Just Assume You Don’t Get It

Just assume you don’t get “it.”  “It” being the Gospel of grace.

One of the most honest and important steps any person can take towards growing in Christ, is to simply accept the fact that you don’t really live by the Gospel.  Take that step in your thinking, and you will be open to repenting and then pursuing the Gospel.  Think that you “have got the gospel” and you will want to “move on” to whatever you think is next.  And in that, you step away from the Gospel.

Why Don't We "Get It?"

In my personal experience and observation, there are a number of root causes for this condition of not living by the Gospel with every breath of life.

The Inclination of Our Hearts (motivations, not simply emotions)

We are deeply oriented towards attitudes of pride, self-righteousness and relying on our own performance.  Everybody believes this, just not so much about ourselves.  Like water running downhill, these are the natural inclinations of our deep motivations.  The moment we assume that we have moved beyond pride, is the moment we act as if water has begun to regularly run uphill.  It simply won’t happen.  Someone has got to keep pumping.  That is where we need grace.

The Moralistic Discipleship of American Ministries

While there certainly is a universal heart issue with pride and “do-it-yourself righteousness,” one would have to say that the churches and para-church ministries in the United States have only added to the problem.  We are a nation of “how-to” believers.  We want “practical Bible teaching.”  Read: “Tell me what I must do in order to get what I want from God.”  Health and wealth theology is only the worst of it.  Much marriage training is couched in “do X for your spouse and you can expect to get Y from them” sorts of terms.  Ask yourself what drives most church based parenting seminars.  What do people get when they flock to “christian” financial seminars?  Do we ever face the insecurities and greed that most often motivate our financial goals?  Or do we get Bible verses that tell us what to do (tithe, avoid debt) in order to get what we want (God’s blessing, more money, financial security)?

The Individualism of American Culture

American self-reliance is the odd progeny of people – think Pilgrims here - who chose to fend for themselves in order to be able to worship freely.  Americans are obsessed with personal rights, freedom to choose and determining our own “truth.”  Receiving the gift of grace solely on the terms of the giver goes against our grain.

Our Fragmented Heart

I see almost daily – usually with the help of God’s Word or the perspective of others – that I have an amazing ability to live in God’s grace in one area of my life, while being a prideful, moralistic, self-reliant person in another.  Please don’t think it’s just me.

Martin Luther Realized He Didn’t “Get the Gospel”

If anyone in Western Civilization has a claim on “getting the Gospel of grace,” it would have to be Martin Luther.  For whatever else he got wrong, his understanding of grace and righteousness by faith alone was so transformative that it changed the course of history.  Look at what he writes in the preface to his Commentary on Galatians though.  It should give everyone who thinks that they “get the gospel” reason to pause.

“Even though we are now in faith, the heart is always ready to boast itself before God and say, ‘After all, I have preached the law, lived so well and done so much that surely He will take this into account ‘. We even want to haggle with God to make Him regard our life, but it cannot be done. With men you may boast, I have done the best I could…If anything is lacking, I will still try to make recompense, but when you come before God, leave all that boasting at home. Remember to appeal from justice into grace.

But let anybody try this and he will see and experience how exceedingly hard and bitter a thing it is for a man, who all his life, has been marred and has worked righteousness to pull himself out of it with all his heart would rise up through faith in the one mediator. I myself have been preaching and cultivating it through reading and writing for almost twenty years and still feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something so that He will give me His grace in exchange for my holiness. Still I cannot get it into my head that I should surrender myself completely to sheer grace, yet I know that this is what I should and must do.”

“I have been preaching and cultivating it (reliance on grace alone) for almost twenty years and still feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something.”  Martin Luther had been “navigating the pathways of his heart” for twenty years and was still prone to self-righteousness before God.

Do we think we have a better grasp of the Gospel of grace than Martin Luther?  Or do we have less of a grasp on the depth of our self-righteousness?

How to Respond

Take The Step

Go ahead.  Admit to yourself and to the world that you are a “self-righteousness-aholic.”  In AA terms you have a problem that you cannot control.  Sure, maybe you prayed a prayer years ago, or go to church regularly, or read – even teach – Bible verses on a regular basis.  But until you face the truth that you, me, Martin Luther and everyone else is deeply broken and irreversibly oriented towards self-righteousness, you will go no further in dealing with the problem.  Admit that you don’t really “get it” and you will be ready for the next step, and ready to see repentance as a lifestyle of grace, not an act of contrition.

Find Other People Who Have Taken The First Step

You will be amazed at the way other people who are looking at the log in their own eye, can help you identify the speck in yours.  We need people who are growing in grace to help, model and encourage us in our own growth.  We need to be that for other people.  The church should be a community of people who – in Luther’s terms – are preaching the Gospel to ourselves every day.  It’s not easy, and certainly not common.  But a Gospel community is a source of strength for breaking the slavish deceptions of our self-righteous hearts.

Relearn How To Read The Bible

I’ve blogged before about “reading with Gospel eyes.”  Click Here.  It is a learned perspective.  And if you haven’t deliberately learned it, you are not reading the Bible with that perspective.  There is a growing trickle of resources available to help people see the Bible as Gospel.  You can come across many simply by regularly reading around on TheGospelCoalition.org.  See how it effects the life of prayer by using Scotty Smith’s daily prayer blog Heavenward.  Purchase and read Sally Lloyd-Jones’ Jesus StoryBook Bible.  Then read it again.  And again. And again.  Then repeat this process.  Click Here for an article where she speaks to reading the Bible as the Gospel, rather than a book about us. 

Click Here for a 3.5 minute video by Matt Chandler on how this perspective works itself out in a curriculum.  Use the Gospel Project curriculum that Matt is referring to.  I’m thankful that we are doing exactly that at Christ Covenant.  After all, why in the world would we want to teach our kids something that deceived and then crushed me (moralistic churchianity), is not the Gospel, and that they will have to unlearn (through get pain later in life) in order to then go on and experience the Gospel?

In Closing

Friends, the Gospel is not simply the A-B-C’s of Christian maturity and discipleship.  It is the A-thru-Z.  (Thank you for that line, Tim Keller.)  We do not have more THAN that Gospel to offer to our community, only more OF that Gospel; enough to permeate every aspect of life and relationship.  Until we admit how little we “get it” though, we will never deeply pursue that Gospel for every aspect of our own lives.

After experiencing a time out of ministry that became a season of Gospel Renovation for my heart, my biggest concern was how to keep a Gospel focus in ministry apart from the community we had become a part of.  The answer was to go with the Father to Fredericksburg and be part of His building a new one here.