The gospel has me reconsidering the typical way we think about Christian growth.
It has me rethinking spiritual measurements and maturity; what it means to change, develop, grow; what the pursuit of holiness and the practice of godliness really entails.
What’s been happening in me recently is similar to what happened in me when I first became a Calvinist back in the Winter of 1995.
Everything changed.
I began to read the Bible with new eyes. The sovereignty of God and the sweetness of his unconditional grace were EVERYWHERE! I remember thinking, “How did I miss this before? It’s all over the place.”
Well, the same thing has been happening to me with regard to how I think about Christian growth.
If we’re serious about reading the Bible in a Christ-centered way; if we’re going to be consistent when it comes to avoiding a moralistic interpretation of the Bible; if we’re going to be unswerving in our devotion to understand the many parts of the Bible in light of its unfolding, overarching drama of redemption, then we have to rethink how we naturally and typically understand what it means to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).
In his 2008 movie The Happening, writer, producer, and director M. Night Shyamalan unfolds a freaky plot about a mysterious, invisible toxin that causes anyone exposed to it to commit suicide. One of the first signs that the unaware victim has breathed in this self-destructing toxin is that they begin walking backwards—signaling that every natural instinct to go on living and to fight for survival has been reversed. The victim’s default survival mechanism is turned upside down.
This, in a sense, is what needs to happen to us when it comes to the way we think about progress in the Christian life. When breathed in, the radical, unconditional, free grace of God reverses every natural instinct regarding what it means to spiritually “survive and thrive.” Only the “toxin” of God’s grace can reverse the way we typically think about Christian growth.
For a whole host of reasons, when it comes to measuring spiritual growth and progress our natural instincts revolve almost exclusively around behavioral improvement.
It’s understandable.
For example, when we read passages like Colossians 3:5-17, where Paul exhorts the Colossian church to “put on the new self” he uses many behavioral examples: put to death “sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” He goes on and exhorts them to put away “anger, wrath, malice, slander” and so on. In v.12 he switches gears and lists a whole lot of things for us to put on: “kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” just to name a few.
But what’s at the root of this good and bad fruit? What produces both the bad and good behavior Paul addresses here?
Every temptation to sin is a temptation, in the moment, to disbelieve the gospel–the temptation to secure for myself in that moment something I think I need in order to be happy, something I don’t yet have: meaning, freedom, validation, and so on. Bad behavior happens when we fail to believe that everything I need, in Christ I already have; it happens when we fail to believe in the rich provisional resources that are already ours in the gospel. Conversely, good behavior happens when we daily rest in and receive Christ’s “It is finished” into new and deeper parts of our being every day— into our rebellious regions of unbelief (what writer calls “our unevangelized territories”) smashing any sense of need to secure for ourselves anything beyond what Christ has already secured for us.
Colossians 3:5-17, in other words, provides an illustration of what takes place on the outside when something deeper happens (or doesn’t happen) on the inside.
So, going back to Philippians 2:12, when Paul tells us to “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” he’s making it clear that we’ve got work to do—but what exactly is the work? Get better? Try harder? Clean up your act? Pray more? Get more involved in church? Read the Bible longer? What precisely is Paul exhorting us to do? Clearly, it’s not a matter of whether or not effort is needed. The real issue is Where are we focusing our efforts? Are we working hard to perform? Or are we working hard to rest in Christ’s performance for us?
He goes on to explain: “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (2:13). God works his work in you—which is the work already accomplished by Christ. Our hard work, therefore, means coming to a greater understanding of his work. As I mentioned a few posts ago, in his Lectures on RomansMartin Luther wrote, “To progress is always to begin again.” Real spiritual progress, in other words, requires a daily going backwards.
I used to think that when the Apostle Paul tells us to work out our salvation, it meant go out and get what you don’t have—get more patience, get more strength, get more joy, get more love, and so on. But after reading the Bible more carefully, I now understand that Christian growth does not happen by working hard to get something you don’t have. Rather, Christian growth happens by working hard to daily swim in the reality of what you do have. Believing again and again the gospel of God’s free justifying grace everyday is the hard work we’re called to.
This means that real change happens only as we continuously rediscover the gospel. The progress of the Christian life is “not our movement toward the goal; it’s the movement of the goal on us.” Sanctification involves God’s attack on our unbelief—our self-centered refusal to believe that God’s approval of us in Christ is full and final. It happens as we daily receive and rest in our unconditional justification. As G. C. Berkouwer said, “The heart of sanctification is the life which feeds on justification.”
2 Peter 3:18 succinctly describes growth by saying, “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Growth always happens “in grace.” In other words, the truest measure of our growth is not our behavior (otherwise the Pharisees would have been the godliest people on the planet); it’s our grasp of grace–a grasp which involves coming to deeper and deeper terms with the unconditionality of God’s love. It’s also growth in “the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” This doesn’t simply mean learning facts about Jesus. It means growing in our love for Christ because of what he has already earned and secured for us and then living in a more vital awareness of that grace. Our main problem in the Christian life is not that we don’t try hard enough to be good, but that we haven’t believed the gospel and received its finished reality into all parts of our life.
Gerhard Forde insightfully (and transparently) calls into question the ways in which we typically think about sanctification and spiritual progress when he writes:
Am I making progress? If I am really honest, it seems to me that the question is odd, even a little ridiculous. As I get older and death draws nearer, I don’t seem to be getting better. I get a little more impatient, a little more anxious about having perhaps missed what this life has to offer, a little slower, harder to move, a little more sedentary and set in my ways. Am I making progress? Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because I’m getting tired! It’s just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is that sanctification? I wouldn’t think so! One should not, I expect, mistake encroaching senility for sanctification! But can it be, perhaps, that it is precisely the unconditional gift of grace that helps me to see and admit all that? I hope so. The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain humor, a certain down-to-earthness.
Forde rightly shows that when we stop narcissistically focusing on our need to get better, that is what it means to get better! When we stop obsessing over our need to improve, that is what it means to improve! Remember, the Apostle Paul referred to himself as the chief of sinners at the end of his life. It was his ability to freely admit that which demonstrated his spiritual maturity–he had nothing to prove or protect because it wasn’t about him!
I’m realizing that the sin I need removed daily is precisely my narcissistic understanding of spiritual progress. I think too much about how I’m doing, if I’m growing, whether I’m doing it right or not. I spend too much time pondering my failure, brooding over my spiritual successes, and wondering why, when it’s all said and done, I don’t seem to be getting that much better. In short, I spend way too much time thinking about me and what I need to do and far too little time thinking about Jesus and what he’s already done. And what I’ve discovered, ironically, is that the more I focus on my need to get better the worse I actually get. I become neurotic and self-absorbed. Preoccupation with my performance over Christ’s performance for me makes me increasingly self-centered and morbidly introspective. After all, Peter only began to sink when he took his eyes off Jesus and focused on “how he was doing. As my friend Rod Rosenbladt wrote to me recently, “Anytime our naturalincurvitas (fixture on self) is rattled, shaken, turned from itself to that Man’s blood, to that Man’s cross, then the devil take the hindmost!”
So, by all means work! But the hard work is not what you think it is–your personal improvement and moral progress. The hard work is washing your hands of you and resting in Christ’s finished work for you–which will inevitably produce personal improvement and moral progress. Progress in obedience happens when our hearts realize that God’s love for us does not depend on our progress in obedience. Martin Luther’s got a point: “It is not imitation that makes sons; it is sonship that makes imitators.”
The real question, then, is: What are you going to do now that you don’t have to do anything? What will your life look like lived under the banner which reads “It is finished?”
What you’ll discover is that once the gospel frees you from having to do anything for Jesus, you’ll want to doeverything for Jesus so that “whether you eat or drink or whatever you do” you’ll do it all to the glory of God.
"We were created to worship God and make culture in which God is worshiped in all of life. Subsequently, when idolatry is committed, all of life is implicated, damaging individuals and societies. This reality negates the popular myth that idolatry is not damaging, or that it is merely a personal matter that does not implicate society at large, as if we were each isolated individuals not affected by or affecting others.
Idolatry destroys idolaters
First, idolatry harms the individuals who participate in it. Commenting on Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s 1849 book The Sickness Unto Death, Tim Keller says,
Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity apart from him. . . . Most people think of sin primarily as “breaking divine rules,” but Kierkegaard knows that the very first of the Ten Commandments is to “have no other gods before me.” So, according to the Bible, the primary way to define sin is not just the doing of bad things, but the making of good things intoultimate things. It is seeking to establish a sense of self by making something else more central to your significance, purpose, and happiness than your relationship to God. (The Reason for God)
Our identity is our idol
Whatever we base our identity and value on becomes “deified”; this object of worship then determines what we hold in glory and live for. If that object is anything other than God, we are idolaters worshiping created things. For most people, their proverbial “tell” happens when they introduce themselves: they first say their name and then say something to the affect of, “I am a [blank].” How they fill in the blank (e.g., education, vocation, number of children, neighborhood they live in) often reveals what they have deified and are building their life on.
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Whatever you base your life on—you have to live up to that.
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The ensuing problem is that our marriage, children, appearance, wealth, success, career, religious performance, political party, cause, loving relationship, possession, hobby, pleasure, status, and power crumble under the weight of being god to us. Regarding the instability of an identity based upon anything other than Jesus Christ’s saving work to claim us as his own, Keller says,
If anything threatens your identity you will not just be anxious but paralyzed with fear. If you lose your identity through the failings of someone else you will not just be resentful, but locked into bitterness. If you lose it through your own failings, you will hate or despise yourself as a failure as long as you live. Only if your identity is built on God and his love, says Kierkegaard, can you have a self that can venture anything, face anything. . . . An identity not based on God also leads inevitably to deep forms of addiction. When we turn good things into ultimate things, we are, as it were, spiritually addicted. If we take our meaning in life from our family, our work, a cause, or some achievement other than God, they enslave us. We have to have them.
God's love grounds our identity
As God’s image-bearers we will only have a true, lasting, deep, satisfying, and sufficiently rooted identity in God’s love. Keller says,
Remember this—if you don’t live for Jesus you will live for something else. If you live for career and you don’t do well it may punish you all of your life, and you will feel like a failure. If you live for your children and they don’t turn out all right you could be absolutely in torment because you feel worthless as a person.
If Jesus is your center and Lord and you fail him, he will forgive you. Your career can’t die for your sins. You might say, “If I were a Christian I’d be going around pursued by guilt all the time!” But we all are being pursued by guilt because we must have an identity and there must be somestandard to live up to by which we get that identity. Whatever you base your life on—you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who died for you—one who breathed his last for you. Does that sound oppressive?
This explains why those whose idol is beauty become frantic to maintain their appearance, even if it should compel them toward eating disorders, abuse of cosmetic surgery, and a panic as they age. Similarly, this helps to explain why those who are the richest and most famous among us struggle with substance abuse, depression, and even suicidal longings.
Idolatry destroys societies
Idolatry also harms the societies in which it is practiced, to the degree it is practiced. In his book Idols for Destruction, Herbert Schlossberg surveys the various idols of modern life and thought. According to Schlossberg, the chief errors of our time stem from attempts to deify various aspects of creation: history, nature, humanity, economics, nature, and political power. Only affirmation and application of the Creator-creature distinction can point the way out. The issues, then, are essentially religious and moral; we will not escape our dilemmas by some new form of political organization or a new economic system.
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When we turn good things into ultimate things, we are spiritually addicted.
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Schlossberg is emphatic to point out that just because a culture turns away from God, it still turns toward something to replace God:
Western society, in turning away from Christian faith, has turned to other things. This process is commonly called secularization, but that conveys only the negative aspect. The word connotes the turning away from the worship of God while ignoring the fact that something is being turned to in its place.
If you idolize, you demonize
One of the great evils of idolatry is that if we idolize we must also demonize, as Jonathan Edwards rightly taught in The Nature of True Virtue.
If we idolize our race, we must demonize other races.
If we idolize our gender, we must demonize the other gender.
If we idolize our nation, we must demonize other nations.
If we idolize our political party, we must demonize other political parties.
If we idolize our socioeconomic class, we must demonize other classes.
If we idolize our family, we must demonize other families.
If we idolize our theological system, we must demonize other theological systems.
If we idolize our church, we must demonize other churches.
This explains the great polarities and acrimonies that plague every society. If something other than God’s loving grace is the source of our identity and value, we must invariably defend our idol by treating everyone and everything who may call our idol into question as an enemy to be demonized so that we can remain feeling superior to other people and safe with our idol.
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If you don’t live for Jesus you will live for something else.
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Curiously, some people are aware of this fact and idolize tolerance and diversity, as if they were more righteous because of their open-mindedness. However, even those who idolize tolerance and diversity must demonize those they deem to be intolerant of certain diversities. Simply stated, everyone who idolizes also demonizes and in so doing is a hypocrite contributing to the tearing of a social fabric of love, peace, and kindness they purport to be serving."
I find this excerpt interesting in the light of that it comes from someone who is an athesist - David Foster Wallace - Sadly he took his life in 2008.
"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it Jesus Christ or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you....
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation."
Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005
Fruit or Success?
Added 1/18/2011 Posted by Doug Seletzky at 1:41:46 PM
“There is a great difference between successfulness and fruitfulness. Success comes from strength, control, and respectability. A successful person has the energy to create something, to keep control over its development, and to make it available in large quantities. Success brings many rewards and often fame. Fruits, however, come from weakness and vulnerability. And fruits are unique. A child is the fruit conceived in vulnerability, community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.” - Henri Nouwen
I liked David Pawlison description of the human condition, "The desire for good relationships, yet suspicion and fear of others; of tolerance for others’ failings, yet self-aggrandizement and despising of others; of moments of brilliant self-awareness, yet habitual blindness to what about us is obvious to others; of patience with counselees, yet petty anger with family members; of love for self-knowledge, yet stubborn resistance to correction."
"We should, I believe, distrust states of mind which turn our attention upon ourselves. Even at our sins we should look no longer than is necessary to know and to repent them: and our virtues or progress (if any) are certainly a dangerous object of contemplation. When the sun is vertically above a man he casts no shadow: similarly when we have come to the Divine meridian our spiritual shadow (that is, our consciousness of self) will vanish. One will thus in a sense be almost nothing: a room to be filled by God and our blessed fellow creatures, who in their turn are rooms we help to fill. But how far one is from this at present!" - C.s. Lewis writing to Walter Hooper
The spiritual journey is not about living as we should so life works as we want. It’s not a linear path.
It’s not about growing up into the maturity of a good self-image and developing the energy to do good things; it is about growing down into the brokenness of self-despair and deepening our awareness of how poorly we love compared to Trinitarian standards. It’s not about working hard to get it right so we can present ourselves before God to receive the blessings we desire; it is about coming before Him as we are, honestly, pretending about nothing, becoming increasingly convinced that we can’t get it right though we try as hard as we can, then listening for the whisper of the Spirit, “Welcome! You’re home. You’re loved. You’ll be empowered to speak with your unique voice as you hear the Voice of God singing over you with great love.
The Spirit is inviting each one of us to walk a very different path, to embark on a radically different journey. We’re bidden to come as we are, boldly, without fear, even though our souls still sometimes seem a cesspool of foul muck with no living waters in sight, abandoning ourselves to God for whatever He chooses to allow, waiting for Him to reveal how near we are to Him already in every circumstance of life, and to then draw us nearer. That’s the new way of the Spirit
