Living Story Grace

Today, some words from N.T. Wright about our tendency toward gnosticism, what he calls a “religion of self-discovery.” Somehow this felt appropriate on the eve of the New Year, when many will review the past year and look toward commitments for self-improvement in the New Year. Remembering the history of the past year and looking to the future of the “brand new things” (Isaiah 43) in the coming year are excellent ways to spend today and tomorrow. Let’s do these things focusing on God’s rescue and redemption of us, not as an effort to discover within ourselves that “inner spark of divine life.”

“Along with the radical dualism goes Gnosticism as a religion, not of redemption, but of self-discovery. This is the real ‘false gospel’ at the heart of a good many contemporary debates. The Gnostic does not want to be rescued; he or she wants to discover ‘who they really are’, the inner spark of divine life. …And in some of our most crucial ethical debates people have assumed for a long time that ‘being true to myself’ was all that really mattered (at this point the existentialism and romanticism of the last two hundred years reinforce the underlying gnosticism). This is a religion of pride rather than of faith, of self-assertion rather than of hope, of a self-love which is a parody of the genuinely biblical self-love which is regard for oneself, body and all, as reflecting the image of the creator.

And this false religion, though it often uses the language of Christianity, makes it impossible for people to have real Christian faith, or for that matter real Jewish faith; because in the Bible you discover ‘who you really are’ only when the living God, the creator, is rescuing you and giving you a new identity, a new status, a new name. The Bible is itself the story of, and the energy to bring about, the redemption of creation, ourselves included, not the discovery within ourselves of a spark which just needs to express itself. Gnosticism hates resurrection, because resurrection speaks of God doing a new thing within and for the material world, putting it right at last, rather than God throwing the material world away and allowing the divine spark to float off free. And it is resurrection – the resurrection of Jesus in the past, and of ourselves in the future – which is the ground of all Christian ethical life in the present. Christian ethics is not a matter of ‘discovering who you truly are’ and then being true to that. It is a matter, as Jesus and Paul insist, of dying to self and coming alive to God, of taking up the cross, of inaugurated eschatology, of becoming in oneself not ‘what one really is’ already but ‘what one is in Christ’, a new creation, a small, walking, breathing anticipation of the promised time when the earth shall be filled with God’s glory as the waters cover the sea.

FROM The Bible and Tomorrow, July 30, 2008, http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Lambeth2008.htm

As we turn toward the New Year, this devotion from Oswald Chambers encourages me.  As one who becomes frustrated with the slow process of sanctification, it is good to be reminded that God is indeed growing the virtues of Jesus Christ in me.
“And every virtue we possess”

All my fresh springs shall be in Thee. Psalm 87:7 (P.B.V.).

Our Lord never patches up our natural virtues, He remakes the whole man on the inside. “Put on the new man”—see that your natural human life puts on the garb that is in keeping with the new life. The life God plants in us develops its own virtues, not the virtues of Adam but of Jesus Christ. Watch how God will wither up your confidence in natural virtues after sanctification, and in any power you have, until you learn to draw your life from the reservoir of the resurrection life of Jesus. Thank God if you are going through a drying-up experience!

The sign that God is at work in us is that He corrupts confidence in the natural virtues, because they are not promises of what we are going to be, but remnants of what God created man to be. We will cling to the natural virtues, while all the time God is trying to get us into contact with the life of Jesus Christ which can never be described in terms of the natural virtues. It is the saddest thing to see people in the service of God depending on that which the grace of God never gave them, depending on what they have by the accident of heredity. God does not build up our natural virtues and transfigure them, because our natural virtues can never come anywhere near what Jesus Christ wants. No natural love, no natural patience, no natural purity can ever come up to His demands. But as we bring every bit of our bodily life into harmony with the new life which God has put in us, He will exhibit in us the virtues that are characteristic of the Lord Jesus.

‘And every virtue we possess
Is His alone.’

Today, a meditative reflection from Michael Card’s lyrics, Immanuel.  Read it, sing it, pray it, live it:

A sign shall be given a virgin will conceive

A human baby bearing undiminished deity
The glory of the nations a light for all to see
That hope for all who will embrace His warm reality

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

For all those who live in the shadow of death
A glorious light has dawned
For all those who stumble in the darkness
Behold your light has come

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

So what will be Your answer? Will You hear the call?
Of Him who did not spare His son but gave Him for us all
On earth there is no power there is no depth or height
That could ever separate us from the love of God in Christ

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

Immanuel our God is with us
And if God is with us who could stand against us
Our God is with us
Immanuel

Day 2 of “What is the real meaning of Christmas?”  What difference does it make in our lives that Christ came in the flesh, to dwell with us?  A little more from Manning on the meaning of Christmas.  If you missed yesterday, you might want to read that first.  This is the sequel, two more paragraphs from Brennan Manning’s “The Furious Longing of God”:

“According to that mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian, what we do to one another, we do to Jesus.  What would Jesus do to the Zacchaeus in your life and mine?  He’d pause, look at them, and love them with such disarming simplicity, such unaccustomed tenderness, and such infectious joy that He’d wring from their calloused hearts real bursts of joy, gratitude, and wonder.  Jesus expected the most of every man and woman, and behind their grumpier poses, their most puzzling defense mechanisms, their coarseness, their arrogance, their dignified airs, their silence, and their sneers and curses, Jesus sees a little child…

How have we gotten it so screwed up?”

To a professional organization, Manning uttered this charge:

…why not be a community of professional lovers that causes people to say, ‘How they love one another!’  Why do we judge Jesus’ criterion for authentic discipleship irrelevant?  Jesus said the world is going to recognize you as His by only one sign:  the way you are with one another on the street every day.  You are going to leave people feeling a little better or a little worse.  You’re going to affirm or deprive them, but there’ll be no neutral exchange.  If we as a Christian community took seriously that the sign of our love for Jesus is our love for one another, I am convinced it would change the world.  We’re denying to the world the one witness Jesus asked for:

LOVE ONE ANOTHER AS I’VE LOVED YOU.  JOHN 15:12″

I would add one reminder to Manning’s exhortation:  Don’t attempt this kind of love in your own strength.  You might make it for an hour, or even a day, but even if you do, it will only lead to your being puffed up in pride at how great a disciple you are.  When we love in the messy places, we won’t know what to do.  We’ll have to get on our knees and ask the Holy Spirit for the right words to say, the right actions to take.  Really forgiving enemies is a process, and we will never do it well in our own strength.  It is only through the grace of God’s forgiveness flowing through us that we will have power to forgive.  Loving one another as Jesus loved us simply doesn’t flow from the American “bootstrap” mentality.  It begins with remembering our stories of rescue, how God loved us and loves us in our curmudgeonly ways and days, it moves daily in imitating Christ’s life here on earth, and it leans forward into the hope that one day we will finally be perfect lovers when Christ comes to complete the restoration projects of our hearts.

For the past several days, we’ve been thinking about the real joy that comes from knowing that Christ is the foundation for our joy.  Today, we shift gears slightly to apply this news practically.  What indeed does it mean that the Lord is come?

Well, right about now, you may be ready for someone to leave — mother, father, cousin, grandma…someone you “tolerate” for 24- 48 hours during the Christmas season, but now it’s time for this incorrigible friend, relative, spouse — fill in the blank — to get out of your way.  Listen to what Brennan Manning says about these people that we struggle to love in The Furious Longing of God:

Is there a Zacchaeus in your life?  Somebody that everybody’s given up on?  Judged incapable of any further good?  Grandaunt, distant cousin, spouse, former spouse, in-law, member of your church, neighbor on your street, colleague at work?  Someone of whom you’ve said, ‘I’ve been wasting my time trying to make you understand anything.  You are incorrigible.  Thank God, I’m quits and free of you.  Don’t you dare to ever darken my door again.’  You probably wouldn’t say that because it’s cruel.  I don’t like to say cruel things either.  They make me feel guilty, and I don’t want to feel guilty.  So, I play it smooth; I call it cool cordiality and polite indifference. Good morning, you dork. In the churches across our land, we allow this garbage to masquerade as the love of Jesus.

Jesus said you are to love one another as I have loved you, a love that will possibly lead to the bloody, anguished gift of yourself; a love that forgives seventy times seven, that keeps no score of wrongdoing.  Jesus said this, this love, is the one criterion, the sole norm, the standard of discipleship in the New Israel of God.  He said you’re going to be identified as disciples, not because of your church-going, Bible-toting, or song-singing.  No, you’ll be identified as His by one sign only:  the deep and delicate respect for one another, the cordial love impregnated with reverence for the sacred dimension of the human personality because of the mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and that’s not just a nice, catchy title.  It means something.  It means that Christmas not only compels us but makes it really doable to forgive and love that incorrigible person in our lives.

A challenge:  Before you click that next tab on your window, close the computer.  Think of at least one “incorrigible” person in your life, and ask the Holy Spirit to help you begin to forgive them and love them.  Ask forgiveness for where your heart has been hard toward them.  Thank Jesus, the Prince who has kissed you with Peace, and extend this kiss to others.