God wants us to be family. That is how I understand the purpose of Jesus\u2019 cross and resurrection and the Holy Spirit\u2019s mission to make us holy. I don\u2019t believe that God is allergic to sin. I don\u2019t believe that God has a \u201cglory\u201d he is obligated to worry about which is somehow at odds with his desire to bring every human being as deeply into his arms as we will allow. God\u2019s glory is his family. I don\u2019t believe that we need to be saved from God\u2019s perfectionism or God\u2019s wrath. What we need to be saved from is our sin, and most specifically our tendency to justify sin, which imprisons us and warps our ability to perceive reality correctly. It is this self-justification which makes us hate God and experience his intimate love as the wrathful torture of hell. The great gift that forms the foundation of Christian life is the freedom to be wrong, which we gain through accepting the mercy of Jesus\u2019 sacrifice for our sins. Without that freedom, no matter what prayer we\u2019ve prayed or how perfectly our actions conform to the teachings of scripture, we remain unsaved.<\/p>\n
This is the gospel I\u2019ve come to understand. This is what I believe the apostle Paul was so emphatic about in his New Testament letters where he develops the crucially important doctrine of justification by faith expressed most succinctly in Ephesians 2:8-10. I think that many of my fellow evangelical Christians have had their salvation undermined because of a misunderstanding of the problem that is solved by Jesus\u2019 cross. The problem is not that we fail to be perfect, and God is infinitely angry about that, so he wants to torture us forever but will settle for torturing his son on the cross instead if we can prove to him that we \u201cbelieve\u201d in Jesus. The problem is that we think that we\u2019re supposed to be always right, and we either believe that we are or resent the expectation; this makes us suck at being a merciful and loving family to each other, which would make eternity together with God a greater hell than the most awful family reunion in human history without his intervention through Christ.<\/p>\n
God does want us to be perfect, but not in the way we think. Jesus tells us in Matthew 5:43-48 how to \u201cbe perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.\u201d It\u2019s not flawless execution of rule-following for the sake of rule-following. It\u2019s not a perfect articulation of all the fine points of Christian doctrine. These things are only relevant insofar as they make us people who can \u201clove our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.\u201d Mercy is the goal of all Christian holiness; it is the perfect divine disposition toward which the Holy Spirit shapes our hearts if we allow. This isn\u2019t to say that my sins don\u2019t matter. They matter immensely, because they make me unmerciful. To be merciful requires having a pure heart that worships only God.<\/p>\n
If I\u2019m compromised by sin, such as an addiction to alcohol or pornography or hate radio, then my distracted heart will be unable to respond unilaterally to the world\u2019s sin with God\u2019s love. We gain the ability to love others in the unilateral, merciful way that God loves us by loving God and receiving God\u2019s love for us. When we worship something as god that isn\u2019t God, then it sabotages the pure exchange of God\u2019s love that takes place when we worship God. What seals us in love-destroying idolatry is when we\u2019re defensive and shameful about it, resisting God\u2019s attempts to liberate us from it, i.e. when we lack the freedom to be wrong. If we have gained the freedom to be wrong from trusting that all of our shameful secrets can be crucified on Jesus\u2019 cross, then the Holy Spirit will guide us on the journey called sanctification which chisels away smaller and smaller idols from our heart that were completely imperceptible to us when we thought we were supposed to be always right.<\/p>\n
I am a little wary of Christians who are hypervigilant about sin, especially when they talk all the time about God\u2019s anger against sin. Though it\u2019s true that I cannot know the heart of people who talk this way, it sounds like they are trying very hard to be right, which makes me think they lack the freedom to be wrong. People are liberated from their sin in environments where they feel safe being wrong. I have trouble understanding how that happens in contexts of hypervigilant sin management where everyone is walking around on eggshells. My greatest liberation from sin has occurred not when I am beaten into submission and humiliation by someone who proves what a hypocritical idiot I am, but when I am melted from the delusion of my self-justification by seeing and loving the goodness of God.<\/p>\n
I do think that confession and accountability are immensely important tools if the problem of sin is understood properly. The problem is not that I\u2019m supposed to be perfect and God is really angry because I\u2019m not. The problem is that I continue to lack the freedom to be wrong, and God is really sad because I still don\u2019t trust him. Even though Jesus died for my sins, I continue to be in denial about addictions and idols that I have, which occupy the space in my heart that God wants to fill with mercy. Confession is practice in embracing the freedom of being wrong and letting God\u2019s armies of love advance into the occupied territories of my heart that remain under self-justification. It\u2019s most powerful when it\u2019s spoken aloud to another person, which is why James 5:16 says to \u201cconfess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.\u201d<\/p>\n
To say that we have the freedom to be wrong is not the same thing as saying it\u2019s okay that we\u2019re wrong, depending on what we mean by that. If I trivialize the wrongness of my sin, that means I remain under the death-grip of self-justification and enslaved to the need to be right. So a healthy confession environment needs to involve forgiveness and repentance rather than a blithe reassurance that the confessed sin isn\u2019t a big deal. To tell people who confess sin that their sin is no big deal means that you\u2019re denying them the freedom to be wrong by telling them that they\u2019re still right and they\u2019re supposed to continue pretending to be right. So when someone says they\u2019re sorry to you, don\u2019t say \u201cNo big deal,\u201d which trivializes their apology. Say \u201cI really appreciate your apology,\u201d which gives their apology dignity. This is the distinction between a gospel of \u201ctolerance\u201d and Jesus\u2019 gospel of the freedom to be wrong. The freedom to be wrong through which God\u2019s mercy makes us into a humble and merciful family for each other is completely different than declaring that there is no standard of right and wrong which would be a horrible foundation for any family to have.<\/p>\n
One thing the Catholics do right that we Protestants need to adopt is to incorporate penitential practices with confession. Part of the freedom to be wrong is gaining the ability to actually mourn and hate our sins. This is something that has to be learned. Part of how I learn it is through my knees, literally. I kneel on the marble floor at the Catholic basilica in Washington, DC when I go there each Monday morning. I have bad knees, so it hurts. But when I kneel and say, \u201cLord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner\u201d over and over again, somehow my tears become my food, as it says in Psalm 42:3. I realize it sounds bizarre and masochistic, but the mourning of sin results in an unspeakable sweetness in which you taste the goodness of God. I gain a deeper hunger for my heart to be emptied of all things except for God\u2019s mercy.<\/p>\n
Again it\u2019s important to understand that we can \u201cmourn\u201d our sins for the wrong reason if we\u2019re doing so in order to be theologically correct. It completely defeats the purpose if we put on a public pageant of grandiose humility talking about our incredible wickedness so that everyone will see how right we are to admit that we\u2019re wrong. We can easily reduce our confession to a public relations gesture, like the mea culpa <\/em>of the politician who pauses for a few seconds before going right on with his talking points. The point is not to admit that we\u2019re wrong when we\u2019re forced to do so in order to get back to being completely right. The point is to own our permanent wrongness and God\u2019s permanent rightness, which may seem demoralizing but is actually incredibly liberating.<\/p>\n We will always remain redeemed sinners, justified solely on the basis of Jesus\u2019 cross. No matter how liberated from sin we become, we will always be wrong. Because part of the amazing freedom of being wrong is to call everything that we do right a gracious gift from God, something for which we are as thankful and surprised as everybody else. I don\u2019t need to be right because Jesus declares me right in spite of everything wrong about me, unilaterally, unconditionally, and permanently. Trusting that truth is heaven; rejecting it is hell. What remains for me to do is to practice being wrong, hopefully in smaller and more intricate ways as the Holy Spirit gives me deeper insight, so that I can be more perfectly merciful in conformity with the nature of the God who is saving me.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" God wants us to be family. That is how I understand the purpose of Jesus\u2019 cross and resurrection and the Holy Spirit\u2019s mission to make us holy. I don\u2019t believe that God is allergic to sin. I don\u2019t believe that God has a \u201cglory\u201d he is obligated to worry about which is somehow at odds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1934,"featured_media":8875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n