Pacing about the vine-covered porch at Winton Ridge, I couldn't take my eyes from the rain-soaked cardboard box filled with all of Mandy's love letters and the True Love Begins As Friends woodblock she gave me this past January. The night she broke up with me I carried the box over to John & Brandy's and left it there to soak in the summer rains. The classic recourse is to set them afire; I wanted to let them weather rainstorm after rainstorm until the ink had bled, each and every word erased. Walking back and forth across that porch, I felt again the gnawing conviction that what happened came directly from God's hand, that He answered my prayers and then took her away to bring me grief, to punish me for my sins. That makes the loss all the more unbearable: I feel like it could have been avoided, that the reason she called everything off is because God put it into her heart to do so, since His whole plan was to cause me pain because I'm not a "good enough" Christian. This conviction both stems from an insecurity regarding my position before God, and simultaneously fuels that insecurity. It's a torturous cycle: I feel like I'm the "black sheep" of God's family, the one who just can't get it right, the "family burden" (if you will).
Really, I've felt this way for a long time. After Julie broke up with me for one of my best friends in 2006, I saw God behind it, punishing me for my sins. In the aftermath of Courtney cheating on me and then dating (and marrying) the man with whom she cheated, I blamed it on my own failures to lead and be sexually pure. I didn't blame Courtney, as if cheating on me were exonerable and "no big deal." The real issue in all that was my own sin. When everything with Sarah happened in 2009, I interpreted that as God putting me through hell because (you guessed it) I just wasn't cutting it as a Christian. And now, with Mandy, I'm doing it all over again: I'm blaming it on myself for my own sin, thinking that if I was "just a little better" God wouldn't have done this to me, wouldn't have turned her heart against me, would've blessed us and prospered us and enabled us to flourish. The fault always comes back to me. Everyone else may blame her for what happened, seeing as she's the one who got freaked out (and that's really what it boils down to: she just got scared, and the pressure of that fear was too much for her to handle); but I see her freaking out, I see her speaking false assurance into my heart, I see her speaking so thoughtlessly, and I think, "God put terror in her heart. He made her give false assurances to further this divine deception. She spoke thoughtlessly because God blinded her. God used her as a tool to hurt me." The reason I think this way is because of my insecurity regarding my position before God.
Let me put it this way. Here is the gospel: everything I think I am, I am, and more. "As good as you think you are, you aren't. As bad as you think you are, you're worse." That's Biblical Anthropology 101. We are under God's wrath and estranged from Him. We are under His judgment, and we deserve to pay an exacting price for our sin. But in Christ, there's redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He who knew no sin became sin in our place, and on the cross He suffered the wrath we deserve and paid the debt we owe to God. In Christ there's reconciliation: we're made right with God, we're at peace with God. He is gracious and peaceable towards us. We are justified, standing before Him not as sinners but as those innocent of breaking His law. And not only that--we are adopted, made members of His covenant family. He looks at us not merely as men and women innocent of breaking His law; He looks at us as His own children. The wrath we deserve was poured out onto Christ, exhausted on Christ, and so we Christians stand before God not as recipients of His wrath but as recipients of His mercy, grace, and love. We still have sin in our lives, but we stand on solid ground before God, clothed in righteousness. simul iustus et peccator: at the same time righteous and a sinner. That is the gospel. And here is what lies at the heart of my insecurity: the fear that I am not 100% forgiven, the fear that I remain under the wrath of God, the fear that when God looks at me He can see only my sin and rightly sees none of my righteousness (because I've got none). It is the fear, if I may be so blunt, that the cross wasn't enough. Helpful, sure; at least now I can get my foot in the door. But is it effective? I know, logically and biblically, that the cross is efficient, that it's not merely helpful but sufficient. But rooted in the insecurity is the fear that the cross got me halfway there, and now I need to pull myself the rest of the way, becoming sinless (or close to it) so that God can look upon me with pleasure rather than disappointment.
I went to Bible college. I know these fears aren't biblical. Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Having started with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? My insecurity--that I'm not good enough to warrant God's mercy, grace, and provision--is founded upon heresy, and the trickle-down effect scorches so many different aspects of my life, not least my own "walk with God," or my communion with God, or the "experiential aspects" of my relationship with God (whatever phrase you want to use). I'm locked in a pattern of being afraid of what He will do to me, since I know that I am so deeply sinful and that sin will always be present in my life. I feel like I can come to Him only as a weak, broken, stumbling child who never gets it right and warrants only disappointment. When I go to pray, I feel weighed down by my guilt, chained by shame, and I can't find the right words because what do I deserve to say?
Knowing my sin, the response is to be repentance. The Spirit convicts of sin; that's one of His main functions. Matt Chandler, in Recovering Redemption, writes, "Christians are not confined to... trying so hard to act like we're not sinners, or to act like our sin is not really that big a deal--at least not as bad as it seems when we're the most bummed out about it. But, yes, it is. It's bad. Majorly bad. And the sooner we realize this, the sooner we can start experiencing renewed confidence in our relationship with Christ, even in our need to repent for our sins and to plead for His help in strengthening our soft spots. Because as believers in Him, that's exactly what's supposed to happen." Repentance is a lifelong process, and until that day we're wholly remade in the new heavens and new earth, we'll never reach a point of being done with repentance. I grit my teeth and repent, and I can't celebrate any victory over temptation because each stumbling is a failure that brings all of repentance crashing down. If repentance were a house built of cards, that one failure, that one instance of succumbing to sin, tears the whole house down. I don't see God celebrating my victories and prodding me forward after my stumblings, secure in His forgiveness and love; I see Him calling every victory a sham in light of one stumbling, I see Him telling me that my repentance isn't genuine unless a flip is switched and one day I'm perfect. Every time the house of cards collapses, I become awash in despair at my own condition, and convinced that I'll never be good enough for God, I am so tempted to resign altogether. The repentance staggers, since I fail to realize that the repentance God desires isn't a "perfect repentance" but an "unfinished repentance," the repentance of running the race set before me and not being waylaid by our moments of weakness, stupidity, apathy, and downright hardheartedness. Quoting Chandler again, "Repentance is not just the beginner course; repentance is lifetime learning. The goal of Christian living is not to get past the point of needing to repent, but to realize that God has made us capable through Christ of doing repentance well--repentance that the Bible calls 'godly' in nature--what the apostle Paul described as 'repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth' (2 Tim. 2:25)--repentance that leads to real change. At the root level. Where it can grow us up into character and consistency and confidence in Jesus' power and strength, fully at work in our pitiful weakness." Perceiving myself as the one who just can't get it right, the one who will never reach a point of holiness good enough to warrant His favor, I am pulled deeper into the chasm of insecurity.
Further, this insecurity, this conviction of inadequacy, holds me back from embracing the freedom of a life wholly surrendered. I know that none of us are qualified to do God's work in the world, and that God has a peculiar propensity for choosing the unqualified, but the inadequacy I feel convinces me that I'm just too inadequate, too unqualified for what I feel that He has called me to. I fear I'll never be good enough to preach or teach, and I fear that if I surrender to Him every aspect of my being, leaving nothing for myself, then He will take my life and ruin it. I feel that I must put to death my dreams of being a godly husband and a godly father, my dreams of being involved in vocational ministry; those are for people far better suited to the task, far more holy, than I am. So you see, this insecurity of my position before God affects so much in my life, and a (if not the) reason I have such hesitation to truly trust God in everything is that I fear that if He is in control, He will do nothing but harm me because of my sin. Pacing back and forth on that porch, I thought about all of this, and then came a whisper in my ear: "Christ bore all of God's anger towards you. Christ suffered the wrath you deserve for the sins of which you're so aware. Christ has freed you from the curse of the law. All of your sins--every single one; the ones you know about and the ones you don't; the sins you hate and the sins you concede; the sins you've committed, are committing, and will commit--ALL OF YOUR SINS are forgiven. You stand before God not as a disappointing child but as a beloved son. You stand before God righteous, holy, and innocent. You stand in God's favor. You are one of His chosen. Your life is bathed in His mercy and grace. His disposition towards you is not that of an enemy, but that of a loving Father.
And let me tell you something: as the Spirit whispered those words into my ear, something, in that very moment, changed. A better word might be "altered." I stood there looking out at the trees, and there came over me a certain peace, a certain freedom. I felt like I could breathe again. I watched the lightning bugs twinkle in the trees and felt the cool wind in my face, and I felt just a little bit more alive. I felt liberated, delivered from the chains that hold me back from becoming the person whom God wants me to be. Strength flooded my veins, and I was hopeful. I felt hopeful because if I am truly loved by God, if I am genuinely one of His children, if I really stand in His favor, if He is actually for me rather than against me, then I can trust Him. I don't have to explain everything that happens in my life, and I don't have to interpret everything with Mandy through a lens of God's divine disappointment and disapproval. I can be freed to believe that He really does have something for me in this, that the benefits of what transpired will outweigh the suffering endured, and that He is using all of the things in my life, the Good and the Bad, to further conform me to the image of Christ, to draw me closer to Him, and to carry me down the road He has set before me. There's a lot of healing that's needed in my life, and not just healing in the wake of everything with Mandy. There's been a need for healing for years upon years; I need to be healed of these insecurities, I need my communion with God to be restored; and in this healing, there's freedom. If everything with Mandy really was orchestrated by God, I can rest in Him, knowing that He did it for my good and His glory. I'm reminded of a third quote by Matt Chandler:
Realize, from revisiting Genesis 1, that God has already shown us how He can take what is formless, dark, and empty--which, perhaps, is exactly the way you feel right now--and breathe His precious life into the most lifeless of situations. Making it... good.
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