Oh, Dang...Again?
It’s pretty common when a Jesus-follower is explaining their faith to someone who has yet to meet him, for him or her to drop into almost salesman mode. Describing a faith-life can come across as living without hardship, drama, major problems, and where all is rosy. On top of that, an impression can be left that life as God’s child is always sweet and following his directions easy and personal faults fade.
Hogwash.
A life of faith in Jesus with forgiven sins and new life commencing is not transactional nor conditional based on behavior. Rather, like any relationship it grows in fits and spurts with as many defeats as victories. Dramatic stories of permanently transformed lives happen, but more often than not a believer’s experience is less like lightning flashes than a slow growing garden. And this garden grows plenty of weeds right beside the veggies.
More than a couple of times, Paul, when writing to believers scattered across Rome’s empire, talks of a battle between the old man and the new man. We continue to get up only to fall again, and the struggle is real. Listen to Paul describe his own wrestling match with his old man.
And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature [his old man]. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway….
I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am! Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?
Reading this honest description of his struggles, the phrase “Misery loves company” comes to mind. You have felt like Paul and so has every believer in history. All too often best intentions end up in the burn barrel on the heels of another stumble.
But Paul doesn’t leave us there. He continues:
Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is: In my mind I really want to obey God’s law, but because of my sinful nature I am a slave to sin.
There is, therefore, no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death.
The God who brought you to life does not turn his back when you prove yourself human, again and again. While believers should avoid using this truth to justify bad behavior we know is wrong, we can take comfort in seeing that, as one author puts it,
“God knows the totality of the human heart…this does not exhaust God’s love and patience, and he continues to take his rebellious child by the hand.”
The triune God worked to bring you to life and to mature you toward Christlikeness. The Father saw you from far away, the Son made possible a reunion with God, and the Spirit leads and encourages and comforts as you travel home.
It’s good to remember, after your next fall, God is for you. You are his beloved, his child and an heir to an inheritance he promises is better.
You will fall, again, even when you don’t want to. Rise up again.
You, with your torn jeans and scuffed knees, walk as testimony of grace in life. Return again to the Source.
You, carrying your own story, stand to help others who have fallen. Reach out.
Below is a poem by Gerard Kelly I’ve liked for some time and use to encourage and as a reminder. It’s entitled, Furnace.
May God, in whose furnace faith is forged, in whose being beauty breathes, from whose dawning darkness flees,
Shine on you.
May the Father, whose love for you beats with a rhythm time itself cannot stop, whose presence in your exile is the promise of home, whose certainties are deeper than the cellars of your city, whose breath is life,
Breathe on you.
May the Son, whose story is a mirror of your own, who has journeyed into darkness to find a key to your prison, who has dived the deepest oceans to find pearls for your wisdom, who has looked into your heart and found a beauty worth the battle, who has written your name on a white stone carved in secret,
Hold you.
May the Spirit, who has waited millennia to fill you, who shaped the word that moved the wind of the morning that conceived you, who holds the earth on which you stand as a midwife holds a newborn, who fully knows you,
Wholly own you.
So may God the faithful Father, God the scarred Son, God the sculpting Spirit,
Journey with you.
Rise up. Return. Reach out.
Music for October
Bad jokes? Sure, here you go.
Are you tired of those fantasy ‘friendship’ poems that always sound good, but never actually come close to reality?
Well, let’s try this my way...just the stone cold truth of our great friendship
1. When you are sad, I will jump on the person who made you sad like a spider monkey jacked up on Mountain Dew!
2. When you are blue, I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.
3. When you smile, I will know you are plotting something that I must be involved in.
4. When you’re scared, we will high tail it out of here.
5. When you are worried, I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be until you quit whining, ya big baby!!!!
6. When you are confused, I will use little words.
7. When you are sick, stay away from me until you are well again...I don’t want whatever you have.
8. When you fall, I’ll pick you up and dust you off—after I laugh my head off!
9. This is my oath...I pledge it to the end.
‘Why?’ you may ask...because you are my FRIEND!
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When my son was in the ninth grade, we reluctantly agreed to let him move into the basement. Then I realized how convenient it was to get him to the breakfast table.
Before, I used to stand at the top of the staircase and scream his name. Now all I had to do was flick the basement light off and on, and he was here.
One morning I flicked the switch, and nothing happened. I did it several more times.
“I’m on my way,” my son called up. “You didn’t have to yell.”