Editorial – Saved to be Spent
Holiness is not ‘done with mirrors’ – it’s undone with mirrors. Be sure that your forgiveness never flows backwards!
“I have forgiven her and that makes me the better person” – I was saddened to hear this statement from the lips of a young Christian woman recently. Sadly, this is not untypical of the twisted views held by many Christians today whose ‘faith’ is influenced more by their peers on Facebook than by God’s Word. Her confident self-assertive statement would no doubt have impressed her expensive ‘life-coach’ – but not her Saviour… Her self-justification is as deadly to her eternal welfare as if she had not forgiven…
Her ‘forgiveness’ is terrifyingly false. She has not, in fact, forgiven anyone if she needs to use the offender to boost her self-esteem – that’s ‘justification by blame’. She feels justified because… the other woman is not! The deception becomes apparent when we realise that her ‘forgiveness’ is actually flowing backwards into her own credit balance, leaving the supposedly forgiven woman still in her debt!
We Christians are not self-made by our own moral superiority; we are made by the kind mercy of God – and by no other means. This is school-book Christianity – so basic that any Christian should understand ‘justification by faith’. Yet there she was, all kitted out with the latest worship songs, comfortable in her large ‘successful’ Christian social circle – and feeling superior to someone who needed her forgiveness! “If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” (Matthew 6:23).
When the letter to the Galatian churches becomes urgently pertinent to today’s believers, the modern Church is showing clear signs of ‘advanced regression’. When Paul wrote to the Galatian churches he had planted on his first missionary journey (across what we now know as Turkey), he was steamed up that the believers had been ‘bewitched’ so readily by the false ideas of legalists and he pronounced a curse on the peddlers of such false teaching. Don’t blanche… Only the true Gospel confers a blessing, so any false ‘gospel’ is a thief and comes with a curse inbuilt. Paul was merely voicing the reality that today’s ‘nice’ Christianity would prefer to leave unspoken.
Hideous similarity…
If the young woman of our story was familiar with Paul’s teaching to the Galatian believers her understanding was well concealed. His fiery passion to protect the young churches even dispenses with the usual greetings and salutations of his other letters. Even when he wishes ‘grace and peace’ to them, he’s attacking the false teachers. If you can earn your good moral standing with God through being circumcised (or forgiving others) or any other good deeds of your own, then “Christ died for nothing!” (Gal 2:15 – Phillips), thus you nullify the grace of God by your own ‘merit’. But if, as Paul shows, it is through “being justified by faith” that we are “at peace with God” (Galatians 5:1), then you have no peace with God if you are justified at the expense of anyone other than Jesus! Our Christian righteousness is the gift of God (1 Corinthians 1:30; Ephesians 2:8), not the accumulated achievement of our good works. If anything will lift today’s Churches out of their hideous similarity to the surrounding culture it is this nuclear truth. Nothing similar to this heavenly doctrine exists in the world; in fact, it is completely against society’s natural concept of religion.
Natural religion (religion as generally understood) works on the ‘nothing for nothing’ assumption. Consequently, divine favour and the acquisition of things money can’t buy (like eternal happiness) depend on personal moral performance. The underlying assumption is that it is somehow possible to make God the debtor in the relationship; that by your moral accomplishments you accrue ‘something on account’, a debt that you can call in from heaven’s bank. The concept of salvation as a GIFT, wholly undeserved and entirely an act of divine mercy was offensive to the religionists of the first century – and it is no less offensive to their 21st century heirs. By nature, religious people assume that access to heaven is gained by those who are ‘deserving’. By contrast, Jesus taught that our good deeds glorify not ourselves but our Father in Heaven; they are evidence of his mercy to us, not of our having earned His admiration!
Let’s not be too quick to consider this subject so basic as to be unworthy of our more mature Christian minds – because there’s an aspect to this ‘faith vs. works’ conflict that cuts to the heart of our sanctification. We know that sanctification – the ‘holying’ of the believer, a shorthand for being ‘conformed to the likeness’ of God’s Son (Romans 8:29) – is God’s will for every believer (1 Thessalonians 4:3), but do we stop to consider how radical are the implications? The life generated by the indwelling Holy Spirit is life in the opposite direction to our default. It’s the difference between the outflowing, land-blessing, nation-refreshing Galilee and the take-all, give-nothing-back sterility of the Dead Sea. It’s the difference between the self-expending life of Jesus and the self-preserving life we all live by nature.
The danger to the young Galatian churches from legalism was that it peddled a religion which made believers preoccupied with their own whiteness; a religion in which personal spiritual development was an end in itself. The nagging underlying question of all such religion is ‘how am I doing?’ Peace with God is always something to be achieved, never enjoyed. As Warren Wiersbe says: “Law says ‘Do!’, grace says ‘Done!’” “There is no peace for the wicked” precisely because they are too proud to receive it as God’s gift of mercy to the ungodly
Economical mercy?
Let’s return to the young Christian woman whose fake forgiveness flows back towards her own credit with no blessing whatever for the one who is supposedly forgiven. We are forced to one of two conclusions – EITHER she does not have the Spirit of Christ (in which case she is no Christian – Romans 8:9) OR she is grieving the Holy Spirit by being as economical with her mercy as God has been extravagant with His… Clearly she feels ‘loved little’ by God and therefore ‘loves little’ – both her God and her debtors. (Luke 7:47).
This speaks right to the heart of Christian sanctification. It is the work of the Holy Spirit who indwells every true Christian to encourage and empower both our growth into the character of Christ and our testimony to His Gospel. In the Kingdom of God testimony is not something separate from character – and the primary ‘characteristic’ of the Lord Jesus is SELF-EXPENDITURE. This is why the worldly notion of holiness – where the supposedly ‘holy’ person withdraws from the world to preserve their own purity and deepen their own communion with God – is nothing more than a caricature of true holiness. Jesus left His glory and the deepest possible communion with the Father to earn Himself the nickname of Friend of Sinners, to be seen constantly in ‘all the wrong company’ and to take upon His own person all the filth and darkness of humanity’s sinful rebellion against God – without once devaluing His holiness. In true holiness He spent Himself for us sinners to bring all who trust Him back to God (1 Pet 3:18) – and He predicted that, for anyone who became His disciple, the entire flow of life would change to match His own: “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.’” We are meant to take special note of the word ‘out’… (John 7:38)
He could have promised us personal fulfilment, moral excellence, spiritual maturity – all the things we, by nature, would put to the credit side of our ledger. But He didn’t promise these because He had planned something far better: His own righteousness as the gift of God. It’s shocking that many Christians think God’s amazing grace extends no further than the forgiveness of our sins; but God has done infinitely more than clear our debit balance, He has added to our empty account the glorious righteousness of His Son! Let the Scriptures testify: “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:21-24) “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Corinthians. 1:30).
His promised ‘rivers of living water’ relate not to our personal development, but to our personal expenditure. ‘Out’ is the only direction that bears witness to His beating heart within the believer. Such a little word, but still fit to describe the natural direction of infinite love: “out of his fulness (literal) we have all received grace upon grace” (John 1:16)
Our 12th Foundations gathering this autumn has taken the theme ‘Holiness: The Great Disconnect?’ It’s a wonderfully plastic sort of title that permits several equally valid meanings. Is holiness the great deficit of today’s impotent church because of the ‘disconnect’ with her Head, Jesus Christ? Probably. Does true holiness require disconnection from the world? Yes indeed. Is the disconnect negative or positive? Both. Holiness requires disconnection from the world for the world so that the children of God can’t be mistaken for Babylonians and the true God can’t be misrepresented as a ‘Great Pal in the Sky’ whose cosmic dementia now enables Him to smile indulgently on every abuse of His rainbow – amongst the multiple tantrums of our rebellious nations…
Tsunami of kindness
When the Church – when we – are rightly connected to Our Head, out of our heart (His heart within us) will come a vast and uneconomical expenditure of every blessing we ever receive. Every self-interested little dam within us will burst with irresistible compassion. Rivers of life, overflowing their banks; catching the guilty unawares with unexpected and unearned mercy – a glorious torrent of heavenly surprise as the God of Grace is seen to favour the guilty who need Him. This tsunami of kindness need be feared only by the self-righteous – their flimsy houses of fake forgiveness and mirrored walls for self-admiration will be swept away in an instant; their eternal future too terrible and their earthly ‘rewards’ too fragile to make the journey with them…
God forbid that we who have been forgiven so much would practise forgiveness that flows backwards to our own pathetic little credit. The ‘better person’ is a complete fake – a fake risking eternal loss. The only Better Person is the Lord Jesus, the Holy Son of God – the One whose holiness can only be seen in its outflow through His Church. May God give our nations a newly revived Church ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’ – preoccupied with Jesus, ripped out of her sterilising self-interest and glad to spend and be spent to make Him known…