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The Christian with depth is the person who has failed and who has learned to live with it.
Let the prayer of Nikos Kazantzakis arise from our hearts at a passionate pitch of loving awareness: I am a bow on your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot. Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?
The New Testament depicts another picture of the victorious life: Jesus on Calvary. The biblical image of the victorious life reads more like the victorious limp. Jesus was victorious not because He never flinched, talked back, or questioned; but having flinched, talked back, and questioned, He remained faithful.
Lloyd Ogilvie notes: Peter had built his whole relationship with Jesus Christ on his assumed capacity to be adequate. That’s why he took his denial of the Lord so hard. His strength, loyalty, and faithfulness were his self-generated assets of discipleship. The fallacy in Peter’s mind was this: He believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord’s approval. Many of us face the same problem. We project into the Lord our own measured standard of acceptance. Our whole understanding of him is based in a quid pro quo of bartered
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After his triple denial, what future would have awaited Peter if he had had to depend on my patience, understanding, and compassion? Instead of a shrug, sneer, slap, or curse, Jesus responded with the subtlest and most gracious compliment imaginable. He named Peter the leader of the faith community and entrusted him with authority to preach the Good News in the power of the Spirit.
The limping Peter’s betrayal of the Master, like so many of our own moral relapses and refusals of grace, was not a terminal failure but the occasion for painful personal growth in fidelity.
writer. At different times on the journey I have tried to fill the emptiness that frequently comes with God’s presence through a variety of substitutes—writing, preaching, traveling, television, movies, ice cream, shallow relationships, sports, music, daydreaming, alcohol, etc. As Annie Dillard says, “There is always an enormous temptation to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.”6
On some given day when grace overtook me and I returned to prayer, I half-expected Jesus to ask, “Who dat?”
None of my failures in faithfulness have proved terminal. Again and again radical grace has gripped me in the depths of my being, brought me to accept ownership of my infidelities, and led me back to the fifth step of the AA program: “Acknowledge to God, another human being, and myself the exact nature of my wrongdoing.”
“There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repenting…” (Luke 15:7). In his brokenness, the repentant prodigal knew an intimacy with his father that his sinless, self-righteous brother would never know.
If we weren’t sinners and didn’t need pardon more than bread, we’d have no way of knowing how deep God’s love is.
For me, the most touching verse in the entire Bible is the father’s response: “While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity. He ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). I am moved that the father didn’t cross-examine the boy, bully him, lecture him on ingratitude, or insist on any high motivation. He was so overjoyed at the sight of his son that he ignored all the canons of prudence and parental discretion and simply welcomed him home. The father took him back just as he was.
We don’t have to be perfect or even very good before God will accept us. We don’t have to wallow in guilt, shame, remorse, and self-condemnation. Even if we still nurse a secret nostalgia for the far country, Abba falls on our neck and kisses us. Even if we come back because we couldn’t make it on our own, God will welcome us. He will seek no explanations about our sudden appearance. He is glad we are there and wants to give us all we desire.
The willingness to keep growing: Unfaithfulness is a refusal to become, a rejection of grace (grace that is inactive is an illusion), and the refusal to be oneself.
One morning at prayer, I heard this word: Little brother, I witnessed a Peter who claimed that he did not know Me, a James who wanted power in return for service to the kingdom, a Philip who failed to see the Father in Me, and scores of disciples who were convinced I was finished on Calvary. The New Testament has many examples of men and women who started out well and then faltered along the way. Yet on Easter night I appeared to Peter. James is not remembered for his ambition but for the sacrifice of his life for Me. Philip did see the Father in Me when I pointed the way, and the disciples
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Yes, the Word was made flesh. I chose to enter your broken world and limp through life with you.
On the last day, when we arrive at the Great Cabin in the Sky, many of us will be bloodied, battered, bruised, and limping. But by God and by Christ, there will be a light in the window and a “Welcome Home” sign on the door.
Because at that moment his love for me did not stem from any attractiveness or lovability of mine. It was not conditioned by any response on my part. Elam loved me whether I was kind or unkind, pleasant or nasty. His love arose from a source outside of himself and myself.
the Iroquois attributed divinity to retarded children, gave them an honored place in the tribe, and treated them as gods. In their unself-conscious freedom they were a transparent window into the Great Spirit—into the heart of Jesus Christ who loves us as we are and not as we should be, in the state of grace or disgrace, beyond caution, boundary, regret, or breaking point.1
The Body of Truth is bleeding from a thousand wounds.
And if you think it is ridiculous to believe that life will triumph over death, then don’t bother with Christianity, because you can’t be a Christian unless you believe that.
Don’t try to feel anything, think anything, or do anything. With all the goodwill in the world you cannot make anything happen. Don’t force prayer. Simply relax in the presence of the God you half believe in and ask for a touch of folly.
For ten minutes pray over and over the first strophe of Psalm 23: “Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing.”
Stretch, man, stretch! Let go of impoverished, circumscribed, and finite perceptions of God. The love of Christ is beyond all knowledge, beyond anything we can intellectualize or imagine. It is not a mild benevolence but a consuming fire. Jesus is so unbearably forgiving, so infinitely patient, and so unendingly loving that He provides us with the resources we need to live lives of gracious response. “Glory be to him whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20).
Thereafter, the only power Peter had was Jesus’ love for him. He told and retold the story of his own unfaithfulness and how Jesus touched him. When he proclaimed the gospel of grace, he preached from his weakness the power of God. That is what converted the Roman world and what will convert us, and the people around us, if they see that the love of Christ has touched us.
Several years ago, the renowned evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote, “True spirituality consists in living moment to moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.” This
Frauds! Liars! Hypocrites! Whitewashed tombs! Snakes!—this is the untamed fury of Jesus at corrupt religious practice.
Ragamuffins do not complain about the feeble preaching and the lifeless worship of their local church. They are happy to have a place to go where they can mingle with other beggars at the door of God’s mercy.
The gospel is not for the good guys with the white hats. It’s for poor, weak, sinful men and women with hereditary faults and limited talents—people like you, people like me.
Don’t assume that the Spirit will act in your life without you taking the initiative. Cry out for a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Wherever you are—in the church or at home, alone or with others, watching television, lying in bed, or driving to work—pray continually for more of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.
Mother Teresa expressed so powerfully, by her life and her words, how she saw the world and Christ in it. “In the Eucharist I see Christ in the appearance of the bread,” she wrote. “In the slums, I see Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor. The Eucharist and the poor are but one love for me.”
