Blind Man's Fancy

I’ve been waiting a long time to read something like the following selections from Tullian Tchividjian’s book Jesus + Nothing = Everything.  Of course, regular immersion in Scripture will lead to the same conclusions, but you never know what you’ll run across in some downtime reading.

Expressing his disdain for “accountability groups” Tchividjian writes, “All parties involved believe that the guiltier we feel, the more holy we are” (p180).  I’ve found this to be generally true among the next generation of Puritan-reading, Reformed theology junkies.  (Although, its not the Puritan’s fault, but a faulty reading of them.)  If they’re not always downcast and bothered by some sin then, in their minds, they’re not taking sin seriously.  And soon the attention is “on our sin, and not on our Savior” (ibid.).  Ironically, those who champion justification by grace alone seem the least content in being justified by grace alone!  It’s as though total depravity swallows up irresistible grace.

“When the goal becomes conquering our sin instead of soaking in the conquest of our Savior, instead of growing stronger and more mature, we actually begin to shrink spiritually” (ibid., italics his).  Of course, Tchividjian and we are against sin.  We hate it and want it overcome.  But there is too often the trend in “accountability groups” to attach spiritual progress with how much sin we’re not committing anymore.  ”Because of this, these groups breed self-righteousness, guilt, and the almost irresistible temptation to pretend” (ibid.).  That is to say, too much of this navel-gazing and we “boast” more in how bad we are than in how great Christ is.

When we (or our friends) focus mostly on our need to get better, we actually get worse.  We become neurotic and self-absorbed.  Preoccupation with our guilt (instead of with God’s grace) makes us increasingly myopic and self-interested.  Real Christian growth, according to the seventeenth century Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs, ‘comes not so much from our struggling and endeavors and resolutions, as it comes flowing to us from our union with him’” (p181).

We become so consumed with examining or testing ourselves to see if we’re in the faith, that we rarely rest in the unchanging, unrivaled, immovable work of God to justify sinners.  That inevitably leads to an undue emphasis on what we’re doing for Jesus rather than enjoying what Jesus has already done for us.  The more we can gather at the Lord’s Table, the more we are graciously reminded that God works outside-in, not inside-out.  Ingesting the elements is a confession that my body and  blood are insufficient means of God’s grace.  Christ’s body and blood alone have become mine and therefore have reconciled God to me.

The sin that gives rise to our sinful behavior is a preoccupation with ourselves.  That’s the root sin that needs to be mortified.  That’s the under-the-surface sin that gives birth  to our misdeeds.  The first sin that needs to be rooted out and attacked is not immoral behavior; it’s immoral belief–the belief that my Christian life is all about my moral and spiritual progress (ibid.).

Again (I can’t stress this enough), it’s so important to understand that Christianity is not first about our getting better, our obedience, our behavior, and our daily victory over remaining sin–as important as all these are.  It’s first about Jesus! It’s about his person and substitutionary work–his incarnation, life, death, resurrection, ascension, session, and promised return.  We’re justified–and sanctified–by grace alone through faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone (ibid.).

Is there a witness in the house?

So, instead of trying to fix one another, why don’t we ‘stir one another up to love and good deeds’ by daily reminding one another, in humble love, of the riches we already possess in Christ? (p182)

Our greatest need is to look at Christ more than we look at ourselves, because the gospel is not our work for Jesus, but Jesus’s work for us.  As Sinclair Ferguson has said, ‘The evangelical orientation is inward and subjective.  We are far better at looking inward than we are at looking outward.  Instead, we need to expend our energies admiring, exploring, expositing, and extolling Jesus Christ’ (p184).

And finally:

The bottom line is this, Christian: because of Christ’s work on your behalf, God doesn’t dwell on your sin the way you do.  So, relax, and rejoice, and you’ll actually start to get better.  The irony, of course, is that it’s only when we stop obsessing over our own need to be holy and focus instead on the beauty of Christ’s holiness that we actually become more holy!  Not to mention that we also start to become a lot easier to live with.”

Amen and amen.

“…as sin reigned in death, even so grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 5.21).

It’s stock language in the Christian life that we’re to “hate sin” and “kill sin.”  Sin is indeed an interloper in the Christian soul, a squatter in the Spirit-indwelled heart.  Because of Christ, sin has no rights, privileges or legal claim on the Christian.  Therefore, it must be rooted out and put to death.  We are strengthened by the Holy Spirit to make progress against particular sins and toward Christlikeness.  Though a lifelong process, the mortification of sin is a hopeful process because Jesus has removed its sting (1 Cor 15.55-57).  I’m far more empowered to kill something that I’m assured cannot kill me back!

But, as pious as hating and killing sin sounds how do we go about it?  What metric do I use to determine how much I hate sin?  Is it enough to merely say we categorically hate sin really, really bad?  Is our hatred of sin to be measured by how bad we feel after committing it?  Does killing sin mean spending our days not sinning in certain ways?  Are we to wake up each day trying not to sin as a means of mortifying it?

Jesus taught us to be violently aggressive against sin.  We’re to cut out the wandering eye and cut off the offending hand, as it were (Mt 18.8-9).  Guerrilla warfare has no rules and sin is our fiercest guerrillero; therefore, killing is rarely easy and often messy.  We’re not merely to hate the category of sin, but to kill “the deeds of the body” in the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom 8.13).  It’s one thing to hate weeds in my yard while staring at them from the kitchen window, but quite another to get dirty pulling up the particular weeds.  We’re called to hate and mortify sin by being done with sins.

That said, I might suggest one metric to measure hatred for sin and a corresponding tactic for killing it.  Sin reigns in death, grace reigns through righteousness.  The grace that saves is the grace that demonstrates its power (reign) in sin-killing righteousness.  In other words, saving grace is not only measured by how much sin we get away with while still remaining God’s children.  Grace is measured also by the amount of righteousness that replaces sin.  Grace doesn’t reign through licentiousness, but through righteousness.

How can my hatred of sin be measured?  By the amount of opposing righteousness demonstrated in my life.  For example, I show how much I hate greed or theft by my level of generosity (Eph 4.28).  I show how much I hate sarcasm, gossip and slander by how much of an encouragement I am in any conversation (Eph 4.29).  I demonstrate how much I hate bitterness, wrath and anger by how kind, tender-hearted and forgiving I am (Eph 4.30; Col 2.8, 12).  I demonstrate how much I hate selfishness and conceit by the amount of humble service I offer (Phil 4.3-4).

The tactic, therefore, for killing sin is not simply not sinning.  Like trying not to think of a pink elephant immediately causes me to think of a pink elephant, trying so hard to avoid thinking about sin focuses our attention on the sin.  Laying aside entangling sin doesn’t mean focusing on sin’s knots, but fixing our eyes on Jesus (Heb 12.1-2).  Killing sin means defeating it by grace-reigning righteousness.  Sin must be evicted by the soul’s rightful resident: the Spirit of Christ putting Christ’s righteousness on display through us.

Killing sin is not a matter of waiting on God to “zap” the sinful desires out of you.  How many times have I prayed, “God, just take the desires away so I can’t be rid of this sin!”? If I had a nickle.  God typically doesn’t mysteriously take sin out of us while we sleep like he did Adam’s rib.  God has provided means of killing of sin; namely, grace.  And grace reigns through righteousness.

Therefore, if I want to kill angry it will be futile to spend every hour trying hard not to get angry.  Doing so will probably only make us angrier!  We kill anger with tender-hearted compassion.  Instead of trying not to be angry, exercise compassion and our anger will run out of food to eat and move on.  If I want to kill greed it will be futile to avoid shopping.  We kill greed by being generous.  Instead of trying hard not to be greedy, give yourself away and greed will slowly shrivel.  Killing gossip will take more than lip-zipping.  It will take gossip being evicted by Christ-centered encouragement of others.  Rather than trying hard not to gossip, try hard to encourage and gossip will become far less gratifying to our selfish soul.

Grace is freedom.  Liberty.  We don’t wake up each day with the burden of killing sin by sneaking around it or ignoring it or being enslaved to its orbit.  That’s like trying to evict a squatter by trying hard not to see him.  We wake up each day in the power of God’s grace to pursue righteousness.  Christ’s righteousness.  We will enjoy far more freedom from sin by pursuing those things that evict sin in the power of the Spirit than we will trying not to sin by our own power.  Grace reigns through righteousness.  Long live the King.

“In fifty years of being a pastor, my most difficult assignment continues to be the task of developing a sense among the people I serve of the soul-transforming implications of grace–a comprehensive, foundational reorientation from living anxiously by my wits and muscle to living effortlessly in the world of God’s active presence.  The prevailing North American culture (not much different from the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, and Roman cultures in which our biblical ancestors lived0 is, to all intents and purposes, a context of persistent denial of grace” (Eugene Peterson, Practice Resurrection: 96).

A graceless church is no church at all.  The church is a motley band of exiles, stained by the world and stung by death.  What distinguishes the church from the world is not necessarily the volume of sin, but the vigor with which we apply Christ to our sin.  The church is full of guilty-but-pardoned death row inmates while the world is full of those who don’t realize they’re condemned already.

We do not gather to enforce or encourage perfection.  We gather to enforce Christ, given for sinners.  Jesus will make us perfect one day, but until then ours to help each other keep repenting, believing and hoping in the sure and final work of our Savior.  We keep eating the bread and drinking the cup precisely because we’re imperfect, trusting wholly and solely on another’s righteousness to pulsate through our veins.

In preaching the panorama of God’s grace Paul was not content until he forced the question: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” (Rom 6.1).   In so doing, Paul pushed God’s sovereign grace to its highest conceivable limit.  Let us preach and invest grace so that we must at least consider the same question.  Then we will be reigned in because the same grace that would invite such a question is the same grace that will reign through righteousness (Rom 5.21).  The grace that is stronger, higher, deeper and wider than all our sin is the grace that woos and compels toward righteousness.  But in order for grace to reign in righteousness it must be pressed to its desired end:  ”a comprehensive, foundational reorientation from living anxiously by my wits and muscle to living effortlessly in the world of God’s active presence.”