The Benefit of Sinfulness

That title is meant as click bait, not that I get much traffic on this blog. 

I continue to read Dane Ortlund's Gentle and Lowly, and recommend it, but really, a recommend the Puritans. In the Valley of Vision is a gem.  

The thing about the Puritans is that they had little concern for social problems. They had two concerns: the glory of God (and by that I mean a totally theologically, God-based view of reality, both physical and spiritual) and the neediness of the human soul. They were in no way dualists; the physical world was real to them, but it is not our permanent place. (Most don't know the Puritans were enthusiastic drinkers.)

Paul wrote "Where sin abounded, grace abounded more." (Romans 5:20). Not that we should sin to get more grace, but it is only in the full acceptance of our sinfulness that we really get it. It is grace, but it's also a self- and world-view that helps us live realistically. 

Ortlund writes: "Fallen humans are natural self-advocates. It flows out of us. Self-exonerating, self-defending. We do not need to teach young children to make excuses when they are caught misbehaving. There is a natural built-in mechanism that immediately kicks into gear to explain why it wasn't really their fault. Our fallen heats intuitively manufacture reasons that our case is not really that bad. The fall is manifested not only in our sinning but in our response to our sinning." (p. 92)

In a more succinct way, he writes, "Do you not find within yourself an unceasing low-grade impulse to strengthen his saving work through your own contribution?"  

Accepting your own sinfulness (not the world's or sinfulness as a doctrinal statement, but one's very own sinfulness and inability to achieve moral goodness or superiority) is actually incredibly freeing. As long as we think we have to defend ourselves, we will do it in the smallest things and feel constant guilt and spend an awful lot of anguish and anxiety and effort. I'm not saying to take on more responsibility for the evil in the world, or to take on more guilt. I'm saying confess to your utter inability to control events you've been trying to control, your utter inability to live beyond anyone's reproach (because everybody out there wants to reproach you because they are defending themselves too!), your utter inability to meet the ridiculous ideals we set before us as humans in this false culture around us. 

This is what it means, I think, to rest in Jesus. "Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Those people in his immediate hearing were laden with labor of poverty and foreign oppression but even more the burdens of man-made interpretations of the law of God. We are laden with slightly different things but no less burdensome. 

When we rest, we can then really live and do what we are supposed to. This is not a call to laziness, but a call to reality. 

I came to Christ when I learned (deeply) that I was a sinner and needed Christ. But I have lived much of my life, not theologically or intellectually, but emotionally, with what Ortlund calls that low-grade impulse to shore up anything that might be missing in Christ's work. I lived in fundamentalism, which blamed me that everyone in the world is going to hell. That will make one insane, eventually. Jesus never said that; he said to love and spread his message, which is entirely different. I don't ever read of Paul or Peter or John feeling guilty about those who aren't believers. Yet we used to have mission conferences with this clock that told us how many people globally were going to hell every minute. No one can live with that and internalize it and be normal. The students would giggle when it turned over to one million at the end of the week, like when a car odometer turns over. 

I learned a lot of other things from Fundamentalism that I am unlearning. But one thing I'm really learning now is that the full acceptance of one's sinfulness is liberating. That may seem odd to some readers, but if one is fully sinful, one has no recourse, and no resource, but the fullness of Christ. The only other options are despair because there is no hope for one's state, or continued pointless effort of trying to impress the unknown person in the sky you are thinking of as God or the phantom called self or the jeering crowd. That unknown personage in the sky you've named God really isn't because you've rejected his terms and his terms are the only ones that matter.