Previous essays in an ongoing series on grace in Christianity:
We struggled through some intimidating “God-words” — justification and sanctification — in my previous essay, and in the process I lost both of my regular readers, leaving but a few wandering insomniacs whose Ambien prescription had just run short. For those now drifting back, whose eyes are just now unglazing, I touched on something of how Christianity works — or doesn’t, for many who have tread its well-worn path or seek to understand it better.
If nothing else, I hope that those who endured my irreverent review gained at least a glimpse of the uniqueness of the Christian faith. Christianity is not merely another framework of moral codes by which to live. It is not comprised solely of the teachings of a charismatic leader, urging compliance to please or placate God or promulgating some hidden wisdom. It asserts at its very heart an outrageous claim: that those who relinquish their right to self-centered autonomy by submitting to God through the specific and exclusive portal of Christ will become judicially guiltless before their Creator. It further claims—perhaps even more outrageously—by this act to re-create the person so submitting, in a manner so thorough and profound that the individual can no longer be thought of as the same person who existed prior to that moment of transformation.
Yet, if these claims are true, if this transformation is as radical and profound as its teachings and proponents assert, why then are those who lay hold of this conviction seemingly so little different from others who have not undergone this metamorphosis? If Christians are utterly transformed in the depth of their beings, why do they struggle and fail so often to be outwardly transformed as they should inevitably be by such a tectonic shift of the soul?
It would be foolish and presumptuous for me to pretend that my answers are simple; they are not. What I do have is experience — the experience of many years of walking the Christian life, with stunning successes which proved all too fleeting, and disastrous failures which made a mockery of the high calling and lofty precepts of the convictions I hold dear. And I have shared this journey and experiences with many others, both past and present, whose paths, while wildly different in particulars, are indistinguishable at their core.
What exactly is the nature of this transformation, this re-creation, which lays claim to a man in such mysterious manner? It is perhaps best described by what it is not.
It is not simply a change in thinking, a new perspective, a different set of opinions, or a new worldview. If anything, the mind is the last bastion of resistance to its influence, and often the greatest enemy of the change needed to transform the whole of one’s being.
It is not simply an emotional experience. Although emotions may be powerfully affected, they often serve to inhibit or distract from true progress, and are notoriously unreliable as guides to its course.
It is not simply a change of the will, a setting of a new direction and discipline to achieve new goals and improve one’s life. The will indeed must be conquered, shackled, and broken like a wild stallion to suit the purposes of this new master. The will becomes a servant – rebellious, recalcitrant, resistant, remorseless, fighting its new overlord at every turn.
It is not simply a change of heart — although the heart lies closest to the seat of change and senses its arrival before all else.
It is perhaps best described as a genesis; an arid fountainhead bursting forth with fresh spring water; an ancient Stygian chamber shot through with dazzling shafts of light; a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the heart. In the soul of man, there is a primordial recess, a silent sarcophagus that is unheralded and unseen, that awakens, like the burst of new flora at the end of winter, when the dawn first breaks.
This is the experience of the new creation, but it is much more than a mere renewal. It is a force of sedition with an unassailable foothold in a hostile land, seeking to undermine and overturn the tyranny of self with the sword of grace.
We are now at war. “I have come, not to bring peace, but the sword.”
The effects are both immediate and often profound. There is a new vision, a grasp of things formerly hidden, a new light disclosing much which was cloaked in darkness, a profound and unbounded joy of discovery, and purpose, and optimism. We glory in the glint of sunlight reflecting off the helmets of our soldiers, marching in perfect unison, their colorful regalia stirring our hearts with visions of triumphant victory.
The reality is soon discovered to be starkly different. The cratered carnage of the battlefield, littered with the detritus of battles fought bravely but foolishly, sobers the spirit and saps the strength. The victory we hoped to be swift and painless now seems pyhrric if not pointless. Yet the failures are themselves at the point of the sword — they are, paradoxically, the means to triumph.
When a man becomes new in his spirit, he has engaged the very power of God in an irrevocable union whose outcome will be the full restoration of the purpose and relationship intended — by design — between the Creator and His creation. The love that is necessary for such a relationship must be entirely free, and hence, the will and actions of men must be left unfettered and without coercion by God. This will, long subsumed in the service of self, must ultimately be turned into harmonious submission to the will of God. The redeemed will desires, in freedom, the full integration of the new man into the wholeness and purpose of God’s design.
Despite the profound inner change that comes from submission to God and our judicial pardon, the mind and will are still immersed in a toxic brew of lifelong slavery to self. We have years of destructively pursuing that which seems right to us — of deceiving ourselves and others about our true thoughts and motives; of addictions and obsessions and hardened habits which have served to mitigate the pain and emptiness which our ego-enlargement have ultimately wrought. We lie to cover shame; we react in anger, resentment, and rage to cover fears: fears of exposure and moral nakedness; fears of rejection; fears of failure; fears of existential insignificance. The sex, the booze, the pursuit of money and prestige, the materialism — all are exploited in the search of integration and meaning, all leading only to more emptiness, more pain, more meaninglessness — and more of the same behaviors, over and over, endlessly.
Before our transformation, we are in a sense of one mind: this is the only life we know, the only tools we have at hand. Our inner and outer selves are on the same page, despite the story not going anywhere and the final chapter appearing grim.
Subsequent to the transformation of our inner selves, the old contrivances no longer find consonance within; they find, instead, dis-ease. Our spirits are forging forward on a separate journey, and there is increasing tension between a mind and a will committed to failed, destructive solutions, and an inner being seeking truth and wholeness.
We react to the inner discord our old life engenders with the tools we know best: we try, using knowledge, and effort, and will power, and discipline, to change the thoughts and actions we now know to be destructive. And we succeed — at first.
The behavior changes, but the thoughts and desires persist. The appearance improves, but the inner demons remain. If anything, they grow stronger, as each failure is a new victory for an old life. The struggle is draining and painful, disheartening and exhausting, as old habits persist and even thrive. Each failure brings renewed commitment; each relapse brings new resolve. With each sortie, stalemate. Again. And again. And again.
There can be no resurrection of the dead until the dead be shown incapable of resurrection.
The mind and the will, unaided by grace, have no power to conquer the forces which bind them. They must be broken. There can be no resurrection of the dead until the dead be shown incapable of resurrection.
There comes a point in this long and unproductive journey where a juncture is reached. The wheels are coming off the car, and we’ve tired of pushing the pedal ever harder. It is a moment of choice: to resign ourselves to our old life, embrace our failure, and drown out the quiet pleadings of that inner voice; or submit, yet again, broken, falling headlong into the arms of grace, which alone can conquer that which is vastly larger than our feeble wills and darkened minds can overcome.
The sword of grace has slayed yet another stronghold of the old life. Another small parcel of the tyranny of self has been repurchased. We have been given what we could not gain by our own efforts, regardless of how determined we have been.
Cheer up. There are many more such battles ahead.
How then do we appropriate this liberating grace, this victory through surrender? There is no formula, for formulas are the haven of fools. But there are answers. The answers, I have found, are always simple — and never easy.
