How do you know you’re getting better? The answer you give may well be a potent clue in determining just how sick you are. A miser, for instance, judges his health precisely by how much wealth he has managed to hoard, the very sickness from which he suffers. An anorexic measures her health by how thin she is, how well she is practicing the folly from which she suffers. A scholar judges his health by the size of his library, or how many letters dangle after his name, again indicating the illness rather than the health. One need not, however, find oneself in such unusual company to find much the same problem.
The issue isn’t, of course, health per se but our growth in grace. How do we measure spiritual maturation? If we think spiritual maturity is roughly equal to greater and greater theological precision, as I spent decades believing, we understand neither theology nor spiritual maturity. If we think spiritual maturity is roughly equal to greater and greater success in avoiding the really bad sins, the ones that involve pleasure of one sort or another, then we understand neither temptation, nor spiritual maturity.
It is, of course, a good thing to study theology. It is a good thing as well to fight off temptation. But theology teaches us that we have desperately deceitful hearts. And the greatest temptation we face is always to think too highly of ourselves. Ironically, the more sound we are in our theology, the more we think lowly of ourselves. King David, for instance, was a man after God’s own heart not because he successfully fought off temptation in the case of Bathsheba, but because in response to his sin, he penned Psalm 51.
Which means in turn that the more sick, or rather sinful we understand ourselves to be, the more healthy, or rather spiritually mature, we may well be. John adds this symptom as well. He argues throughout his first epistle that what separates the children of God from the sons of the devil is this, that we have love one for another. What defines us vis a vis the world around us is that we love our brothers in Christ, while they hate us, and each other.
These two symptoms, however, come together in the end. The more conscious we are of our own sins, the less conscious we are of the sins of our brothers. The more aware we are that our hearts are deceitful, the less likely we are to trust our judgmental judgments against our brothers, the more likely we are to think no evil as love calls us to do in I Corinthians 13. As we own our sin, remembering of course that in Christ we are beloved of the Father, then we better love the rest of those who in Christ are beloved of the Father, our brothers and sisters.
Want to know how well you are? Look at your neighbor in the pew. Is your first thought, “How can I be expected to be gracious to someone like that?” Or is it instead, “How astonishing that they should be so gracious to me, a sinner!” And after you fail this test, repent, believe, and ask for the grace to know your sin more and to love your brother more.