Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners

by Dane C. Ortlund

First, I’m not going to hurry you. No one else should either. We are complicated sinners. Sometimes we take two steps forward and three steps back. We need time. Be patient with yourself. A sense of urgency, yes; but not a sense of hurry. Overnight transformations are the exception, not the norm. Slow change is still real change. And it’s the normal way God deals with us. Take your time.

Second, as you begin this book, open your heart to the possibility of real change in your life. One of the devil’s great victories is to flood our hearts with a sense of futility. Perhaps his greatest victory in your life is not a sin you are habitually committing but simply a sense of helplessness as to real growth.

this book but to reflect your way...

Fourth, this book is written by a fellow patient, not a doctor.

One common reason we fail to leave sin behind is that we have a domesticated view of Jesus.

Saving It may seem obvious that the real Jesus is a saving Jesus. But I mean something quite specific when I call him “saving.” I mean he is saving and not only helping.

Every human is five hundred denarii in debt. The point of the parable is that we tend to feel only fifty denarii in debt.

One reason our spiritual growth grinds down is that we gradually lose a heart sense of the profound length to which Jesus went to save us. Save us.

Jesus is not bored in heaven. He is fully engaged on our behalf, as engaged as ever he was on earth. He is interceding for us. Why? Because we continue to sin as believers.

This is a book about how we change. Let me be plain. You will not change until you get straight who Jesus is, particularly with regard to his surprising tenderness.

Fallen human beings enter into joy only through the door of despair. Fullness can be had only through emptiness. That happens decisively at conversion, as we confess our hopelessly sinful predicament for the first time and collapse into the arms of Jesus, and then remains an ongoing rhythm throughout the Christian life. If you are not growing in Christ, one reason may be that you have drifted out of the salutary and healthy discipline of self-despair.

The Great Prerequisite If you feel stuck, defeated by old sin patterns, leverage that despair into the healthy sense of self-futility that is the door through which you must pass if you are to get real spiritual traction. Let your emptiness humble you. Let it take you down.

Have you been brought to despair of what you can achieve in your sanctification? If not, have the courage to look yourself squarely in the mirror. Repent. See your profound poverty. Ask the Lord to forgive your arrogance. As you descend down into death, into knowledge of the futility of what inner change you can achieve by your own efforts, it is there, right there, in that dismay and emptiness, that God lives.

There is nothing noble about staying in that pit of despair. We need to experience it. But we are not meant to dwell in it. Healthy despair is an intersection, not a highway; a gateway, not a pathway. We must go there. But we dare not stay there. The Bible teaches, rather, that each experience of despair is to melt us afresh into deeper fellowship with Jesus. Like jumping on a trampoline, we are to go down into freshly felt emptiness but then let that spring us high into fresh heights with Jesus. The Bible calls this two-step movement repentance and faith.

Repentance is turning from Self. Faith is turning to Jesus. You can’t have one without the other. Repentance that does not turn to Jesus is not real repentance; faith that has not first turned from Self is not real faith.

Some Christians seem to think that the Christian life is ignited with a decisive act of repentance and then fed by faith thereafter. But as Luther taught, all of life is repentance. The first thesis of his Ninety-Five Theses reads, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ (Matt. 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” The Christian life is one of repenting our way forward. Equally, we live our whole lives by faith. Paul said not “I was converted by faith” but “I live by faith” (Gal. 2:20). We do not merely begin the Christian life by faith; we progress by faith. It is our new normal. We process life, we navigate this mortal existence, by a moment-by-moment turning to God in trust and hope at each juncture, each decision, each passing hour. We “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7). That is, we move through life with our eyes looking ever up. Our posture is one of expectant empowering from above. Repentance and faith. In a word: collapse. Both repentance and faith, however, must never be viewed in isolation from Jesus himself. They are connectors to Christ. They are not “our contribution.” They simply are the roads by which we get to real healing: Christ himself.

don’t seek repentance or faith as such but seek Christ.

Your salvation in the gospel is far deeper, far more wondrous, than walking an aisle or praying a prayer or raising a hand or going forward at an evangelistic rally. Your salvation is to be united to the living Christ himself.

The answer is that at one level, yes, we will all begin to look more like Christ and thus more like one another—each of us exhibiting more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22–23). But in terms of our individual distinctiveness, the glory of Christian redemption is that it is in union with Jesus that we are given back our true selves. We finally begin becoming who we were truly created to be.

S. Lewis offers a brilliant analogy to make the point.8 If a group of people have always lived in the dark and are told a light is going to be turned on so that they will all be able to see each other, they may very well object, believing that since a single lamp will be shining the same light on everyone, they will all look identical to each other. But, of course, we know that the light would bring out their individual distinctiveness. 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. Your distinctive personality, your you-ness, your human individuality, was in 2D when you were out of Christ, held back by sin and shame and fear and darkness. Now that you are in Christ, you are in 3D, free to blossom. In other words, it is only in union with Christ that you can grow into who God made you to be.

That place in your life where you feel most defeated. Our sins loom large. They seem so insurmountable. But Christ and your union with him loom larger still. As far as sin in your life reaches, Christ and your union with him reach further. As deep as your failure goes, Christ and your union with him go deeper still. As strong as your sin feels, the bond of your oneness with Jesus Christ is stronger still.

What I want to say in this chapter is that the love of God is not something to see once and believe and then move beyond to other truths or strategies for growing in Christ. The love of God is what we feed on our whole lives long, wading ever more deeply into this endless ocean. And that feeding, that wading, is itself what fosters growth. We grow in Christ no further than we enjoy his embrace of us.

What exactly is Paul praying for? Not for greater obedience among the Ephesians, or that they would be more fruitful, or that false teaching would be stamped out, or that they would grow in doctrinal depth, or even for the spread of the gospel. All good things, things we should and must pray for. But here Paul prays that the Ephesians would be given supernatural power—not power to perform miracles or walk on water or convert their neighbors, but power, such power, the kind that only God himself can give, power to know how much Jesus loves them. Not just to have the love of Christ. To know the love of Christ.

As Jonathan Edwards famously put it, you can “know” honey in two distinct ways: you can know the exact chemical makeup of honey; or you can taste it. Both are ways we can “know” honey. But only the latter is the knowledge by which honey is experienced.1

Who are we—weak, faltering, mixed-motives we—to be filled up with the very fullness of God himself? How can the clay be filled with the fullness of the potter, the plant with the fullness of the gardener, the house with the architect? What breathtaking condescension, what astounding dignifying of us. Yet this is not something God relents to do, wishing he could be doing something else. Filling up his fallen people with his own fullness is what he delights to do. It is at the center, not the periphery, of what gets him out of bed in the morning, so to speak. And how does he do this? What is the means by which he fills us with his own fullness? The text tells us: “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Knowing Christ’s love is the means, and being filled with divine fullness is the purpose.

We don’t go out and attain divine fullness. We receive it. This is the surprise of the Christian life. We get traction in our spiritual lives not centrally as we get down to work but as we open up our hands. The Christian life is indeed one of toil and labor. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a false teacher. But we cannot receive what God has to give when our fists are clenched and our eyes shut, concentrating on our own moral exertion. We need to open up our fists and our eyes and lift both heavenward to receive his love.

your growth in Christ will go no further than your settledness, way down deep in your heart, that God loves you.

So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from him; but if the heart be once much taken up with this the eminency of the Father’s love, it cannot choose but be overpowered, conquered, and endeared unto him. . . . If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will?

We tend to think we’re in danger of overstating God’s love for us as we receive it as his children. We hold back, not wanting to be too bold, careful to be sure we don’t overdo it. But what if my kids acted like that toward me, holding my love at arm’s length? It would break my heart. Don’t break your Father’s heart. Lap it up. Drink it down. Let the holy fire of his love burn hot in your soul. That is his own deep desire.

And it is this experience that uglifies sin in our eyes and beautifies righteousness. It is this experience that takes us deeper into communion with God. It is this experience that uproots sin.

They that find Christ [discover that] though he be so glorious and excellent a person, yet they find him ready to receive such poor, worthless, hateful creatures as they are, which was unexpected to them. They are surprised with it. They did not imagine that Christ was such a kind of person, a person of such grace. They heard he was a holy Savior and hated sin, and they did not imagine he would be so ready to receive such vile, wicked creatures as they. They thought he surely would never be willing to accept such provoking sinners, such guilty wretches, those that had such abominable hearts. But behold, he is not a whit the more backward to receive them for that. They unexpectedly find him with open arms to embrace them, ready forever to forget all their sins as though they had never been. They find that he as it were runs to meet them, and makes them most welcome, and admits them not only to be his servants but his friends. He lifts them out of the dust and sets them on his throne; he makes them the children of God; he speaks peace to them; he cheers and refreshes their hearts; he admits them unto strict union with himself, and gives the most joyful entertainment, and binds himself to them to be their friend forever. So are they surprised with their entertainment. They never imagined to find Christ a person of such kind of love and grace as this. ’Tis beyond all imagination or conception.7

If you are having thoughts like that as you hear of Christ’s love, I want you to know that you’re looking at the wrong life. Your life doesn’t disprove Christ’s love; his life proves it.

Your suffering does not define you. His does. You have endured pain involuntarily. He has endured pain voluntarily, for you. Your pain is meant to push you to flee to him where he endured what you deserve.

Justification is outside-in, and we lose it if we make it inside-out. 2. Sanctification is inside-out, and we lose it if we make it outside-in. 3. And this inside-out sanctification is largely fed by daily appropriation of this outside-in justification.

Apparently being a lover of self can look like godliness. Being a lover of money can look like godliness. Someone can be filled with pride and arrogance all the while presented as godliness. One can be ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable—and to the outside observer it looks like godliness. True sanctification, true growth in holiness, is internal. It will manifest itself on the outside; “The tree is known by its fruit” (Matt. 12:33). But the tree creates the fruit; the fruit does not create the tree. Edward Fisher, in his famous Puritan treatise on sanctification, explained that external conformity to rules without an internal reality fueling it is akin to watering every part of a tree except its roots and expecting it to grow.3 The internal realities of the Christian are what define true growth in Christ.

lot could be mined from this fascinating interchange between Paul and Peter. I want to make just one observation. Why would Paul address an internal church conflict with the doctrine of justification? We tend to think of justification by faith as a key truth to get us into the Christian life. Why did Paul reach into his theological toolkit and pull out this doctrine to fix a problem among those who were already believers?

Apparently the apostles considered the gospel not a one-time vaccination that spares us from hell but food to nourish us all the way to heaven.

Peter feared losing the approval of people.

Diagnostic questions to expose our idols are questions such as What does my mind tend to drift back to when I lie awake in bed? What do I spend disposable income on? What in other people do I tend to envy? What is that one thing that, if God were to appear to me today and tell me I would never have it, would make life feel not worth living? If I’m married, what would my spouse say I tend to give myself to that makes him or her feel neglected? How would my heart—not my theology, but my heart—phrase the hymn, “When __________, it is well with my soul”? What do I find myself praying for that is nowhere promised in the Bible? By

All this is startling for a couple reasons. First, Lewis only had twelve years left to live when he had this 1951 experience. He had written most of his books. But it was at this point that the forgiveness of the gospel truly clicked into place for him. Second, Lewis came back to this experience repeatedly over the course of his life. It was not of transient significance. It marked him for life. Francis Schaeffer experienced a similar post-conversion discovery of the gospel, though in his case it proved to be the turning point of his life and ministry.

Schaeffer had gone stale. His joy had dried up, and he was questioning the viability of Christianity at a fundamental level. What got him through? Revisiting the gospel—the simple, wonderful, justifying gospel, which says that we are acquitted of our guilt once and for all on the exclusive basis of the finished work of Christ on the cross. Not only did this help settle his mind philosophically as to the truth of Christianity; it also caused his life to blossom anew.

Do you want to grow in Christ? Never graduate beyond the gospel. Move ever deeper into the gospel. The freeness of your outside-in justification is a critical ingredient to fostering your inside-out sanctification.

But still, you might wonder, do we really need the Spirit in order to live a moral life? The answer is that we do not need the Spirit to live a moral life, but we do need the Spirit to live a supernatural life. In other words, we don’t need the Spirit to be different on the outside; we do need the Spirit to be different on the inside. Yet again: we don’t need the Spirit to obey God; we do need the Spirit to enjoy obeying God. And that’s the only kind of real obedience anyway, since enjoying God is itself one of God’s commands (Deut. 28:47; Ps. 37:4; Phil. 4:4). So we can stiff-arm God by breaking all the rules, or we can stiff-arm God by keeping all his rules but doing so begrudgingly.

Lewis goes on to conclude that it is simplistic to view only two kinds of people, the disobedient and the obedient. For we can be “obedient” in the sense that we follow a certain code, yet in a taxpaying kind of way. The nuclear core of authentic Christianity is not simply doing what God says but enjoying God.