

What will ruin your growth is if you look the other way, if you deflect the searching gaze of Purity himself, if you cover over your sinfulness and emptiness with smiles and jokes and then go check your mutual funds again, holding at bay what you know in your deepest heart: you are wicked.

I am united to Christ. I can never be disunited from him. The logic of the New Testament letters is that in order for me to get disunited from Christ, Christ himself would have to be de-resurrected. He’d have to get kicked out of heaven for me to get kicked out of him. We’re that safe.

Union with a single Christ is like that. You are given back your true self. You become the you that you were meant to be. You recover your original destiny. You realize that your existence out of Christ was a shadow of what you were made to be.

Submerge yourself in this truth. Let it wash over you. The divine Son, through whom all things were made (Col. 1:16), who “upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), the one without whose constant care and guidance all of molecular reality would fall apart (Col. 1:17), is the one with whom you have been united. Through no activity of your own, but by the sheer and mighty grace of God, you have been enveloped in the triumphant and tender ruler of the cosmos.

Paul is saying that the love of Christ is as expansive as God himself. We can underestimate it. We always do. We can never overestimate it.

When I tell my five young kids I love them, they shrug and say, “I know, Dad.” But they don’t. They believe it, but they hardly know it. I cannot hug them tight enough. I can’t say it loudly enough. I can’t express it often enough. I have blessed frustration at being unable to communicate to them how precious they are to me. If that is true on a human level, from a sinful father, what must God’s love be like at a divine level, from a blazingly holy Father?

But the Bible teaches that healthy spiritual growth takes place only when such commands land on those who know they are accepted and safe irrespective of the degree to which they successfully keep those commands. Or to put it differently, in line with the broader point of this whole book: we grow by going deeper into the justification that forgave us in the first place.

In that rare instance where we do in fact attain the idol we’ve longed for, we will be astonished at how empty and hollow it is. All of this world’s fraudulent pseudo justifications are shiny on the outside but only bring misery when attained. They are like baited fish hooks: when bit down on, they only bring pain.

Refusing to be honest with another is works righteousness in disguise; we are believing that we need to save face, to retain uprightness of appearance.

Or to put it in a fantastic form—if a voice said to me (and one I couldn’t disbelieve) ‘you shall never see the face of God, never help to save a neighbor’s soul, never be free from sin, but you shall live in perfect health till you are 100, very rich, and die the most famous man in the world, and pass into a twilight consciousness of a vaguely pleasant sort forever’—how much would it worry me? How much compared with another war? Or even with an announcement that I should have to have all my teeth out? You see? And what right have I to expect the Peace of God while I thus put my whole heart, at least all my strongest wishes, in the world which he has warned me against? Well, thank God, we shall not be left to the world. All His terrible resources (but it is we who force Him to use them) will be brought against us to detach us from it—insecurity, war, poverty, pain, unpopularity, loneliness. We must be taught that this tent is not home.

When insults send us reeling backward, when life hurts, our eyes are being lifted off of the unstable things of the world onto the stable God of the Bible. We are being given back our true selves. We are being beckoned, as Lewis put it, “further up and further in.”

But I wonder if we really take to heart what is wrong about such a practice. Is it not a constant temptation for Western Christians to engage in such self-flagellation psychologically and emotionally, if not physically?