Look before you leap - an apology

I use my blog as a way of reflecting on my emotional reactions to things, usually to critique my own emotional response and think about how God speaks into it and this blog has therefore been a form of putting my personal journal out there for others to read in the hope they can draw encouragement from it. It has therefore become something of a habit to publish my internal processing via this medium.

However, I have been gently and justly rebuked that critiquing a pastoral conversation via the medium of blogpost is not necessarily the best way to build unity in the church. Having reflected I completely agree. I wrote about my discomfort with my friend’s advice (see previous blogpost) as a means of helping me understand why it made me uncomfortable but the right thing would then have been to discuss it with my friend rather than publish in a public medium something that was at best implicitly critical. The fact that I anonymised my friend, that she is not easily offended and that I thought she was unlikely to read it, which felt sufficient at the time, on reflection was not.

I also should acknowledge that although that one very brief conversation was the springboard for my previous post and that I believe that the post does reflect a problem within British Christian culture, the ideas and feelings I walked away with from that conversation and which I then went on to blog about were not reflective of the character and ministry of the individual in general and that I should have had some grounds for questioning whether I had understood them correctly. I was therefore unjust, and even if I had been the only person to know about whom, it still matters.  

I’ve discussed it with the person involved, apologised (although they were gracious enough not to be personally offended) and we have agreed that although I won’t withdraw the post as it may contain some helpful ideas I will add this commentary both as an apology and as a corrective.

The moral of the story is that sometimes a private journal should stay a private journal because for our growth as Christians personal relationships are what matter the most.

Try harder, do better

I was in a sermon last week, the topic of which was sitting in judgement upon others and I was strongly convicted about bitter thoughts and anger that I was allowing to go unchallenged in my heart towards two people who had recently, largely inadvertently, caused me a lot of pain. Over the last few months I had made frequent attempts at forgiveness and understanding but again over recent weeks the bitter thoughts and words had crept back in, the anger expanding unchecked and threatening to swallow up any mercy in my heart. I was recalled in this sermon to the fact of my own sin and forgiveness and convicted of my failure to extend mercy to these others.

Inevitably, however, when it comes to emotions I also had a sense of my own helplessness before the strength of my feelings. I know God’s good and holy law but I also know my own weakness in obeying it when it comes to emotions, the sense of being overwhelmed and defeated by the power of my feelings and their resistance to attempts to suppress, change or manipulate them with guilt. I was driven to prayer, to the refuge of the knowledge that I now have, that powerless as I am to change my emotional climate, to move my emotional mountain, God is not. I felt challenged to pray and I sought out a friend to pray with, to give me the immediate accountability to obey that impulse.

We prayed good prayers, prayers for God’s help, prayers full of God’s truth, asking him to keep promises he has made, reminding ourselves and him of his power to change us, calling upon his mercy and forgiveness for the sin of bitterness and unjust anger. Prayers that have mostly found an answer in the past week in a freedom from bitterness in my thoughts for those I was holding anger towards and a renewed sense of peace. So far, so terrific, praise God.

After we had finished praying though, my friend with whom I had prayed felt led to give me two pieces of wisdom to help me in my struggle with anger. They made me uneasy at the time and have continued to do so all week. Not because they were in any way wrong in themselves, but because I felt they somehow pointed my eyes in the wrong direction for what I needed. It made me reflect on what I think is possibly the greatest weakness of the middle-class conservative evangelical church, that our response to sin in our lives can often be an emphasis on obedience and self-discipline which is just a new way of living under law and which alienates the poor, broken and damaged of the world who know that their sinful drives and impulses are beyond the reach of law.

I have seen it drive people out of church, when they find that their sin is beyond their ability to control with self-discipline and guilt. They become overwhelmed with their own helplessness, tired of feeling guilty and walk away from their faith. We have failed them as a church. We have failed to teach them the true character of God, intentionally or unintentionally, by our teaching or our behaviour we have taught them that there is a spiritual maturity which goes beyond the cross of Christ instead of deeper and deeper into it.

I think the fundamental mistake is to confuse two groups of people whom the Bible addresses, those who are unconcerned about their sin or who do not recognise it, and those who are utterly and terribly convicted of their sin and in despair at it. To the former Jesus presents the law, the uncompromising, unrelenting holiness of God which is meant to drive us to self-examination and despair. To those who ask, “what must I do to inherit eternal life’, who live with sufficient self-delusion to even believe that might be possible, he commands the impossible – love your enemy, sell all your possessions and give to the poor. Teachings that are meant to drive us to the question of the disciples, “who then can be saved?” and its liberating answer, “for men this is impossible, but for God nothing is impossible”. To the latter, Jesus says, “I have come to preach good news to the poor, to set the prisoners free, to bind up the broken hearted,” and, “come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

Another way of thinking about it is that holiness does not come through self-discipline, rather self-discipline is the fruit of holiness, the fruit of the spirit. Holiness, comes through relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, through obedience to the command to come to him, to follow him, to listen to him, to accept his forgiveness and mercy. This command is a command of love and relationship, not a command of self-discipline found outside of Christ.

I think we can risk, in the middle-class church teaching a gospel of self-reliance that is an expression of our culture, entirely by accident. It is a comfortable gospel, one in which we reconstruct the law demolished by grace and simply give it a new name, obedience. One in which we risk becoming Pharisees, tying up burdens for the backs of the poor and weak. One in which we alienate the vulnerable from the good news of grace and relationship with the Lord Jesus because they cannot meet the bar of ‘obedience’ which we set for ourselves. Of course we can never say that sin does not matter, that would be a lie of the devil, but to anybody struggling with sin, this is not the problem that they have. Anyone who comes to us despairing of their sin or ashamed or guilt-ridden or confessing their sin has already grasped its nature and horror. The work of the law is already done, and to point them to law as the solution to their sin, or to live lives that express our belief that it is the solution to ours is to defame God and dishonour the gospel.

Because we are often privileged as a church to have been raised unexposed to trauma, need or many types of corruption – particularly those raised in Christian families – we can often suppress our more noticeable sinful tendencies by self-will, teach others to do the same and fail to understand why they can’t. When someone is struggling with sin we will point them to the command as the solution, failing to recognise that the law is powerless to bring change.

This then is the problem, what is the solution? And here is the opportunity to avoid becoming circular and advocating a law-based response to the sin of seeking righteousness from within ourselves. We are helpless before sin, its dirty fingers are laced through every part of our lives, our bodies, our minds, our hearts. No more so than in our attitude to sin itself. We cannot overcome sin through the written code of law and instruction, through trying harder to be better people, through self-discipline. We cannot overcome the sin of our attitude to sin in this way. The only way is grace and the life that comes through grace. Through the relationship we have offered by the Lord Jesus, through grasping increasingly the height and depth and breadth of his love for us that surpasses knowledge, through the Spirit of sonship that cries ‘Abba, Father’, through dependence on his power and mercy and grace for change in our lives.

The command of the law to forgive those who have hurt me is despair and death to me. The love of Christ crucified, raised, exalted and interceding for me in heaven is life and peace and power to forgive. Christ’s love is healing for my pain, Christ’s love is reassurance of God’s justice, Christ’s love is knowing that I matter to God and that my pain is safe in his hands, that I can surrender my anger and not lose my safety, not accept the position of shame that others’ sin places me in.

What I need to forgive is not to meditate on the extent of the sin that I have been forgiven, to fuel my obedience with guilt; it’s not to hear the command to forgive, that is the written code which carries with it no power for obedience. What I need to forgive is to know my God, his mercy, love, power and grace to me. By this I am delivered, by this I find that truly Christ’s burden is easy and his yoke is light, that the command ceases to be needed as my bitterness and resentment flies away of its own accord exposed to the light of Christ.

So a word of advice, when a friend comes to you in despair of their sin, the work of the law is done, tell them instead how much they are loved by God, how much forgiven, and of the cross that is the confidence we have of these things. And that this would be my response to my own sin and to others’ is the prayer of my heart for myself and for each person reading this too.