Here is written a message to you, myself from many years ago, and I trust with my whole heart that these things, past and present, are all part of God working out His plans for His own glory.
Hello dear self,
I see you speak with passion about your failings, wishing, wanting, begging for God to work change your heart. I see you reading books, listening to sermons and podcasts, reading blog posts, looking for some small hidden key that will bring change. I love you. I love your heart to love better. I love your heart that hates your sin and your selfishness and longs to be a selfless channel for God to use to speak truth to people. I see God’s Spirit working in your life and it is a joy to walk with you while you wait on Yahweh to do His work.
But this is what my heart longs for, that you might be free of the guilt and the shame that you feel and that you might spend more hours of your day resting in and enjoying the knowledge that you are pleasing to God, here, right now.
We have discussed the Biblical statement that “unless Yahweh builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.” And we both agree that it is God Himself who can change the heart, which is from where our outward actions become also changed. We have discussed His sovereignty, how He uses even our failings and sin to work for His glory and for good, just as He used the murders Paul committed as a greater encouraging testimony for 2000 years of mankind, assuring us that if God saves even the murderer of His own precious people, then God can save me and you, too.
Yet in spite of surmounting evidence that your own efforts can effect but the smallest of outward changes and that true heart change can only be done by God in His own timing, you hold onto guilt and shame. You feel you must wallow in grief over your sin. You feel it is your duty to make outward actions to attempt that which you cannot accomplish. And I don’t blame you. It is both human for us to be fiercely independent, and also is it taught to us that the way to prove ourselves true children of God, we must do these pointless and hurtful things. We’ve come to a place where the appearance of fighting sin is now labeled as “most righteous” and the presence of sin in our hearts is overlooked…. ultimately because we know deep down that we can’t change ourselves. But we cannot accept a God who wants things different than we want them. So for generations our human instincts to “do what we can” and to “be better” and the biggest unholy thought of all, to be righteous in any small way before our Creator God has been passed down and built upon so that our twisted thinking in this way has been what is normal throughout history.
The thing is, none of that is what God tells us He wants of us in the Bible. God does not tell you to keep up your feelings of shame and guilt over things in your life that you cannot seem to conquer. He does not tell you to wallow in grief over your sin and focus your time and energy into surrounding yourself with every bit of human wisdom which you hope will conquer it. God doesn’t tell you to try your hardest to do something which you cannot do. These things are not found in the Bible, they are not in the heart of God for you.
Let’s imagine for a minute something a little random. Let’s say God gave you a free pass on the way you love people. Ridiculous, ami right? But go with me. Use your imagination. What if He told you that it was really ok with Him for you to not love people well for the rest of your life. That He wanted you to use the energy and emotion you were pouring into this and use it however you wanted. What if He promised that He would give you the rewards for a life better than you could ever earn in exchange for letting go of this stuff and participating in this little experiment. And let’s pretend you believed Him and that hearing these things made you take a huge sigh of relief. The pressure to conquer and perform was off. Breath now, iiiiiiinnnnnnnnn and outttttttttttt. Relax your shoulders, let go of that knot in your belly. Imagine a peaceful mind. If you knew that God had promised to be abundantly pleased with you when you stood before Him for judgement. And let’s say that you also would be immune to judgement or praise from another human for the rest of your life. No one could approve or disapprove of you. What if you were free from the judgement of God and the fear of man.
Here’s the crazy thing. That is exactly the message God has for us through the Scriptures. Does God hate sin? Of course! Should we hate sin too? Yes, and God has promised that His children will have a hatred of sin…. though it may not be as intense of a feeling as we would like. God has promised that part of our salvation includes a hatred of sin, and the intensity is exactly according to His will. In some it may look greater and stronger and in some it may look weaker, but who are we to question God’s will, to give a hatred of sin to each according to His own plan? We get to rest in God restraining our sinfulness as much as He chooses, and as little as He chooses. To believe this is impossible for us.
Does God want us to be righteous? Yes! Is there anything we can do to become more righteous? Heavens, no. “More righteous” is simply not a thing. One is either all righteous or not righteous at all. That’s what God tells us in His scriptures. Even IF one could achieve partial righteousness, which they can’t, God would toss them in the bin with the next guy because God is ALL holy and ALL perfect and ALL pure and there are no brownie points for trying or striving or wishing for righteousness. So, is there a way for us to be righteous? All of God’s children ARE righteous, they ARE holy, they ARE set apart, each and every single one of them, from the highest pharisee to the lowest wretch. Perfectly completely righteous. And you simply cannot ADD anything to complete perfection. We get to rest in Christ’s perfect righteousness and trust that included in this gift, as stated in the Scriptures, comes also perfect unity with God, just like Christ has. And standing perfectly pleasing for God, just like Christ does. And a beautiful perfect rich inheritance beyond what we could imagine, which Christ earned and has allowed us to share with Him. To believe this is impossible for us.
But what if I just don’t get how I can BE righteous AND sinful at the same time. Seems like I need to pick one or the other to really focus on and let God deal with the other. Yes! That’s pretty much spot on, you just need to pick to focus on the righteousness that you are and trust the sinful part to God. Indeed, we are redeemed perfect righteous beloved spotless creatures, our very life IS Christ, in whom we are kept and because of whom we are one with God in a perfect union, right now, here today. We are made so perfectly pleasing that nothing can be done to add to it. And yet our souls are bound by the flesh, bodies of flesh chaining us in this fallen earth in which we still are stuck connected to the sinful wretched old self which is no longer our identity but a filthy garment yet to be shed. It is the fallen flesh which is untamable by us which causes us to act against the things we long to do according to life, which IS Christ Himself, doing His work within us. So while we do long to restrain our fallen flesh from hurting ourselves and those around us, we recognize that this flesh cannot be “fixed” or “made righteous” or anything, but has been condemned to die with Christ’s death. It is a thing that must be removed wholly and cannot be altered or transformed. We can reign it in sometimes, and surely God is so kind to keep so many reigned in as much as He does. And so while we do continue to reign in and restrain our flesh, while we do aim to do actions which make up for the wretchedness of our flesh, we do not dwell there. We do not judge ourselves before God by them, and God does not judge us by them. They were crucified with Christ and will fall away when we are made alive in Christ. We do the best we can for now but we focus our hearts on the God who has given us His favor, on the God who has restrained our sin as much as He has chosen, on the Savior who loved us, died for us, crucified this flesh which must die, and has planted Himself as LIFE within us, who is working out His will to His own glory right now in us, using both the actions and desires of the righteous us and the fleshly us. To believe this is impossible for us.
And so, in my sorrow and in great overwhelm I see my own wretchedness, my own inability to please God even to believe the most basic pieces of His great news to us about salvation in Jesus Christ. And yet it is here in this honest view of ourselves, this is exactly where God dwells within us. This is where He dwells within us, living in us in spite of all of this wretchedness. Indeed He loves us better than we do ourselves, for we cannot stand this view of ourselves. It crushes and destroys us, it torments our pride and vanity and independence. Often the circumstances required to bring us to a place where we can see these things is so terrible that they destroy us, and so though wiser for knowing our true depravity, our minds and hearts and lives are often shattered in the process, perhaps never to recover.
So this is why I wait for Yahweh. To be ignorant of our depravity is to exist in a dependence on something we can do for God and the end to any bit of that pride is condemnation. To be made aware of the depth of our depravity often does permanent damage to our hearts and minds and lives and the lives of those around us. Surely the wrath of God is unendurable and destroys both the flesh and the soul. And surely the love of God also is unendurable, destroying the flesh. This is the truth. As God has communicated Himself to us in His Scriptures.
Praise God who has never forgotten that He made us from dust. Praise be to God who has always done all things for us in His timing, according to His will, in His own way for His own glory and has brought about so much kindness for His children. Praise be to God who often leaves us blind to the depravity of our souls and the totality of everything He’s done for us in Christ, preferring to allow us to go merrily along our way in blindness, waiting to share this revelation with us once we’ve been united with Him and our flesh has fallen from us. Praise be to God who has sat faithfully alongside us, in the deep dark pit of sorrow, as He has revealed Himself to the death of our flesh.
Have mercy on us, oh God. Show us not too much of your truth here on earth, bring us through our life to a life with you where we will better be able to behold your glory. We praise you for the mercy you have shown your beloved children, even going so far as to endure millennia of humans giving themselves the credit and flaunting their superiority around, though all credit belongs to you. You have shown us such great mercy. We bow in awe and reverence.
In our humility we beg for mercy on behalf of those whom you have not chosen. We cling to those instances in the Scriptures where you used the prayers of your saints to “change your mind” and work out salvation for more people that was your “original plan” and we beg that you might show mercy on each soul that you have created. For we see that our “decent” or “good” lives are the result of You, behind the scenes, restraining the flesh of many. And we see that every bit of good in us is only there because Christ overcame our flesh and produced the good Himself in us. We are completely and utterly humiliated. And yet, with the realization that we are less than worthless, You lift our faces from our own filth and bring our gaze up to your glorious smile and you laugh and you hold us in a tight embrace and you tell us that we are loved and approved of, more than we can ever know.
Now to Him who is able to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen.
Jude 24-25
M.S.E Dominic 