Jesus will judge, so everything matters

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil. 2 Corinthians 5:10

People who have tasted the sweet forgiveness of Christ’s cross become desperate to know how not to waste their lives. Redemption is too good to ignore. Yet, fleshly complacency sets in and sucks the life out of us like the afternoon heat. Thank God, Scripture leads us in this, too.

The Bible describes who Jesus is to a Christian in many ways: friend, king, shepherd, brother, healer, advocate, savior, shield. Each biblical term for the Lord is saturated with significance and layers of meaning. Naturally we gravitate towards some more than others. However, one crucial, repeated title of Jesus, that I fear we too often neglect, is that Jesus is our judge.

For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. And he has given him authority to execute judgment, because he is the Son of Man. John 5:26-27

The remarkably modern-sounding book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew scriptures concludes this way:

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. Ecclesiastes 12:13-14

It is clear that the author is not using the word judgment here in the sense of condemnation, but rather in the sense of evaluation.

…on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. Romans 2:16

In 1 Corinthians 3, one of my favorite chapters in the New Testament, Paul speaks of a day when the fire of God will test all the things we devote our lives to building: our families, ministries, careers, reputations, possessions, identities. The worthless and vain things will burn and disintegrate. Only those things “built on the foundation” (verse 14), “which is Jesus Christ” (verse 11), will survive. Only Christ-founded endeavors will keep their value in the new heaven and earth. All else is vanity, destined to be forgotten.

Soon after laying out this teaching, Paul says this:

This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even judge myself. For I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. 1 Corinthians 4:1-4

To accept and daily live under the reality that “it is the Lord who judges me” drastically changes at least two things about the ways we typically think.

How our fellow humans judge and evaluate us becomes a “very little thing,” an insignificant addendum of which we ought to be as unaware as possible and about which we are free to be unconcerned. In the shadow of God, human commendation and condemnation become equally trivial. Together they amount to the immaterial opinions of small minds, which hold no weight in God’s court. “The Lord is my helper; what can man do to me?” (Hebrews 13:6) Amen, and the Lord is my judge. What can man say about me?

That the Lord judges me also means that everything matters. In this world, now, everything I do, and don’t do, counts. It all has dignity, significance, and potential. There are no parts of my life that God will not drag into the light on Judgment Day, whether I like it or not. That God will expose and judge every secret thing makes even my minor decisions very grave, and worth my attention. All things - all things - will be tested.

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! 2 Peter 3:10-12

Scripture says that redeemed people live in the love of God, in the service of him, in the worship of him, and also in the fear of him. No longer do we live in the fear of his punishment; without a doubt, Jesus dealt with that fear, one time, forever, which his death and resurrection. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, period (Romans 8:1). We live, however, in an honest recognition of his holy character and awesome power. We live recognizing the absolute claim of his ownership over us, analogous to the ownership of a potter over his clay (Romans 9:20).

Part of fearing God is admitting how unspeakably unworthy he is of our disobedience. If we properly understand God as he is, we fear displeasing him and grieving him (Ephesians 4:30) with our vanity.

And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed… with the precious blood of Christ… 1 Peter 1:17-18

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain. 1 Corinthians 15:58 (NIV)

To not waste our lives is to live for the Father to commend us, which is to establish everything we are and do on Jesus only. To establish our labor on Jesus is to give ourselves fully to him, no holds barred. “I am completely yours, direct me as you will” is perhaps the scariest thing we can pray; yet it is the only prayer that makes sense, given the cost he paid to make it true (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).

I think of it this way: if Jesus will judge me, and he will, I want to walk in the light, where he walked. I want freedom from the secrets and shame of the darkness, where neither God nor happiness live.

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. 1 John 1:5-7

why we (desperately) need the Bible

The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul;
the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple;
the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes;
the fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever;
the rules of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether.
More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb.
Moreover, by them is your servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward. Psalm 19:7-11

If you are a Christian, you believe in the Bible. Whether or not you have read it yourself, you believe that it is true and that it is authored by God. Christianity has nothing to stand on – no source – if it does not have that.

You may intellectually agree that the Bible is true, but you may not personally and wholeheartedly agree that the Bible is desperately necessary, in your life, in your church. People who desperately depend on the Bible in that way are rare, even in Christian circles.

Part of the reason for this is that the Bible is difficult to understand. Part of the reason is that most people have not been taught either to treasure or understand the Bible properly. The most profound reason, however, is that bent, that perversion, in our humanity which reaches to our core: self-reliance, above relying on God.

Christian doctrine says that the whole world is in a state of brokenness and fallenness. We were whole, and exalted, in Eden. Now we are broken and fallen: our instincts and intuitions are bent towards evil and foolishness and away from good and godliness, towards Self and Satan and away from God. Our intuitive ideas about how to live, think, and relate are distorted versions of the truth. In other words, they are lies.

One thing every Christians learns is, “I cannot trust myself.” Learning to distrust yourself – your own perceptions, inclinations, desires, and opinions – is the flip side of learning to trust God. Fundamentally, you cannot do both.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5

Trusting God means depending on him. Depending on him means depending on his revelation to inform and define who you are and how you live, comprehensively.

The reality is that as humans beyond Eden, we need to re-learn how to be human, in every part of our humanity. We need to be re-taught, by God, in scripture.

Good and upright is the LORD; therefore he instructs sinners in the way. He leads the humble in what is right, and teaches the humble his way. Psalm 25:8-9

Consider the alternative. The alternative, individually or collectively, is making it up as we go along. It is placing our faith most essentially in our own ability to perceive reality, make choices, think correctly, and define God. If everything we do and are and think about God does not come directly from the truth he has defined, given in the Bible, we are making shots in the dark like the rest of our race, shots in the dark which are inherently inclined away from the truth.

Truth comes to us not only from the doctrinal statements and explicit directives of scripture. It comes from the stories and parables, too. It comes from how things are said, from what is included and left out, from the flow of the narrative, from the repeated cycles of God and man interacting, portrayed in individuals’ lives. Truth comes from all the genres of biblical literature, from the outright statement of James, John, Peter, and Paul, to the subtler presuppositions of the Israelite poets. Truth comes from the framework of thought which undergirds all of scripture.

Absorbing the paradigms of the Bible into our thinking causes us to think in new categories, and ask new, better questions. It guards us from our tendency to take on the roles of both beasts and gods and instead demonstrates to our minds and hearts, in a thousand ways, how to be authentically human.

And that is our goal: to be human, really and truly, participating in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) while maintaining our honored, blessed role as servants and sons of the transcendent God, after the pattern of the Heavenly Man (1 Corinthians 15:49). Only scripture elucidates redeemed humanity and how it behaves.

Even more: scripture tells us about God himself. It is not theology – man making statements about God. It is doctrine – God making statements about himself, for man to believe. God gave us doctrine the way he did intentionally, that is, in the voices of particular cultures and people. The expressed truth itself is absolutely universal, but the phrases themselves are limiting. We are not at liberty to embellish, stretch, or “improve on” the statements of scripture, especially in light of the original point about our inclinations toward falsehood and foolishness.

Credit must be given where credit is due. The power of the Bible to change lives and communities is the Holy Spirit of God, speaking the words through the writers, persuading hardened hearts of the words’ truth, and granting the grace needed for people to convert the words to actions in the human sphere. So the glory is God’s, and the benefit is ours, and the necessity is desperate.

Read it, and keep on with it, without giving up. Let it change your categories of thought as well as how you behave. Discuss it with people who love it. Hear it preached by preachers who preach nothing more or less than the Word in its purity. Feed on it and feast on it, dive into it and absorb it. The Spirit will not leave you untouched. He will pierce you, crush you, build you, change you. He will recreate you.

The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times. Psalm 12:6

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. Romans 10:17

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly… Colossians 3:17

What do you think? I want to know, especially on this one!

be my absolution!

Have you seen this ad?

Like every good advertisement, it latches onto something more basic and important to the human mind than the functional purpose of the product being sold. Essentially it says, our product will address a fundamental desire in your heart (which is what all good Hallmark cards do).

Call it validation, affirmation, self-worth, whatever you want. The dual ideas of absolution – “formal release from guilt, obligation, or punishment”; in other words, the remission of sins – and justification – “the action of declaring or making righteous in the sight of God” – are the heart of it.

The longing for validation itself is not wicked. Just the opposite; that longing was created in the human heart by God when he first fashioned the race from the dust. When it is pure, it is the longing to relate with God. It is a longing for everything wrong in me and my life to be atoned for and forgotten, and for God to love me and call me worthy.

When it is impure, it is the drive behind every sin. Millions of teenage girls who give up their virginity do it because they want absolution and justification, but instead of seeking it from Jesus, they seek it from a fellow sinner. Millions of proud hypocrites who condemn their neighbors likewise work to be validated by something other than the cross of Christ.

This month, I am reading through the Psalms. David and the other psalmists give words to that basic human longing in its pure form, addressing to God and only God the cry, “Be my absolution!”

Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God! 3:7

Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness! …Be gracious to me and hear my prayer! 4:1

Give attention to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to you do I pray… Lead me, O LORD… 5:2, 8

Be gracious to me, O LORD… heal me, O LORD… 6:2

Consider and answer me, O LORD my God; light up my eyes… 13:3

From your presence let my vindication come! …Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings. 17:2, 8

Remember not the sins of my youth or my transgressions; according to your steadfast love remember me, for the sake of your goodness, O LORD! 25:7

For your name’s sake, O LORD, pardon my guilt, for it is great… Consider my affliction and my trouble, and forgive all my sins. 25:11, 18

Vindicate me, O LORD… Prove me, O LORD, and try me; test my heart and mind. 26:1

Et cetera. It is important to note not only what the Biblical authors say, but that they say it; in other words, there is something to learn from the simple fact that the psalmists looked to God and him only for grace, help, healing, happiness, vindication, forgiveness. The truth is that to look for these things – to look for validation, absolution, and justification – in any other place is idolatry defined. We look for absolution from whatever we worship.

We must be specific. My question is: how does God absolve and validate me?

He does it like this:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized in Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with [Christ] in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. Romans 6:3-6

Faith unites the believer with Christ, particularly with his death and resurrection. When Christ died, I died. My “old self,” of which sin was master, died and was buried forever, disabled from disqualifying me ever again. When Christ resurrected, I resurrected, to a new kind of life, a life lived to, for, and in God. Before God, all the wrong in me and my life died with Jesus on the cross. When he walked out of his tomb alive, three days after dying, he left it all there in his grave. It’s not on me anymore.

The consequence of this is that God forbids me from seeking peace anywhere else. Only Jesus forgives sin; personal achievement does not.

So, alright! Be my absolution, Jesus!

The triumph of the meek

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5

The triumph of the meek will be
Loud. Crowds of complex hearts pulled
Out of dying chests, vests of steel thrown off, melted
Down and welded into cymbals and trombones.
The groans and creaks of grief will cease;
The pains and aches of age will fade;
Instead, the heads of gray will raise,
Amazed.

Meanwhile, my tongue is fire, eager to
Burn, yearning to inflame the anger I suppress
Unless a wafting wind, incendiary, wins, and
My fire-tongue levels the house. The sounds
Of burning dreams are screamed complaints.
Yet saints who keep meek seep love to me
And the lowly-hearted man still holds my hand
In hand.

The blessed state of being will be
Shown, owned up by all. The fault is in our game,
For remedying shame means meekness,
Salving jealous anger, weakness.
Pull a heart from a dead chest: the surest
Way to save a life. Knife in a surgeon’s hand is safest.
So the triumph of the silent will be violently boisterous:
Joyous.

5 things the world needs to hear from the church

“The world” means not only institutions and cultures, but every person. “The church” means not only preachers and organizations, but every Christian. The world is full of prejudices and misunderstandings, and the church is full of bad examples and average people without all the answers.

We all could use some clarity.

1. We [Christians] are not interested in collecting converts like trophies on a shelf. If we are talking at you to prove anything to ourselves, our Christian friends, or God, we are completely in the wrong. Christians are under scriptural mandate to respect all people (1 Peter 3:15). We adhere to a biblical, dual anthropology which teaches that, on the one hand, every human being is an image-bearer of God and therefore valuable and honorable, and that, on the other hand, humanity is, comprehensively, morally broken and spiritual bankrupt, Christians included. In other words, we are no better or smarter than anyone else. In fact, we may appear weaker and more foolish (1 Corinthians 1:27), because God wants us to be amazed at him, not ourselves.

The reason we want to talk to you about our faith is that we earnestly believe Jesus is who he said he is and that he really is able to give the joy, peace, answers, and fellowship with God that he offered. We want the world – especially our friends and family, the people we care about most – to hear him out.

2. We care deeply about personal morality, but not for its own sake. The aim of a Christian’s life is this: to worship God and express love for him by thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting like Jesus Christ. This means much more than behaving like a better person or giving up bad habits for good ones. It is more spiritual and more profound, and more impossibly difficult. Some of us with the right genes could pull off being “good people”; i.e. people with enough morality and likability to please the culture. None of us accomplish Christ-likeness in its fullness before we die. The idea of grace is so important to us for this reason: we want to be like Christ, but we fail miserably, and still, God chooses to love us as if we had succeeded, for Christ’s sake.

This is the tension behind our views on personal morality. The personal conduct of you and me is extremely important because it has to do with the aim and orientation of our lives, and yet is almost trivial when considered in the light of our failure and God’s grace.

3. We actually believe what the Bible says about Judgment Day, the wrath of God, and life after death. We believe that God, who is exactingly holy, is angry with the world. We do not believe that he is only angry – Jesus taught that God loves the world to the point of sending his Son, Jesus, into it, to save it (John 3:16-17). Yet our scripture teaches that God will not overlook our outrageous disregard and mockery of him – which is the disease of sin that infects both our societies and our personal lives – forever. Soon, God will demand from every human being an exhaustive account of how they lived their lives. On those souls not shielded by the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ, God will rain down his justice in hell. It will be terrible, and fair.

In a culture of Self and non-accountability, we take this seriously. We want to do whatever we can to help people save themselves from themselves by entrusting their lives and their fates to Christ.

4. We struggle (with depression, anxiety, stress, unhappiness, loneliness, unmet expectations, sexual temptation, doubt, and on and on) as much as everybody, but we believe that Jesus is more real than all of it. We do not fool ourselves into thinking we have it all together or can refute every argument. We understand that Christian belief is hard – the  apostles understood that (Matthew 28:16-17). Our inner turmoil is often intense and our lives are often a mess, like everyone else.

We are also aware that we are not doing everything as we should be doing it, and that very often our words must speak louder than our actions. The difference for the Christian is not his or her own ability to rise above; the difference is faith in a God who transcends us and a Messiah who knows what it is like to be us.

5. What we are staking our lives on is Jesus – especially his death and resurrection. The death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth are even more fundamental to Christian faith than the existence of God or the inerrancy of the Bible. That is, we believe in God and the Bible because Jesus did, and we believe in Jesus because he rose from the dead. At the center, our belief stands or falls with him. Understanding the Bible and dealing with questions about Christianity’s rationality become possible once faith in Christ is established.

We believe that intellectually satisfying answers to questions about God and the Bible exist and are accessible. It is true to say, however, that everything we are and believe hangs on one person, and the historical reality of two events. Jesus is the central thing, and we believe that every person must ultimately deal with him.

Good Friday: the cross is an intersection

See, from his head, his hands, his feet,
sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet?
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

-When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, Isaac Watts

The shape of the cross is the universal symbol of the Christian faith. Geometrically, a cross is two perpendicular lines intersecting. One vertical, the other horizontal.

When Jesus Christ died on his cross nearly two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem, paradoxes were proclaimed and unlike realities intersected with each other in a way that they never had before or will again.

God + humanity
The Bible teaches that Jesus Christ is the God-man, fully human and fully divine, yet one person with one nature. Simple enough to say; impossible to comprehend. Yet what that means is that when Christ died on his cross, the world of heaven – the vertical beam, if you will – cut into the world of earth – the horizontal beam. Jesus hung there, suspended between the two worlds, bridging the impasse between them. You could say that the cross was the ladder down which God climbed to make peace with humanity; to reach us. Therefore, to reach God, all a person needs is to come to the cross.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. Colossians 1:20

wrath + grace
Sin provokes the Holy One to ferocious, irrepressible anger. God’s own love provokes him pardon sinners. At the cross, these two elemental aspects of God’s character met and embraced. The wrath of God against human sin inflicted itself on Jesus’ shoulders, back, neck, hands, feet, body, soul, mind and spirit; totally, comprehensively, exhaustively. He took every ounce, for my sin and yours. He absorbed the blow, stepping in as the scapegoat, the sacrifice, the substitute. All that is left over for us – the ones standing in Jesus’ shadow – are the grace, the mercy, the forgiveness, the love.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. Isaiah 53:4-6

decimation of our pride + affirmation of our worth
The cross gives us a revolutionized way to look at ourselves, one that is painful and profoundly sweet at the same time. I’m using the strong word “decimation” here to mean “totally cancel and destroy.” The cross certainly decimates our pride, or our self-esteem, depending on your vocabulary. It asserts without apology that our self-imposed predicament of sin, death, hell, and alienation from God is so severe that nothing less than the Son of God’s torture and death could hope to address it. An extreme problem – the human condition – called for an extreme solution. No one but Jesus will cut down your pride and self-justification so thoroughly, because no one but Jesus loves you so deeply.

While decimating our attempts at self-worth, the cross affirms with abandon our value to God. It asserts, likewise without apology, that the depths of God’s grace towards us are so unfathomable that he found it worthwhile sacrifice the Son for the rabble outside – in order to turn the rabble into sons! Therefore, you count. You are not a waste. You are worthy. God says so.

But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world. Galatians 6:14

suffering + glory
The Bible is chock full of paradoxes, as we should expect from a book claiming to contain divine truth. One of the most essential paradoxes in Christian thought – in my mind, it’s the key to the whole thing – is the one that Jesus expressed a few hours before his arrest:

When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once.” John 13:31-32

Now is the Son of Man glorified. Now, as he is arrested, falsely accused, beaten, scourged, stripped, mocked, crucified, murdered. On the cross, glory intersected with suffering. Honor with shame, life with death. I do not understand it, but the brutally disfigured, naked body of Jesus on the cross brought glory to God. It blazed through and through with the glory of God. The Son of Man’s suffering screamed glory! glory! hallelujah!

That is the Christian paradigm. In our lives, that means that suffering and glory are intertwined, and death always comes before a resurrection.

When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. John 19:30

…looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising its shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:1-2

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 1 Corinthians 1:18

paralyzing failure and God

The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go.” 1 Samuel 16:1

To me, how a person responds to failure is one of the truest tests of his or her character – who that person really is.

Samuel served Israel as a judge, priest, and prophet. He was much more than a distant military leader, symbol, or figurehead. “Father figure” is a better way to describe his relationship with the Israelite nation. The Israelites turned to him like children, on the one hand immaturely expecting him to solve their problems for them and acquiesce to their foolish desires, and on the other hand wisely recognizing him as a remarkable leader with a remarkable relationship with God (see 1 Samuel 7:8, 8:5). ”I have walked before you from my youth until this day,” he told the people at his farewell address (1 Samuel 12:2).

Samuel was the real thing. He held the nation together as everything was falling apart, leading God’s people with transparency, integrity, and devotion. When the people of Israel demanded that Samuel step aside and replace himself with a king who could lead them militarily and compete with the monarchies of their neighbors, he obeyed, understanding that, fundamentally, their act of rejection was against God, not him. Therefore, he anointed (and thereby identified) Saul as Israel’s first king.

But Saul disobeyed direct commands from God. He became a proud, presumptuous, vindictive man, totally unfit to lead God’s people, much less to hold the title of king (a title previously reserved only for God).

Scripture says, “And Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul” (1 Samuel 15:35). One can easily infer why Samuel grieved. Saul had transgressed God’s law, disappointed Israel’s hopes, and forfeited his royal title and dynasty. Saul had utterly failed as a leader and as a man of the covenant. To Samuel, it must have felt as if he had failed, too.

To be human is to experience failure. We often treat the two things as synonymous: “You can’t expect everything from her, she’s only human.” “Don’t get ahead of yourself, you’re only human.” In other words, “You are prone to failure and inadequacy simply because you are a human being.” Christian thought associates the undeniable reality of our imperfection with something called The Fall of Man.

When a Christian fails in a major way – or in a minor way, depending on how sensitive the person’s conscience is – there are three levels to it: failing God, failing others, and failing yourself.

Failing God is at once the hardest and the easiest of the three. He asks the most from us and is the least deserving of the offense, but he is also the most ready to forgive. God holds no grudges. Other people are rarely so forgiving, or so eager to repair trust. Perhaps, hardest of all, it is disappointing one’s own inner vision of oneself that hurts the most. “Is this what I really am, after all?” We ask, but we fear the answer.

How do you respond to failure? To letting yourself down? Maybe you wallow. Maybe you allow cynicism to harden your heart, or apathy to atrophy it. Maybe, by giving up on yourself, you give up on God and his promises to make you beautiful in his sight. Maybe, like me, and like Samuel, you simply feel paralyzed. Maybe you cannot stop grieving about Saul, and you have allowed your horn of oil to stay empty for far too long.

God had something to say to Samuel, and he has something to say to you too.

He wants you to know he is pleased when you confess your failures freely, without excuses or attempts at self-justification. What he wants from you is humility and a heart ready to receive grace; what he hates are eyes unwilling to see or lips quick to explain away (cf. Genesis 3:12-13).

Imitating our primeval parents with attempts to hide our failure, whether from God and the angels or mom, dad, and the world, is the last thing we should do when confronted with our own inadequacies. Running to Jesus (and Jesus alone) for the confidence to be transparent before even the harshest judging eyes is really the only thing for us. The cross says: you have nothing left to prove to God. With acceptance from the everlasting God, total vulnerability before our fellow mortals is the only thing that makes sense.

God is present in strength and success. He grants and blesses them both. He is not absent, however, in weakness and failure. There is truly a sense in which he is even more deeply present, more deeply there, in our weaknesses and failures than in our strengths and successes. We are closer to God at the end of our ropes than anywhere else.

The deepest mysteries of the gospel – the incarnation, when God became a man, and the atonement, when God died – speak of lowering, humbling, weakness, apparent defeat, and death. The gospel itself is the precedent for claiming God is deeply present in our failures and intensely near to us when we come to the end of ourselves. We are weak, but he is strong. Paul said it like this:

But [the Lord] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10

Not longer after, he said,

He is not weak in dealing with you, but is powerful among you. For he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but in dealing with you we will live with him by the power of God. 2 Corinthians 13:3-4

We who live with Jesus by the power of God are no longer at liberty to let our failure paralyze us. It precisely when we fail that we know Jesus’ strength, precisely when we disappoint everyone and ourselves that we know Jesus’ sufficiency.

God told Samuel to leave Saul behind, fill his horn with oil, and go. Jesus told Peter to leave his boats behind, “feed his sheep,” make disciples of all nations, and go. The Lord tells us, now, to leave our regrets and our failures behind, cling to him, hold on to our hope, and go forward: his mission in mind, his cross behind.

prayers to Jesus in Iran

[Jesus] put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of the seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Matthew 13:31-32

John M. Perkins

What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. James 2:14-17

Christian love engages the world around it. It takes up the real causes of real people and does things about them, in the name of Jesus.

Jesus is the great Rebel, and his revolution revolves around his cross. Cross-like love is always rebellious: selflessly abandoned, extraordinarily costly, loving enemies, turning the world’s tables.

Christian love is deeply involved in the community in which it finds itself. Hedging our bets and staying inside the established circles are not options for people who hold up the cross as their banner. Our churches exist to take the cross, with its million applications, deep into the lives of our communities. Where this is not being done, our churches exist to plant new churches that will do it, whether for Stone Age tribes or for our own suburbs. Complacency kills.

John M. Perkins, a sharecropper’s son from Mississippi who fled poverty and his brother’s murder at age 17, only to return to his home state once Jesus grabbed his heart in 1960, was and is a civil rights activist whose life shows what it means for cross-like love to encounter a world of injustice, oppression, and repetitive, destructive cycles. Imitating Jesus, Perkins loved from the bottom of society up. Currently, his foundation serves and preaches good news to the poor of West Jackson, Mississippi – especially single moms. Check it out.

“The Sound” by Switchfoot is bringing Perkins and his message to worldwide attention.

In a world of chaos and idolatry, the church needs a different set of heroes from the world’s heroes, who are of a different type and caliber, who do not preach themselves, but who preach Jesus as Lord. And him crucified.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

[Jesus said,] “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:27

Judges: when society crumbles

Judges, the biblical book, is two things at once: a record of historical heroes, and a detailed, exhausting chronicle of human failure.

Reading about the heroes is fun. The entertainment never lasts, however, because the author painstakingly takes care to point out the flaws in every hero and the crumbling society in which the judges found themselves. The author of Judges, like all the other authors of the Bible, zoomed in uncompromisingly on that one most unpopular topic: sin.

It can be hard to read the Bible for exactly this reason. It doesn’t let up on sin. Many people especially shy away from books like Judges, for an understandable reason. Reading Judges is like watching an extended movie called “This Is What Sin Looks Like.” It is a brutal read.

After a chapter and a half of setting the scene with some essential background information, the rhythm of the book gets going in chapter 2:

And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and served the Baals. And they abandoned the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the LORD to anger. Judges 2:11-12

If you come to the beginning of Judges having read Genesis through Joshua, these verses will break your heart. For six books straight, God had set up every precaution, prescribed every law, held up every incentive, to keep the people of Israel faithful to him. He had given them a glorious vision of themselves as the beacon of hope for humanity, the shining city on a hill, a blessing and example to all people. To accomplish this, all God had asked of them was to “fear him, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve him, and to keep his commandments” (Deuteronomy 10:12).

By the beginning of Judges, the potential was huge. God had freed Israel from slavery and brought them to Canaan where he had led them in a string of military victories under Joshua, giving them the land and the security they needed to flourish as a nation. The question on everyone’s mind at this point in the biblical story is, “Will Israel pull it off? Will they keep God’s law and fulfill their God-given mission as a nation?”

The author of Judges wrote his or her book (the author is unknown) for the purpose of answering this question with an unambiguous NO. Why, you may ask, write 21 chapters expounding upon this simple answer, in such painful detail? Perhaps it is because the reason for the No was sin, and sin is complex and convoluted. Apparently, although we dislike hearing or reading about sin, we must understand it if we want to be deeply joyful, deeply useful Christians.

For Judges-era Israel, the disease of sin most often expressed itself by blending in with the pagans around them by intermarrying with them (3:5-6) and adopting their religious practices (8:27, 10:6, 17:4). It was the spiritual, not ethnic, dilution that mattered. In the same breath, people said things such as, “I dedicate the silver to the LORD… to make a carved image and a metal image” (17:3), as if even in the wake of Moses’ life people had not heard of the second and third commandments.

You shall not do according to all that we are doing here today, everyone doing whatever is right in his own eyes… Deuteronomy 12:8

In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 17:6 (repeated in 21:25)

Overall, the author of Judges gives very little direct commentary about the events he recounts. At two brilliantly ironic places in his narrative, however, he pauses to say, “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” The author deliberately uses the same phrasing Moses had used several years earlier, before Israel entered Canaan.

“Everyone doing what was right in their own eyes”; that is how the author of Judges explained Israel’s chaos. And perhaps that is the most fundamental way to define sin: me defining my reality, what I will call good and what I will call bad; me deciding whom or what I will worship and love. Me deciding what is worth my time, my self. The god of Me, doing what is right in my own eyes, with no thought to God or the debt of love.

To list for your reading enjoyment a complete catalog of the disturbing, heart-breaking, and dreadfully ironic examples of human sin recorded in Judges would take a blog post unto itself. Suffice it to say the list is long, and diverse.

But why did Israel fail? They possessed God’s law, and every privilege. God had carefully inculcated into their culture both the motive and the opportunity for obedience. The Apostle Paul reflected on this question some eleven centuries later, and concluded, in light of Jesus’ advent and the Spirit’s outpouring:

For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin [or as a sin offering], he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Romans 8:3-4

Because Jesus (1) came to the world as a man, “in the likeness of sinful flesh,” and (2) offered himself as an atoning sacrifice for sin, (a) sin is condemned and (b) the law is fulfilled in us whose hearts and lives are penetrated by the Spirit.

They had the law, but we have the Spirit. How dare we forget that for a moment. God the Creator, the King, the Judge, the Promise-Maker, the Promise-Keeper – the God of Judges – is alive, and living in us. The same Spirit of Yahweh who “rushed upon” the judges and made it possible for them to deliver Israel militarily now abides in us without leaving, making it possible for us do outlandish, “foolish,” beautiful things for the kingdom of God in Jesus’ name.

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world.” John 18:36

Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” John 8:34-36

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you… For all who are lead by the Spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” Romans 8:11, 14-15