God willing we’ll be back next Monday evening.
Yes and no. There is a perspective out there, driven I suspect more by psychology than theology, that looks down its nose at what is sometimes called “worm theology.” It suggests that we can be too down on ourselves, that looking too deeply into our sinful hearts is unhealthy and unbiblical.
The Bible, however, gives a compelling portrait of our sinful nature before we are reborn (see Ephesians 2), and I would argue, after we are reborn (see Romans 7). To look more deeply into our sin is to look more deeply into His grace, and to respond more potently in love and gratitude. One thing most needful for me, and for the church in our age is a more honest, humble grasp of our own sin.
While it is likely not possible to overstate the scope of our sin apart from His grace (though it is possible to miss the blessing of that grace in stamping us with His image) nevertheless there is at least one way in which we can “over-repent.” We do so when we repent for things that are not sins.
There are at least two ways we repent for things that are not sins. First, when we in the church add to God’s law. The Pharisees, we remember, were infamous for what we call “fencing the law.” Here we take an actual law God has given, and to be extra certain we don’t commit that sin we make the law broader than God Himself did. The Pharisees were neither the last, nor the first to do this. Eve is the patron saint of this error.
Remember when the serpent asked if God had forbidden Adam and Eve to eat of any of the trees of the garden she rightly replied that God had given them liberty to eat of any tree, save one. Her good beginning however soon came with a gloomy portent when she added, “Neither may we touch it.” God had said no such thing. Eve was the first to add to God’s law.
The second way we repent for things that are not sins is when we take on the burdens of the law from the world. They have their own law that often has little connection to God’s law. They are quick to condemn us, and sadly, too often we are willing to take on the stigma. Consider the tragic case of Joshua Alcorn.
This young man some years ago took his own life, and left behind on social media his explanation for why. Joshua wanted to go through that process by which some men disfigure themselves. He wanted to take in chemicals all designed to make him appear as a woman. His parents, professing believers, did not support either this process. Neither did they accept the notion that Joshua was a girl trapped in a boy’s body.
The death is of course a terrible tragedy. The young man was struggling with deep despair. But the “lesson” we are called to learn, that too many professing believers have owned, is that Joshua is dead because of his cruel, narrow, believing parents. We Christians are to repent for our lack of understanding of those struggling with sexual identity. Trouble is, perhaps apart from Fred Phelps, I’m unaware of Christians lacking in understanding for anyone struggling with sexual identity. Or any other sin for that matter.
I am aware that there are Christians, sadly too few, who are unwilling to call evil good in the boiling cauldron of sexual identity politics. The tragedy of the death of Joshua Alcorn was tragic because of Joshua’s death, not because we Christians won’t get with the program of our postmodern sexual free fall.
As when we in the church add to God’s law we end up distorting who God is, so when we embrace the world’s law as God’s law we do the same. We may weep for Joshua, and weep with his parents. We may not, however, add to or subtract from the law of God in the process. We have plenty of real sins to repent of without taking on the yoke of the contemporary zeitgeist. When we repent for things that are not sins, then we need to repent, for distorting the law of God, and therefore, His character.
I suspect it is a nearly universal phenomenon— we look in the mirror and wonder what happened. We are no longer what we once were. Worse still, we don’t recognize ourselves in what we have become. When we are young, we look upon adults with wonder. They seem to us, as children, like a different order of being. They go to bed when they wish. They need not ask permission before eating a cookie, or three. They are utterly uninterested in the important things— baseball cards, breakfast cereal, and Saturday-morning cartoons.
I just assumed that the transformation would not just be sudden, but unmistakable, that there was some switch that at some point would be flipped and I would turn into one of these strange creatures. Before I knew it, I was looking at an old man in the mirror, but somehow the switch never got flipped.
It’s true enough that I went through sundry rites of passage. I took a mortgage, got an education, and worked a job. But inside, I’m still the same kid. I want to make wise decisions. I desire to handle my responsibilities. I seek to be mature in the faith. I have faced adult-sized challenges along the way and have been changed by His grace, but I am what I am.
What I have come to understand, however, is that the process of maturation not only has no switch, but it runs both ways. I need not only to grow older in the faith, but to grow younger as well. Indeed, the best sign that I am in fact growing older is that I am growing younger. Jesus said that unless I become like a child, I will not enter the kingdom of God (Matt. 18:3). The spiritually mature thing to do is to believe my elder Brother.
When I was a child, I did not worry about what I’d eat. I went to bed quite confident my parents would be able to provide for my meals. I did not worry about what I’d wear (though, given that I grew up in the ’70s, perhaps I should have) but woke every morning confident my parents would provide clothes. When I took on adult responsibilities, established my own home and was blessed with children to feed and clothe, I did not cease to be a child. By His grace, I have a heavenly Father. He is fabulously wealthy, owning not just the cattle on a thousand hills but the hills themselves.
Jesus’ message, however, isn’t merely, “Don’t worry about that stuff. Your Father in heaven has it covered.” Instead, the command is to seek first the kingdom of God. In one sense, our anxiety ought to increase. Food and clothes, for most of us anyway, are rather easy things to come by. It is for most of us a small job to secure them. But the kingdom of God? That’s important, big, and not so easy to come by. From this perspective, Jesus is telling us to put down our toys and grow up, to leave the petty and the ephemeral for the weighty and the eternal. That’s all true.
But the same Jesus who told us to put away our childish things that we might pursue His kingdom also tells us that the only way to find it is to have the eyes of a child. We find our way to the kingdom less by the adult work of mapping and climbing and carrying and struggling and more by resting, trusting. The kingdom is found, maturity is reached, when we realize our utter dependence on His grace, not when we manfully make our way but when we ask Him, again by His grace, if He would carry us.
As He carries us, He washes us. He scrapes away the barnacles of our cynicism, scrubs away the stains of our self-sufficiency. And like the strange case of Benjamin Button, with each day we grow older we grow younger, cleaner, purer. This is the path He has laid before us. We traverse it less like heroic explorers and more like a child frolicking in the Hundred Acre Wood.
It was one of those moments when the things I learned in one part of God’s world intersected and harmonized with something I learned in another part, all beautified by artistic genius. I had already come to understand the wisdom of the great Scottish economist Adam Smith in describing the market mechanisms of pricing, supply and demand as God’s invisible hand of providence. I saw the dance described in Leonard Reed’s classic parable, I, Pencil.
I saw, however, by way of contrast, what sin had done to our dominion mandate when reading C.S. Lewis’ description of the creation of Narnia. In his The Magician’s Nephew, book 6 in the proper reading order, Lewis describes a new world’s birth where the ground begins to bubble up like a toasted cheese sandwich, as animals burst forth, shaking the dirt off themselves. We watch as silver and gold coins from our realm drop out of Uncle Andrew’s pockets, only to have a silver and a gold tree pop out of the ground.
Lewis gave us a picture of what fecundity might have looked like before sin opened Pandora’s box of thorns, thistles and the sweat of our brows. We can still, however, get a picture of what we yet have, and what we have lost. Consider farming.
Animals, when you put a boy and a girl together, beget more animals. Seeds, when you drop them into the ground bring forth food. We don’t have to get in the way to make this happen. Even Paul notes that one plants, another waters but the Lord gives the increase (I Cor. 3:6). What an astonishing world He has made.
Why then, if it’s so simple, are we not all prosperous farmers? Because of sin. I spent several hours yesterday sweating under the hot sun spraying our fruit trees. I’ve had to dispose of bag worms, pull weeds and still have to fence in my trees to keep the deer away. Though I don’t yet have chickens I do have a chicken coop, to protect my future chickens from various predators.
There remains sufficient fecundity that our family is out working the land the Lord has blessed us with. There is likewise joy and delight in that work. My office is now in a space shared with shelves bursting with the veggies Lisa grew in our garden and canned last season. As I sprayed yesterday I was serenaded by hundreds of birds as a breeze dealt with the sweat of my brow. This morning we once again had swans on our lake.
I would be a fool indeed to expect to be free in my labors of thorns and thistles. I would, however, be an even bigger fool were I to let thorns and thistles beat me down, lead me to miss the blessing of work. I look to the day when everything will be made right, when we will work free of thorns and thistles, when we find ourselves back in that life-giving garden where we walk with the Lord in the cool of the evening.
It’s a pretty simple concept that we let slip too easily out of our hands, because it reveals our weaknesses. The concept is this- when the Bible warns us against something, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll be tempted to do just that. The point is not that we are so contrarian that when a new rule comes to us we just have to break it. Rather the point is that the Lord does not waste His holy breath on things we are not prone to falling into. He warns us against real dangers, that are dangerous to us.
In His Sermon on the Mount Jesus takes the time to redirect our priorities. He warns us,
“Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?
“So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’” (Matthew 6: 25-31).
There is plenty of encouragement for us here. We’re called to trust our Father, to rest in the glorious truth that we matter to Him. There’s a gentleness in this warning from Jesus, but it is a warning, a rebuke even. We worry about the things we ought not to worry about and fail to worry about what we ought to worry about. Francis Schaeffer suggested that the god of this age is “the god of personal peace and affluence.”
Like our fathers before us, we are masters at melding together the worship of the living God and the worship of the god of the age. Jesus is telling us to stop. He’s telling us to tear down the idols we have set up and serve, and to devote ourselves single-mindedly to the making manifest the glory of the His kingdom, to pursue obedience.
Reformation requires of all of us that we reform our value systems, that we toss overboard that which weighs us down, that we break through every barrier, including those that reside in our hearts. Reformation, in other words, requires that our hearts be re-formed by His Spirit, for His ends and to His glory.
Tonight we continue our look at the monumental, towering book of Romans. All are welcome to our home at 7 est, or you may join us for dinner at 6:15. We will also stream the study at Facebook, RC-Lisa Sproul. We hope you’ll join us.
