Christianity is often pejoratively referred to as “dirty
rotten sinner” religion. Our detractors will often say something like this:
- “Christians tend to be so guilt-ridden. They feel that they have to go through life degrading themselves in order to win God’s approval. I find that very depressing. Instead, I want a spirituality that’s positive, freeing and one that will make me feel good about myself.”
This type of reaction is very understandable. We all want to
be happy, and it might seem that the Gospel is a one-way street into a medieval
village where the Inquisition is diabolically entrenched, seeking to wipe away
every smile. While it’s a hard sell to merely claim that the Gospel will set us free from so many of life’s
torments, a story might prove helpful.
For the first few years that I was teaching Bible and
Theology at the New York
School of the Bible, I
was assailed by such intense feelings of unworthiness, shame and self-contempt
that they co-opted my thought-life. Driven by such powerful feelings, my
self-doubts seemed to speak with unassailable authority: “You teach? What type
of Christian are you anyway? You think you really have faith? Look how selfish
and self-absorbed you are. How are you going to help anyone? What a charlatan,
posing in the front of the class as some type of authority! What do you think
their reaction would be if they really knew you?”
Devastated by these indictments, I wanted to disappear and
to have the buildings of NYC implode over my head and swallow me up without a
sign. Many times, I thought of calling my school to say, “Find yourselves
someone else. I’m not your man.” But gradually, the Gospel began to take root.
In my longstanding pre-Christian struggle to attain some sense
of significance and value, I’d ward off the shame and self-contempt through
positive affirmations: “I’m a good person; no, I’m a vastly superior person.
I’m _____, _____, _____, and more. I’m a once-in-a-lifetime person!” There was
no end to the superlatives. In fact, I was always inventing new ones—whatever I
needed to tell myself to keep the shame at bay. However, these never sufficed,
and so I always needed to up the superlatives in order to overcome the
ubiquitous feelings of shame.
However, as a Christian, I learned that it was wrong to
engage in this form of masturbation. But I had to do something about the
poisonous arrows of my own demons. I needed to prove myself, and now I had a
new vehicle with which to do it. I would excel at spirituality! I would prove,
at least to myself, that I was worthy of God’s grace.
I reassured myself that I was more deserving of salvation
than others. I was more spiritual; I had chosen God because I wasn’t as carnal
as 90% of the human race. I had the keenness of mind to recognize the
surpassing value of the things of God, and I had a great destiny, not just in heaven,
like all the other Christians, but I would also lead the way here.
However, God loves us too much to allow us to continue in
our delusions. He closed my hand to all my dreams of spiritual accomplishment.
Even more difficult to endure, I began to see my own poverty of spirit, my
utter unworthiness. My levies were overwhelmed, and the demons of shame and
self-contempt came roaring back. I feverishly sought to rebuild the levies with
good works--anything that would tell me, “You’re OK!” In my torment, I began to
read the Bible with new tear-filled eyes, hoping to find a God tucked within
its pages who would be far more merciful than I ever dared to hope for.
Jesus told a parable about two men who entered the temple to
pray one was a self-assured Pharisee, the other a broken sinner who lacked the
confidence to even look up to heaven (Luke 18:9-14). I had become that broken
sinner, now defenseless against the internal raging. I had been stripped of
confidence and any sense that there was something about me that would merit
even a glance from a holy God.
Paradoxically, this was the beginning of psychological
freedom. I had been stripped bare of all my defenses, and for the first time in
my life, gradually found that I didn’t need them. I could finally let go of my
miserable fig leaves, because I was beginning to know a God who wanted to
clothe me with His forgiveness, His righteousness, and His sanctification (1
Cor. 1:29-30). I was beginning to learn that I was complete in Him (Col.
2:9-10), not because of who I am, but because of who He is.
It took me a while to learn these lessons. The Bible was my
thought-life foundation, but it seemed to say such contradictory things. On the
one hand, it assured me that salvation, along with everything else I needed,
was absolutely free. But then I observed that other verses seemed to say that
God’s “gifts” also required some labor on my part. These “contradictions” first
needed to be resolved before I could decisively confront my demons.
However slowly, that day did come. Now, when my demons
accuse me of my failures and worthiness, I’m ready for them: “Satan, you’re
right! I am totally unworthy to serve God, let alone to teach. I don’t deserve
the slightest thing from Him. But I have an incredible God who is everything to
me—my righteousness, my sanctification, and whatever else I need. He loves me
with an undying love and will never leave me. It is He who has given me the
privilege to serve Him by teaching. Besides, I’m so glad that I’ve been reminded
of my unworthiness, because this just prompts me to be grateful, and makes me
just want to sing His praises.”
Understanding
the truths of Scripture becomes a wellspring of peace (Col. 2:1-4). I’m now rid
of some baggage that had been too heavy to bear. As Jesus said, "If you
abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:31-32). The truth has set me free—free from the need to defend
myself, free from struggling to prove myself, free from shame and self-contempt,
and free from the fear of failure. Well, not absolutely free, but free enough.
However, this freedom would never have come
without seeing the depths of my unworthiness. Had I not come to this crushing
point, I would never have discovered true grace, and without receiving this
incredible grace, I never would have found the confidence to lay aside all the
inner struggles and to finally accept the fact that I’m an utter sinner saved
by grace.
Not everyone’s experience is as intense as
mine was, but we all have a conscience that tells us things we don’t want to
hear, and we all attempt to beat it down one way or another (Romans 1:18-21). We
all yearn to prove ourselves and resort to self-deception to accomplish this.
This isn’t merely a Biblical point of view; this
is the prevailing view of psychology. Shelley Taylor writes,
As we have seen,
people are positively biased in their assessments of themselves and of their
ability to control what goes on around them, as well as in their views of the
future. The widespread existence of these biases and the ease with which they
can be documented suggests that they are normal.[1]
46
They might be “normal,” but dependency on
self-delusions, the product of self-righteousness, ultimately produces a loss
of mental flexibility, not freedom and joy. As paradoxical as it might seem,
the road to freedom compels us on a humbling journey through “valley of the
shadow of death” (Psalm 23), where our old armor and defenses are stripped away
so that we can be re-clothed in splendor. No wonder Jesus tells us, “For
everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be
exalted" (Luke 18:14).
How
then do we come to this place of assurance of God’s grace in the face of our spiritual
brokenness? It’s not possible on
our own. Jesus had taught emphatically against the idea of self-salvation (Mat.
19:26; John 3:3; John 6:44). However, He made it equally clear that spiritual
growth is also impossible without His involvement (John 15:4-5). Knowing this,
we have to trust Him to perform for us the humanly-impossible and to cry out
for His intervention.
Spiritual desperation is a lens that brings
grace into fine-focus. It’s this mourning that sharpens our eyes to the reality
of grace (Mat. 5:3-4; Psalm 25:8-9; 14-15). But what if we don’t see our
neediness? We have to embrace the prayer of David:
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my
anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the
way everlasting (Psalm 139:23-24).
Trust
Him in this. He has promised to reveal to us our spiritual deficiencies as He
also did for the churches of the Book of
Revelation:
I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God
has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. All of us who are mature should take
such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.
Only let us live up to what we have already attained (Philip. 3:14-16).
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