the drive for self-justification

As Christians, we unite in our opposition against the forces of evil around us. Yet, we are often blind to the force of evil in our own lives. We see ourselves as "having arrived" because we no longer smoke or drink and because we now practice a habit of daily devotions. Our drive for self-justification is stronger than our drive for food or sex. It is the essence of our rebellion.

In many churches, the "spiritual" Christians are those who seem to have arrived at some magic formula for victory over struggle. Because we relate stories of success and victory in our Sunday School classes, rather than struggles with disappointment and failure, we raise a standard that, when we are honest, we can never live up to. When life throws its curves at us, and we do not seem to triumph, we begin to think something wrong with us that isn't wrong with everyone else; we begin to think Christianity isn't working.

God has chosen for our sanctification in this life to be a slow and incomplete process which holds out the promise of eternity in the Kingdom where true righteousness and moral beauty will be ours forever. God's gracious intervention in this life reveals to us the depth of our problem of sin and who we really are before Him. As His grace invades our hearts, we begin to understand that, no matter how hard we try, we can't reach deep enough into our souls to flip a switch that will enable us to do the right thing automatically. Only God can do that, and He will, but He has designed it to happen fully, finally, in the next life. He could have changed us immediately, but He didn't.

God has not yet changed our moral nature, but He has changed our perspective. And as we mature in our faith, we become more and more convinced of the value of righteousness as we see and experience our own lack of it. This lack causes us to hunger and thirst after righteousness, if we are, indeed, God's children.

What happened to Sally? Fortunately for (and unbeknownst to) her, her salvation was in God's hands the whole time. And He is faithful. He eventually drew her back to Himself after her many years of open rebellion. Since then she has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong the first time around.

jesus and the sinful woman

Luke 7:36-50 describes Jesus' dinner with Simon the Pharisee. A sinful woman interrupts their dinner to anoint Jesus' feet with costly perfume and to wash them with her tears. When Simon objects (to himself), Jesus tells him a story about two men who owed different amounts of money and whose debts were both canceled. Jesus asked Simon which debtor he thought would love the moneylender more, the one with the larger debt canceled or the one with the smaller debt. This story intrigued Sally because she so strongly identified with the sinful woman. Sitting in a church full of seemingly perfect Christians, reading this story, she wondered how anyone who had not strayed like she had could love Jesus as much as she did. She understood the depth of her rebellion in that moment.

Sally's thoughts, however, raised a question:

Why would her sins qualify her for a deeper relationship with God than those Christians around her who had not rebelled as wholeheartedly as she?

This seemed to be what Jesus was saying in his story about the two canceled debts. Years later, Sally realized she had missed the point, when a different interpretation of this passage solved her dilemma. She understood that the difference between Simon and the woman was not, after all, the amount of debt owed. Both owed the same enormous debt to goodness, a debt canceled at the cross. The difference was how they perceived their debts: Simon perceived himself as someone who did not owe that much; the woman knew better about herself.

Jesus intended the story to show Simon that his perception of himself was wrong. In fact, when God's grace reveals to us who we are and who He is, we recognize the depth of the debt we owe, whether we have rebelled openly or in ways that are more socially acceptable and, therefore, less noticeable.

a way of understanding

Sally began to understand what went wrong with her Christianity the first time around. She saw that in her early years she was Simon, someone who did not recognize the depth of her own evil. She had perceived herself as a special case, granted grace by God to be better than most. After God graciously gave her a dose of her own evil, she finally recognized the kind of heart she had had all along. In the aftermath of all the pain and heartache, it was good for her to go there, for her to know that God is the one saving her, and that she is at His mercy. Fortunately, He is merciful, and the very evil she hid from, she now strives to admit and repudiate.

In her new understanding of living in grace, Sally recognizes the mix that this life is. She understands that the change in her perspective on her evil, her awareness of it and her growing distaste for it, is evidence of her faith, not her ability to achieve a different level of success. Because, even if she can do the right thing now, she is no longer naive enough to confuse her ability with true goodness deep in her heart, the goodness she still lacks, but longs for more and more. She struggles to acknowledge her own evil and how it works its way into every breath, all the while trusting that God is saving her, drawing her into the kingdom with each passing day, because her taste and her longing for goodness grows with each struggle.

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