Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

We have struggled as a community of faith, and many of us have faced feelings of betrayal or confusion. Discouragement is natural. Despair is tempting.

Read with attentiveness because attentiveness is the beginning of receptiveness.

True, there is always this tension between practicing unity and preaching truth. But it is the tension of two people hanging fiercely on to each other, like the tension of a bridge, that the gospel might go forth into all the world. We cannot let go of each other.

If you disagree with someone on one point, then you must disdain or dismiss them entirely. And if you acknowledge or affirm someone, then you must agree with them entirely. This is a lie. Break

We could be the people who know not just in our cerebral synapses but in the chambers of our bravely pounding hearts that if we have right doctrine but have not love, we are nothing more than a clanging cymbal.

The gifts of the Spirit are given generously and quickly. Not so with the fruit of the Spirit. One of the dangers is we expect the gifts of the Spirit to quickly do what only the fruit of the Spirit is meant to do slowly.

To classify sin as failure to love is not to sentimentalize or soften it. It’s to frame the very essence of our lives with God and one another in the way Jesus

The chapter was Paul’s word of rebuke to Christ followers who had become fractured and distracted. They were marked by great miracles and charisma among them, but they had little of maturity and character where it counted.

The historical and modern fractures in our world need a category vast enough to make sense of our vast present pain.

it is theology that places them in their true and larger context. It might sound strange to say this, but we need sin. We can’t talk about ourselves or our society accurately without it.

In our culture, sin has usually not been seen as a failure to love but almost exclusively as a violation of a law: God’s law.

A robust theology of sin helps us live beyond self-deception. A limited theology of sin often results in a false sense of spiritual maturity.

When spiritual vitality is measured by sin-avoidance, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are following Jesus faithfully. But following Jesus is to be measured by love—love for God expressed in love for neighbor. This is the good, beautiful, and kind life.

sin was overwhelmingly presented as violation of a moral code. And as a result, holiness was understood with a similar negativity: as sin-avoidance. Sin was privatized.

If I sensed that any of these things would lead me into sin, I did my best to cut it out. On one hand, this sounds like good discipline. But if this is the sole, or even primary, way of understanding sin, we will find ourselves functioning as disciples of the devil. Let

In other words, by becoming solely focused on abstaining from sin (defined very narrowly), we live by a crushing moralism that robs us from enjoying God and self-righteously places us above others.

The world sees the scrupulosity around individual sin and personal piety without the corresponding commitment to love and justice.

You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.

sin is not just something we do but a power we fall under, a power that curves us into ourselves until we become stuck there.

Sin is at work when those who have experienced undeniable racism are not met with empathy and care but rather are demonized for naming the problem. Sin is what’s at work when we shrug our shoulders in the face of grave injustice. Sin is present when we refuse to treat another with dignity.

To begin with, the tree signified a holy limit. God had placed before them a boundary that was both necessary and out of his love.

Jealousy reveals the idols of our hearts.

But you know you’ve crossed the line and are on the verge of coveting when the intense longing that often comes from comparison with another person (I want what they have / to be what they are)

The zero-sum game is at the core of much of our social interactions. It would have us believe that for me to truly win, you need to unequivocally lose.

The “towers” we build are often rooted in the idolatry of self-interest.

The world apart from God is in sin, and we can’t rescue ourselves.

Christian faith compels us to say in one breath that a fragmenting power is at work within each of us and between all of us, and in the next breath announce that there’s a way out.

whenever we talk about sin, it’s a good practice to immediately announce that it has been overcome by Christ. This is the good news!

Until we consistently live from a place of humility, confessing our sins before God and one another, we will find ourselves gradually turning inward.

“when we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back. Sin is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance.”[7]

Followers of Christ establish our moral credibility in the world by routinely and fearlessly confessing and repenting of sin. And we lose our credibility by refusing to name our sins. This is the paradox of faith. To confess our sins doesn’t mean obsessing over our mistakes. To confess our sins—especially together in a community—is an act of solidarity. It’s a practice reminding us that we are all on equal footing, all in need of grace; that we all have sinned and have been sinned against; that we are in the same broken family.

reminder that we are far more weak, frail, broken, and marked by sin than we think. It’s also the reminder that God is far more gracious, merciful, present, and loving than we can believe.

That is how the world moves toward wholeness—not by our covering up our sins and mistakes, but by lovingly acknowledging them before God and one another.

powers and principalities.

behind the actions of people and groups of people

institutions) there exist spiritual forces whose agenda runs counter to the way of God.

We can’t understand the fragmentation we experience without expanding our language for the forces that fill the world and influence us.

The utter failure of our optimistic views of progress to account for the escalating horrors of our time demands at least a fresh start at understanding the source and virulence of the evils that are submerging our age.[3]

Powers and principalities are spiritual forces that become hostile, taking root in individuals, ideologies, and institutions, with the goal of deception, division, and depersonalization.

Evil One’s great scheme is to convince us that the root problem is not with the Evil One but exclusively with ourselves, our circumstances, or our neighbors.

Because love must be grounded in reality, nurtured in unity, and protected through the compassionate valuing of a person’s worth and dignity.

Much of our society holds the conviction that if two people disagree on important issues, they must be enemies.

the great temptation is to see not people but socially constructed amalgamations of entire people groups.

Depersonalizing at that moment would have led to immediate judgment and the subsequent removal from ministry. Zero nuance. Even less love.

And so, after we routinely ask hard questions to raise our awareness—questions such as What or who am I really serving with my time, belief, money, passion, and opinion?—we must prepare ourselves to take real, peaceable, and decisive action to resist and conquer those powers, following the example of Jesus Christ.

have emphasized the need to name interior messages that undermine our spiritual and emotional health.

not only an individual need and pursuit. We also need to examine the larger movements and structures of our communities and society.

“We have to love technology enough to describe it accurately. And we have to love ourselves enough to confront technology’s true effects on us.”[11]

righteousness (often looking like truth telling, unity, and affirming the sacredness of each person) is one of the redemptive strategies of God.

One of the most important tactics for keeping injustice present is convincing the humans that racism or classism is strictly an individual feeling of superiority. Don’t let them focus on the institutional elements of it. Keep up the good work. Your uncle, Screwtape

Yep!