The Goal of Sinlessness

It has been a week since I last posted, and a blessed struggle of a week it has been.  I feel as if Brie and I have taken the training wheels off of our bikes of faith.  Over the last year the Lord has built around us and through us a beautiful community of hungry, Christ-centered disciples.  We have lived within a community where we were challenged and built up by others, and the expectation was that we too would do so for them.  The Lord has called us out of that place, out of that comfort zone, and now we are experiencing the full extent of our strengths and weaknesses in a place less intentional about its growth in discipleship.  I have been asked by a few why we would choose to, or why the Lord would choose to pull us out of such a great situation.  Why would it be best to be removed from an environment where faith was stimulated almost without effort.  I really do believe the answer to that question is much the same as the answer to why we take training wheels off of children’s bikes.  You can do way more with a bike when those extra wheels aren’t there to get in the way.  There is a freedom in the challenge of adversity.  Though we are experiencing the skinned knees and scraped elbows that come with the initial challenge, the Lord continues to pour himself into us, and continues to refine us for his work.

I have largely given up reading besides the Bible, due to the distraction from Christ that reading about Him had become in my life.  However, I have been sporadically working my way through a compilation of George Macdonald’s sermons called Getting to Know Jesus.  Macdonald is the source of one of my favorite quotes:  “I do not with Paul consider myself to be the slave of Christ, but my only desire and wish is to be so.”  In the early stages of reading this book, I have been provided with yet another gem from this man of God that I would like to share with you.  He writes,

            “Oh, my friends, if you will but cast away the evil! I speak to myself and to all who have believed already, for you are not saved yet.  I do not count myself saved.  Never till God and I mean the same thing, and think the same thing, and do the same thing; never till the very existence of God is my continual gladness shall I count myself saved.  Then I say to all of you, Cast away the thing that you know is not light, is not clarity, and, let it cost what it may, receive the life that Jesus offers you; then you will one day, I know not when, be filled with life, that you will be glad like God himself with an intense consciousness of blessedness.”

The reason I love these words so much is because I am so deeply disgusted, so completely fed up with Christian contentment.  There is often such a push to be able to say with certainty that one is saved.  I remember being given a survey that asked me how sure I was that I was going to heaven.  There was a list of percentages, but the correct answer was 100%.  Now, I do not want to undermine the amazing gift of Jesus Christ.  I do not for a second want to make the illusion that we can save ourselves, but my friends we must yearn for salvation, we must chase salvation, we must strive after it, simply amazed that possibly through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ this wretch might be saved from himself.   Striving to be able to say that we have gained salvation, or striving to help others say that, simply minimizes the reality of salvation.  We should never dare to be so bold as to say that salvation has come our way.  Paul himself would not make such a claim.  In Philippians 3 he writes, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.  Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.  But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize of which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  Before I go on to speak more about pieces of these verses, I simply want to comment on the audacity, the foolishness of standing before Christ and saying that you will for sure spend eternity with Him.  Any man or woman who knows themselves, their utter depravity, and knows even a fraction of the beauty and majesty of the Lord our God, should expect fully that they are going to hell.  It does not seem possible that God could ever make me into something that could dwell in the house of the Lord for eternity.  At this point, some might challenge me, and say that I do not fully understand the love of God, that the equation above where I cannot help but see myself going to hell is only derived when the amazing love of God is not taken into consideration.  At this argument I balk severely, for I am convinced that it is exactly the love of God that would most strongly despise all of my depravity and sin.  The Lord cannot be alright with a sinful me, for that is not the me he created.  God will dwell with human beings, with the creatures he created to live in his will.  In Eden we became something other, something less.  We are not fit for eternity, because we live not in the will of the Father.  And yet, Christ has made it possible for us to once again become human.  In a history of sub-perfect humanity, there was one point over two-thousand years ago when light entered the darkness.  That light brought with it life, and that life in George Macdonald’s words is when, “God and I mean the same thing, and think the same thing, and do the same thing; when the very existence of God is my continual gladness.”  For how many Christians is that the goal?  It is the Bible’s goal, Jesus’ goal, the Father’s goal, and the Holy Spirit’s goal, but there are far too few Christian’s for whom this is the goal.  The majority of the church has settled for much less than life, and thus we journey on in a contented state of death and depravity.

I have always believed goals to be important.  I know from experience the importance of having a target to shoot for.  In the verses above Paul describes the goals that have been set before him.  They are to know Christ, to know the power of his resurrection, to know the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, and to become like him in his death.  I could spend tons of time delving into each of these goals, and trying to clarify exactly what Paul is after, but I would have another overly long blog entry.  1 John provides enough help with some of the understanding of these goals of faith.  It is important to realize that these are not just individual goals, which can be different for Paul, and for me, and for any Joe Blow.  These are God’s goals, this is God’s agenda for bringing us to life that we are talking about.  Paul says he wishes to know Christ and 1 John says, “We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands.  The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.  But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him.  This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.”  Elsewhere in chapter 3 it reads, “No one who continues to sin has either seen him or know him.”  I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but these are scary words for me.  In my Bible there are many markings from throughout the years that are often a joy for me to read, and a testimony to me of all that Christ has done in growing me to salvation.  However, there is a marking on this text that I know is old, but one that I can still relate with, and it reads simply this, “Big Problem!”  How often have you heard these truths of scripture?  I would be willing to bet not very often.  It’s become borderline heresy in many church settings to read these very words of scripture.  No one wants to hear or to preach that those who know Jesus, no longer know sin.  People want to hear and preach even less that knowing Jesus is paramount to salvation and eternal life (John 17:3), because that means that those who are heaven bound, are no longer bound by the chains of sin.  As I write these words, I realize another sad reality, which is that people would rather hear that they might not actually know Jesus, than they would hear that they might not go to heaven.  What a horrifying situation we find ourselves in when fear of not gaining our constructed image of eternal life and heaven, outweighs the fear of not gaining Jesus Christ himself. 

I got into a bit of a disagreement with my sister-in-law a few days ago, one which has made me think very deeply, and one that we have still yet to resolve.  I was discussing my observations that the church has become far too content with, as I put it earlier, “living in death” or simply put, far too content with sin.  It surprises me as I read the Bible how important holiness, righteousness, sinlessness is to God and in scripture, and how unimportant those things are in much of the church.  We seem for the most part to be alright with being sinful creatures.  We live in America, we live on Earth, and so there is only so much we can do to work towards perfection.  It is that kind of talk that I feel dominates faithful American Christian communities.  And it is that kind of talk that I think is a bunch of crap, and simply an unspoken excuse to not die to gain Christ.  Throughout the Bible, Christians are referred to as aliens and strangers in this world.  Just to remind myself and all of us that when you are a stranger to something it usually means you know nothing about it.  The language of the Bible is not the same as the language of, “in the world, but not of it” that gets thrown around so often.  Actually, I take that back, the denotation may be similar, but the connotation is something completely different.  This small phrase usually means not being a drunk, not sleeping around, it refers to the big ones, but usually includes a sense of passiveness in regards to other sins.  Not so with the Bible.  Again 1 John reads, “Do not love the world or anything in the world.  If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.  For everything in the world – the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father, but from the world.  The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.”  Anyway, back to my discussion with my sister-in-law, in drawing from my reflections upon the scriptures, I raised the question to her, myself and the rest of Brie’s family of why it is that we do not have the goal of sinlessness.  Why do we not strive for absolute perfection?  Why do we not make it our every move’s goal to discard our sin, our baggage, the distractions that plague us.  She immediately took objection with these kinds of statements, and insisted that our goal should not be to become sinless, but instead our focus should be on Jesus.  She was adamant that one could not focus on removing their sins, but instead had to focus on Christ, and imitating him.  In part, I agree with what she is saying.  1 John 5:12 reads, “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”  Attaining Jesus must be the goal.  It must be the only goal of our entire lives, to know Him, to be one with Him, to live completely within him.  Unity with Christ equals life.  I could not agree more.  However, I must argue that if that is truly the only goal of our lives, we cannot help but get very feisty, very aggressive, downright mean with the removal of sin from our lives.  If Christ is truly my only desire, than anything that is not Christ should absolutely repulse me.  It is a waste of my time at best, a poison perhaps more accurately.  Thus, I think very quickly when Christ is truly our only want, than a subsequent and secondary goal of sinlessness, of holiness, of destroying distractions must develop.  In the verse I spoke of earlier, Paul himself reflects this truth.  He says, “Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal . . .”  Jesus is his goal, but in his straining toward that goal, he most assuredly must just as fiercely work to forget what is behind Him.  My sister-in-law is correct that we cannot make it our main goal to remove all sin from our lives, and forget the main goal of Jesus Christ.  However, when I do not see violent straining and battle to remove sin, I struggle to believe that there is truly a desire to know Christ in the first place.  In a church full of WWJD, we have become far too comfortable with talking about pursuing Christ, being like Christ, and far too foreign to what that actually means.  Thus we have a church that is alien not to the world, but rather to talk of righteousness and sinlessness. 

This past Sunday, the sermon at church was about the Cost of Discipleship, and the pastor used an apple to represent the areas of deadness in our lives, the places of distraction from Jesus.  He then stood up front and dropped the apple off the stage to show what it is that we must do with those things that hold us back from our Lord.  He talked all about how an apple must die to get its seed in the ground, to bring new life, and how our sins must die in order to bring life.  That was all fine and good, but all I could think about as he dropped that apple nice and gently from the stage, was just how badly I wanted to see applesauce splattered in the center aisle.  If that apple was the things keeping him from Jesus, there was no way I wanted him relying on gravity to take care of the disposal, I wanted that thing hurled to the ground with enough force to make sure it was good and dead.  As I brought up this point to my in-laws they pointed out that we shouldn’t be destroying these things, because that implies that it is within our power to get rid of them.  I just don’t know if I can buy that though, it sounds far too churchy, far too predictable.  I think of Zacchaeus for example.  Jesus spoke to him, and right that instant he flung away most all of his money.  That was his obstacle, and just as quickly as Zacchaeus had seen Jesus, he smashed that distraction to kingdom come.  Zacchaeus was the one who got rid of it, Jesus didn’t do it.  Jesus was the motivation for the smashing, but he was not the smasher.  Zacchaeus simply had God invite himself into his house, and that was enough to motivate him to destroy everything that was preventing that from happening.  Somehow though, we hear God’s plea to enter into lives, and yet think it too rash, too foolish, too arrogant to simply take it on ourselves to destroy anything that might hinder his living within us, or we in Him.  That is not arrogant, it is not any of the above, it simply makes sense.  Just like Zacchaeus we have got to get serious about destroying sin, destroying obstacles.  I find it hard to say that I can watch TV in or for Jesus, that I can follow sports in or for Jesus, that I can spend time worrying about my appearance, about my finances, about anything besides bringing the Kingdom of God.  And because these things are not where Christ dwells, and because he has placed a hunger in my soul to dwell where he does, those things are all getting the axe.  As I meditate on these words and ponder the hunger of my soul, I find an image in my mind’s eye.  I am on a tropical beach somewhere, dying of thirst.  There is a spring across the beach, but between me and it, are about fifteen hungry, terrifying crocodiles.  All I want, all I can think about is that spring, but as long as those crocodiles are alive I can’t drink.  Thus, my initial objective is to make fifteen dead crocodiles.  Fifteen dead crocodiles later and this thirsty man will be quenched.  My soul thirsts, and my body longs for Christ, in a dry and weary land where there is no water (partially stolen from Psalm 63), and I do have crocodiles in my life keeping me from the only source of drink.  I have endured without life-giving water for so long, I have even grown to like some of the crocodiles.  Some of them have names and are like pets to me, but I am ready to kill them anyway, all of them, because the thirst is unbearable, and the spring calls my name.  “Come,” it says, “On my way” I say, and fifteen crocodiles shed their tears, for their life is nearly over.

Much love to you all in Christ,
Andrew