2023-01-03 A Meditation on Living it Out

“Therefore let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God,” (Heb 6:1 ESV)

Mind races and there is a call to reckon with a question: what exactly got us here, to the front line, to the battlezone, to the whiz-bang of explosives overhead and the clatter of weaponry, certain and prepared individuals flanking us, in our own glance to the left and to the right.

It was a call to go deep and all-in, a call to labor in a heavenly glimmer and adjustment: we are adjusted to rely on Christ, not on ourselves. We are adjusted to winsome countenance and completed body, because He knows our status as Original Sinners.

We are adjusted to a grin knowing nothing we say can “fix” the sins called Original Sin. For that liminal moment, we are heavy in Christ and light in our own goodness. This permeates any heroic outlay or idea expressed to the Company: all is drenched in Original Sin, but where we were proud He is already turning that to His Glory. Where we were self-advancing, He is already making that an evangelistic step forward. Where we are trying to tell someone else how to live, He is bending over backwards to nurture them in that light called Original Depravity on display. Heal thyself, and turn and heal thy interlocutor.

For we started out fairly enough: Christianity teaches us a certain accomplished deed, a certain buzz, a certain elation: we are buzzed and elated and accomplished in the shade of our confession. Sin no longer has dominion. Good deeds are laden with Original Sin: imposing of our own interpretation on another person’s experience, fussing about secondary matters and forgetting the call to stand up for the Gospel, finding strange ways of outletting our wishes for each other. So the buzz is a place to dwell in, a peace offering to our neighbor, a prolonged wake of the churning forward ministry of Gospel truth.

As we fuss this way and that, there is a fruit easily forgotten: the fruit of desiccated deeds, dead works, immediately nurtured and blessed via a Spirit called Grace. That is, we are elated as our plans and policies and ideas can be formed in the shade or light of the confessional, that is, in the certainty that sin permeates all plans until they are made out to be drenched in a kind of sin that Holy Spirit does forgive.

Only converted eyes understand the divine beauty and desire for the genuine stories of those whom we come across: all is met with gladness, the simplicity of someone else’s testimony paying credit to a God of the community, of the engagement, of the listening. For, found in the din of church talk there is the reality of bending over backwards to understand where someone else’s experience lies. It is almost comical, how servile Jesus is to the average man or woman, maintaining integrity by going down a seeker’s path hardly expressible in words. That is, words that explain do injustice to the determination to find and to succor and to live into a community together.

Then to the question: what got me here? It was that inspired moment that infiltrates our otherwise clutching and grasping lives. It was a moment when we truly were available to the Spirit of Grace, truly seeing with eyes unclouded, truly lacking in the pride that accompanies any intentional and planned spiritual outlay. In some regard I was making that earnest attempt to hear what this sinner before me is saying. In some regard I was trusting that life is eternal. In some regard I was honoring elder or parent, on faith, not with any cold calculation. In some regard I was convicted: even good deeds we only partly complete; a fire hose of other ideas is given us, not to mock us but to humble us: the reformed sinner is certainly prodigious, but they are not as prodigious in good deeds as they might be! Thus and so, God humbles us whatever “language” we have chosen for the day. If our language be good deeds, He points out our insufficiency in that language, not denying that we had good intentions, only pointing out that we could have done more (“Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” (Jn 21:25)). When we are feeling defeated, He immediately flatters us that Sin in body and deed does beckon to Holiness, to the Holy Spirit, to recalling all and every idea, vision, and dream sent our way; at least, recalling sufficient to know the goodness is His and not our own.