From this morning’s email newsletter, an article by Dr. Jerry Root. Dr. Root teaches several courses in evangelism at Wheaton College. To learn more about Dr. Root, visit his faculty biography page. To sign up for our free newsletter, click here.
God Works Through Flawed Men and Women
There are many things those who share the Gospel do well to remember. Certainly it is good for us to recall that the message we share is the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness. But, as we carry the Gospel to others it is also good if we remember it is mediated through we who are so flawed and fallen. Have you ever noticed how everyone in the Bible could have introduced himself, or herself, in some kind of recovery group? Imagine it:
“Hi. My name is Abraham. I am a coward and a liar. I would tell a lie to put my wife’s life at risk in order to save my own skin.”
“Hi. We are Isaac and Rebecca and we’re dysfunctional parents.”
“Hi. My name is Jacob and I’m a cheater and a scoundrel.”
“Hi. My name is Aaron. I’m a religious leader; but I cave in to peer pressure.”
“Hi. My name is Miriam. I’m jealous of my little brother Moses and I’m a racist; I’m upset about his inter-racial marriage.”
“Hi. My name is Moses and I’m a hot-head and a murderer.”
“Hi. My name is Naomi and I am bitter.”
“Hi. My name is Samson and I struggle with lust.”
“Hi. My name is David. I am an adulterer and a murderer.”
“Hi. My name is Elijah and I struggle with depression.”
“Hi. My name is Thomas. I struggle with doubts.”
“Hi. My name is Mary Magdalene and I’m a prostitute.”
“Hi. My name is Peter and I let down my best friend when he needed me most.”
“Hi. My name is Timothy. I struggle with paralyzing fears and insecurities.”
“Hi. My name is Paul. I am a Christian killer and I am very difficult to work with.”
As I read about these “heroes of the faith” I see that each one was flawed and yet each did significant Kingdom work. I do not believe that they were rewarded for the flaws; nor do I believe their flaws were unrelated to the good that occurred in their lives. The flaws became grace places; places of humility, which I believe is a synonym for honesty. They came to acknowledge in progressively deeper ways their need of God’s love and mercy. For, to each, in his or her specific need, God came because He loved them; as He loves us. He loves us! He loves us with a love that is not conditioned by our performance…
…In Francis Thompson’s poem “The Hound of Heaven” the hound, who represents God, asks the man who has been running from Him (the man whose live is spent in dissipation), “Human love demands human meriting; how hast thou merited? Of all man’s dingiest clay thou art the dingiest clot. Alas, thou knowest not how unworthy of love thou art. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, save me? Save only me. Rise, clasp my hand and come….” The words are very powerful. God’s love is not conditioned by performance and, perhaps, all the men and women listed above, went on to accomplish their greatest work after their hour of crisis because each understood more deeply than they might have otherwise known that God’s love was deeper, richer, wider, and mightier than they ever could have imagined. Furthermore, His forgiveness can go deeper too.
I love C. S. Lewis’s work. But there is a point where I disagree with him. In “Mere Christianity” he wrote that he thought pride was the greatest sin. I disagree. It is certainly bad; and, perhaps we can legitimately say it is at the apex of all sin. But an apex, like that in a pyramid, is always supported by that which is much more substantive at its base. In other words, pride is at the end of a process. When I think about what precedes pride, I come up with insecurity or fear. In pride or pretense, the tendency is to make myself look better than I am because I fear if folks really and truly knew me as I am they would reject me. Fear precedes pride. And this fear is often insipid in most human subcultures; perhaps because it is so deeply embedded in our fallen sense of self. If we marginalize the strugglers in our midst with words like: “Out of fellowship”; “Carnal”; “Backslider”; though nobody would say it explicitly, implied in this is the expectation that everyone should be perfect in our subculture. Since nobody is perfect, this false expectation breeds pretense. Everybody goes about trying to make themselves look better than they are. This behavior is so contrary to real life that it seeks to be rationalized and validated and can only be done so pharisaically. The community moves into grace-denying constructs. Pride as I mentioned above is preceded by fear and insecurity.
The Bible says that the antidote to fear is the love of God. “Perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18). I think a corollary to that verse is that imperfect love breeds anxiety. You and me, we’ve never been loved perfectly by anybody. Remember: “Human love demands human meriting.” We are saddled with the burden of anxiety by well-meaning folks who loved us as well as they might but were incapable of loving us perfectly. Of course it gets worse before it gets better; nobody we’ve ever loved has been loved perfectly by us as well. We have also burdened others with the anxiety of our well-intended but deficient love. Only God, from whom we can hide nothing, God, who fully knows us, can love us thoroughly with the transformational love that casts out fear. So, if my analogy is correct, and pride is at the apex of the pyramid, than the greatest sin at the very base of the pyramid is the unwillingness to receive the love of God unto ourselves. He comes to us with Incarnate grace as He came to each of those heroes listed above in their darkest hours to restore them. The true Kingdom of God is made up of broken men and women mended by the love and mercy of God. I do not know much; but I do know this is true. And I know that it is these kinds of people He deploys into the world to spread the Gospel. They are the only kind He has to work with. Andrew’s offering of five loaves and two fish to feed the 5,000 wasn’t much for the work that had to be done. But Jesus took what was offered and did something great with it! So too, with the offering to tell others about Jesus – it is mediated through flawed men and women, eager to tell others of His love and forgiveness which is free for the taking.
Jerry Root Ph.D.
Wheaton College
If you follow us on Twitter, you probably know that we’re going through Isaiah 59 right now in our Tweets. (For those who aren’t following us on Twitter yet, find us at @insp_faith)
Something struck me as I was reading through Isaiah 59 this week. I call it the language of “them.”
What I mean by the language of “them” is my tendency to read certain passages in the Bible as if they relate to “them” and not to me, or us.
Let me give you an example:
Their cobwebs are useless for clothing;
they cannot cover themselves with what they make.
Their deeds are evil deeds,
and acts of violence are in their hands.
Their feet rush into sin;
they are swift to shed innocent blood.
Their thoughts are evil thoughts;
ruin and destruction mark their ways.
The way of peace they do not know;
there is no justice in their paths.
They have turned them into crooked roads;
no one who walks in them will know peace.
Isaiah 59:6-8
 Dathan from The Ten Commandments, my stereotypical view of "the bad guys" in Scripture Even though right before and after these passages, Isaiah switches from using “them” language to using “us” language, internally, I still stay in the mindset that all of this depressing talk about sin and injustice relates to “them” – the “wicked.” When I think of the wicked who rush into sin and shed innocent blood, I picture the bad guys in those old Bible movies, like Dathan from The Ten Commandments. The wicked people the Bible must be referring to are slightly overweight, stuck-up gluttons dressed in old-fashioned robes. With an image like that in my head, it’s hard to relate these passages to people in today’s world or to myself.
Even when I realize how silly my mental images are and make an effort to apply these Scriptures to contemporary times, it’s still hard to bring it home to me and people I know. It’s much easier to look at leaders like Hitler and Stalin who clearly shed a lot of innocent blood and are considered wicked by most people’s standards.
But me…I’m not so bad, right? My friends and family, none of them have committed murder or stolen from those who are impoverished.
Or so I think.
And so it appears, on the surface.
But when we’re all really honest about the world’s problems…when I realize that I take a long shower on days when I’m tired, with absolutely no thought to the resources I take for granted that people in other parts of the world are literally dying for…when I think about the products I use that at some point in their production are polluting groundwater and rivers…when I dwell on the methane that my trash is creating somewhere in the world after it leaves the garbage can in my kitchen, I realize that maybe I’m not quite as different from those “wicked” people in the Bible after all. Maybe I am contributing to violence and injustice, without even thinking about it.
The thing is, even though I know about these problems, even though I see injustice that I’m indirectly connected to every time I watch the news, I’m like the people in Isaiah 59. Verse 16 says, “Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey. The LORD looked and was displeased that there was no justice.” I am part of that crowd of sinners that is mankind, refusing to shun evil, lest I become a prey.
So what’s to be done about that? Am I saying that we should all withdraw from the world and its corrupt systems? Should I stop using water or using any material goods, knowing that my use of them is hurting somebody somewhere? Should I stop paying my taxes, knowing that some of the money is probably going toward systemic injustices, toward pollution, toward abortion?
I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think that’s what God is calling me and calling you to do. I don’t think we’re supposed to withdraw from the world. And I don’t think we’re supposed to be wracked with paralyzing guilt over all the evils we’re voluntarily or involuntarily committing.
The Good News is in Isaiah 59:17, “He saw that there was no one, He was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so His own arm worked salvation for Him, and His own righteousness sustained Him.”
Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, God is bringing redemption to us and to creation. Do I have an obligation to join with Him in that work of redemption? You bet. And that’s going to show up in small ways, through loving my neighbor, through recycling, through composting, through telling people about Jesus, through doing what I can do to fight injustice.
And it’s going to come through confession and repentance. Through realizing that even if I can’t change the world entirely and bring about God’s justice in my lifetime, I have a duty to intercede in prayer and to confess my sins and our corporate, societal sins with a contrite heart to the LORD.
I have full confidence that one day Jesus will physically return to the earth and restore everything that has gone wrong through sin and death. But until that day comes, let us identify ourselves with the “thems” of Scripture and realize the role we have to play in confession, repentance, and justice.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was raised in a church that didn’t observe most of the Church calendar. In high school, I remember seeing a friend at school with ashes on her forehead one Ash Wednesday. I thought it was weird that she had a dirty forehead. When other people asked her about it, she explained that at her church, ashes are put on people’s foreheads to commemorate the beginning of Lent.
I knew that people “give up things” for Lent, but I never really understood why. Most of the people I knew growing up who observed Lent didn’t really observe much else about Christianity. (I remember one year, a girl in my class announced to a small group around her that she was giving up wearing underwear for Lent.)
I attended an interdenominational Christian college, where I became friends with some Catholics and Anglicans. These friends passionately observed the Church calendar and everything else that comes along with following Christ. Through those friendships, I learned to respect other Christian traditions, like observing Ash Wednesday and Lent. But I still didn’t have a good grasp on why these traditions were observed.
To help combat our ignorance about the traditional Church calendar, my husband and I went to an Ash Wednesday service today at a church down the road from where we live. Before we went, I googled to make sure it was okay to receive the ashes if we weren’t a member of the church. (It was.) So as we approached the church, I felt nervous. What if you were supposed to do something upon receiving the ashes, and I made a fool of myself for not doing it? Should I wear the ashes all day – even to my very Protestant church later tonight? What would people think? Would everyone at work think I was a Catholic? Would people at my own church feel offended that I attended a *gasp* Catholic church?
As the questions popped into my mind, I decided that, in spite of my nervousness, I was going to go through with it. I would receive the ashes, and I would wear them for the entire day.
In college, the Lord laid it on my heart to work toward reconciliation between fractured denominations. As a Christian growing up in a contemporary Protestant church, I experienced judgmentalism on both sides of the table. Friends at my church spoke condescendingly about Christians who were “too traditional” to have an authentic relationship with God. On the other side of the divide, friends at school who came from traditional church backgrounds would speak condescendingly of Christians like me, who came from “weird, emotional, self-centered” backgrounds. They claimed that we turned worship of God into a frivolous party rather than a sacred reverence.
In college, God stretched me by bringing relationships into my life with Christians of all sorts of backgrounds. Through studying the Bible and theology, I felt convicted about my own attitude toward Christians who worshiped differently than I did. I started to think that maybe Christians on both sides of the table had something worthwhile to offer each other. Sometimes we, as human beings, can be too rigid in our worship of God. But sometimes we can be too frivolous, forgetting what a glorious, awesome God we serve. God is a friend to us, but He is also a holy fire. Reconciliation and fellowship between different denominations helps us all to hold that tension of worshiping God for who He really is, not for who we want Him to be.
Tonight when I attend my contemporary Protestant church with ashes on my forehead, my prayer is that this visual reminder would be received for what it is – a reminder that we are all sinners saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus. I pray that we would be more quick to love and embrace one another in Christ than we are to argue over traditions, calendar days, and styles of worship.
I may not understand or embrace all aspects of every denomination. But I want my heart to be soft enough that I can find the common points we agree on and build bridges of fellowship. May these ashes play a small part in bringing reconciliation, and may they be a reminder today of my need for Jesus.
What about you? Did you grow up in a traditional church or a contemporary church? Have you noticed judgmentalism between Christians of different denominations? Have you ever passed judgment on those who are different from you, like I did with my high school friend when she came to school with ashes? Will you observe Lent this year? If so, what does Lent mean to you?
You may have noticed a lot of buzz on the internet yesterday about World AIDS Day. December 1 marked the 21st World AIDS Day, and the entire month of December has been set aside as World AIDS Month. This day and month were set aside to promote awareness of HIV/AIDS and to encourage support for those affected by the disease.
As I came across a large amount of Tweets and Facebook ads promoting awareness of Worlds AIDS Day, I figured I should get Inspired Faith on the bandwagon. I posted some AIDS Day-related Tweets and started researching some websites with stories and charities related to AIDS so I could write a blog post.
As I read stories from people who have become infected, I noticed something surprising. I knew that AIDS is only transferred through sexual contact or blood contact, so it wasn’t surprising to me that many people I read about had contracted AIDS through premarital or extramarital sex or through drug use. What surprised me was my gut reaction to those stories. I found myself skimming stories, looking for people I could have legitimate sympathy for–people who had been infected unknowingly, perhaps through a blood transfusion or through an unfaithful spouse’s bad choices. My initial reaction toward the people who “chose” infection for themselves by engaging in unsafe sex with multiple partners or by using drugs was that they deserved what happened to them. They made their beds, now they had to sleep in them, so why should I feel sorry for them?
When I started to really think about my initial reaction to those stories, the Holy Spirit began to convict me. Was my attitude really that of Jesus?
Then I began to think about how the Church as a whole generally deals with the AIDS pandemic. I’ve never been part of a local church that mentioned AIDS, much less contributed money, time, or support to AIDS victims. Why? Could it be that a majority of the Church has the same gut reaction I had to many AIDS victims? They sinned; now they’re paying for it. And instead of having compassion on these sinners, maybe we feel scared of them. Maybe we’d rather distance ourselves and deal with “lesser” sinners whose consequences of sin aren’t so obvious. Maybe we don’t like the uncomfortable reminder of our own sin nature and the reminder that the wages of sin is death.
Romans 6:23 tells us that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. I believe that God wants us to be more active in sharing His gift of eternal life in Christ with AIDS victims and less active in our condemnation of those who have sinned.
In John 8:3-11, we see a picture of Jesus’ attitude toward a potential AIDS victim:
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing Him.
But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with His finger. When they kept on questioning Him, He straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground.
At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
“No one, sir,” she said.
“Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
The woman in this story was engaged in behavior many of the people I read about were engaged in. Like the Pharisees, my initial reaction was condemnation. But by the Spirit’s tender cultivation, I pray that my attitude and the attitude of the Church would become like Jesus’ attitude toward this woman. His attitude was not one that embraced her sin, but it was one that embraced her. We always hear the phrase, “Hate the sin, but love the sinner.” World AIDS Month is an opportunity for us to put that idea into practice.
Rather than turn our hearts away from those who have participated in unrighteous acts, let’s commit to doing something to love them. Let’s commit to seeing ourselves in the same boat. After all, we were once slaves to sin ourselves, and if not for God’s gift of life through Christ, where would we be?
There are many Christian organizations that are committed to practically loving those who have contracted AIDS. You can find links to their websites at the end of this post. If you aren’t able to or don’t feel led to commit service or money to an AIDS organization, take some time to do something even more powerful. Pray.
Pray for those who have contracted AIDS. Most of them are scared, lonely, and depressed. You can understand why. Pray for their comfort and that those who don’t know Christ would come to know His power and His love. Pray that those who feel shame would release it to God and accept His grace even as they repent for past choices.
Pray for the hearts of Christians, that we would not be like the Pharisees, but that we would be like Jesus and love those who “made their own beds.” Pray that we would be examples to the world of compassion, grace, and service concerning the AIDS pandemic.
Pray for those who don’t yet have AIDS but are in danger of contracting it, through their current lifestyle or through temptations and circumstances in their lives. Pray that the Spirit will bring believers into their lives to love them with Christ’s love and to give them hope for the future.
Finally, there are many cases throughout the world of people who have contracted AIDS through no choice of their own. There are villages in rural China where peasants donated blood to local blood banks to earn extra money. The blood banks were contaminated with AIDS, and entire villages have been devastated by the disease. There are places in Africa where people believe that if a man has sex with a virgin, it will cure his AIDS. Young women have been raped, and instead of curing the man’s disease, contracted the disease themselves. Pray for these victims who were taken advantage of, whose lives were stolen from them. The enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and these stories are a powerful depiction of that. Pray for education in developing nations, so that deadly medical errors would not happen. Pray for integrity in leaders who oversee business and medical safety. Pray that those who take advantage of the powerless would be convicted of their sin. Pray for comfort and supernatural peace for victims and their families.
Jesus, You know the depths of our hearts–how sinful each of us can be. We praise You for giving Your life for us, for paying the price for our sin. We pray for those who have been infected with AIDS, that they would seek and find You with all their hearts. Even though their bodies will perish, we pray that they would find eternal life in You. We pray that the Church would not be a place of condemnation for those who have sinned, but that we would be a place that freely offers Your gift of life to all who seek it. We pray for AIDS victims who contracted the disease through no decision of their own. How tempted they must be to feel forsaken by You! We pray that they would feel Your comfort and know that You are a friend to the powerless and that You will be their judge, their healer, and their redeemer. Teach us, Your people, how to be Your hands and feet in the world.
Christian AIDS Organizations:
World Vision http://www.worldvision.org
Blood:Water Mission http://www.bloodwatermission.com
World Relief http://www.worldrelief.org
Christian HIV/AIDS Alliance http://www.chaa.info
Christian Mission Aid http://www.cmaid.org
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