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.
Excerpt from A Time for Prayer, the 2010 book for the National Day of Prayer:
Taking Back Our Communities by Lance Wubbels
One of the greatest “layperson revivals” in American history occurred in 1857. At that time there were 30,000 men idle on the streets of New York. Drunkenness was rampant, and the nation was divided by slavery. On September 23, 1857, Jeremiah Lanphier, a praying businessman, began a noontime prayer meeting on Fulton Street in the Financial District of Manhattan. Out of a city of one million people, six people showed up. However, the crowds grew, and within three months there were prayer meetings all over the city. More than 50,000 people in New York City alone paused each Wednesday at noon to pray. The prayer revival soon spread across the nation, and in about 18 months, a million people were converted to Jesus Christ.
Ongoing since 2002, prayer warriors rallied against a prolific drug problem in Manchester, Kentucky. Located in Clay County, the second poorest county in Kentucky and the sixth poorest in the nation, Manchester had approximately the same number in the county jail and federal prison as residents – 2,200. As reported on the 700 Club, almost immediately they began to see change. Drug arrests went way up! Drug dealers and users started coming to church and getting saved and the story of Manchester was carried in papers through the country. Little did they know their march against drugs would ignite a fire of hope that continues to spread across the country. Dozens of towns, from Georgia to Texas, after seeing the stories on the 700 Club, held their own marches and are taking back their communities for Christ.
Prayer for the Nation by Max Lucado
Dear God,
Not to us, O Lord, but to You goes all the glory.
We depend on You. You give birth and breath and determine our days. You make every nation and set every boundary. We exist by Your power.
We exist for Your glory. Showcase Your power through this land. Display Your justice in our courts, wisdom in our governments, guidance in our schools, and love in our homes.
Have mercy upon our sins. We have disrespected Your Word, disregarded Your gifts, and discarded Your children. We are sorry. Forgive us, dear Father.
Grant strength to all our leaders. May they serve You first and honor You most. Remind us of the brevity of this life and the beauty of the next. Prepare our souls for the day we meet You in eternity.
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.
In today’s culture, it isn’t popular to talk about original sin. There are probably a lot of reasons for that unpopularity – the influence of humanistic thinking and the view our society has toward sweet children who can do no wrong, just to name a couple of reasons.
But I think experience tells us that the doctrine of original sin, that every single human being is born into sin and needs the grace of God to be freed from their sin nature, is true. Maybe we can say that a newborn baby has no conscious expression of sin, but in my experience, as soon as a baby has any sort of consciousness, you see selfishness and sinful behavior displayed.
Little children may not be expressing malicious, murderous sins, but even a toddler’s natural tendency to demand his or her own way is evidence of that innate desire to be our own gods. We have to be taught to share and to love others as ourselves. And even when we are taught to do those things, we don’t always do them.
Apart from experience, it’s essential for us to affirm original sin because without it, we don’t need justification through Jesus’ death and resurrection. We can be tempted to think that if we just put our minds to it and decide not to be sinful, if we try hard enough to be a good person, we can get the job done.
This is not what Scripture tells us, and the subconscious (or sometimes conscious) belief that we can decide to be good enough on our own, apart from the grace of God, is dangerously flawed.
When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. Yes, people sinned even before the law was given. But it was not counted as sin because there was not yet any law to break. Still, everyone died—from the time of Adam to the time of Moses—even those who did not disobey an explicit commandment of God, as Adam did. . . . Yes, Adam’s one sin brings condemnation for everyone, but Christ’s one act of righteousness brings a right relationship with God and new life for everyone. Because one person disobeyed God, many became sinners. But because one other person obeyed God, many will be made righteous.
God’s law was given so that all people could see how sinful they were. But as people sinned more and more, God’s wonderful grace became more abundant. So just as sin ruled over all people and brought them to death, now God’s wonderful grace rules instead, giving us right standing with God and resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 5:12-14, 18-21 NLT
What examples have you seen in culture, media, or your own life of people refusing to admit that “all have sinned”?
