1)"Christ died for your sins."
2)"The power of the Cross saves you from guilt."
3)"You don't need to feel bad anymore, Jesus sacrificed himself for you to take the penalty of your sin in your place."
These are common things we hear in our Christian circles. They're also true and fundamental to the Christian faith. But I dare to say that sometimes these answers aren't relevant to the questions people have on their hearts. These facts do matter and are extremely important. But people just aren't inquiring about them.
Statements #1, 2, and 3 assume that the question on the listener's heart is "How do I get saved from the guilt of sin?". But quite honestly, this is not the immediate question on people's hearts a lot of the time. Especially for the Christian who knows that he/she is not guilty and is innocent in God's eyes if one accepts Jesus as Lord and Saviour. The question in a lot of people's hearts, I dare to say, is "How do I get saved from the power of sin?". A lot of our Christian resources kill tree after tree printing books about the first question while neglecting very concrete help for the second one. I am not saying resources should stop in addressing the first question. However, I do think that there needs to be a balance of resources that focus on both questions, and that a disproportionate production of one at the neglect of the other is a dangerously imbalanced state for the Church to be in.
Proportionally speaking, we have enough books that talk about Romans 7. But, I think, very few books comprehensively, practically, and crisply talk about how Romans 8 can be concretized in one's own life, without resorting to mere "flowery" abstract images and pretty words about sanctification that have no concrete anchoring in the hour-to-hour "mundane" and "everyday" existence that comprises most of our lives outside of our Sunday services and 1 hour devotions from Monday to Saturday (which are good things in themselves).
I am going to be very blunt.
A lot of things we do and promote don't change us to be more Christ-like. I'm not talking about external behaviour modification so that the external forms of our behaviours fits in with what Jesus' external behaviour would do. I'm talking about a divine metamorphosis in the deepest core of one's being so that one's deepest insides where Christ resides in undergoes a "holy mutation of one's spiritual DNA" so that one's fundamental desires are changed from Galatians 5:19-21 into Galatians 5:22-23. As Dallas Willard says, just changing the external behaviour of a person from "unrighteousness" to "righteousness" really doesn't make one more righteous any more than tying apples to the branches of a live orange tree makes that orange tree turn into an apple tree.
I am not trying to say this with a critical spirit, I am just trying to save people (at least those who are willing to consider what I have to say with an open mind) some time, heartache, and disappointment. Based on my observations, research, and personal experience:
-just listening to the best sermons on "living for God's glory" won't produce this type of change
-just doing an hour devotional every day won't produce this type of change
-just going to good God-glorifying Christian conferences won't produce this type of change
-just reading good orthodox/exegetically and hermeneutically sound theological textbooks won't produce this type of change
-just having group inductive Bible studies/group discussions on "the Cross" won't produce this type of change
-just playing and singing worship songs all day won't produce this type of change
Ouch. Someone had to say it
What, then, will produce this kind of change?
Hour-by-hour die-hard discipleship to Jesus Christ that consists of training to live like Jesus more hardcore than an Olympian trains for the Olympics.
Training to fast like Jesus. Training to meditate on scripture like Jesus. Training to pray like Jesus. Training to engage in solitude like Jesus. Training one's thoughts, feelings, will, physical body, and social life to become more like the thoughts, feelings, will, physical body, and social life of Jesus. Training to listen to the Father's voice every minute like Jesus. Training to be filled with the Holy Spirit every minute like Jesus.
I've learned that entire universities should be erected based on the pursuit of experiential knowledge of Christ-likeness. There are so many categories of discipline in the quest of following Christ, some of which are mentioned above (e.g. praying like Jesus prayed), which could be further broken down into more specifics within the Christ-like discipline (e.g. Protestant prayer, Catholic prayer, Eastern Orthodox prayer), which could then further lead to specialization in the sub-field (e.g. how to learn to literally pray without ceasing so that one calls upon God literally as often as one takes a breath, even while one is sleeping [it is possible I have learned!]). After a while, people can come up with their own "PHD"s in Christlikeness that will be their unique contribution to the greatest pursuit ever pursued. There could also be interdisciplinary subjects within this university of Christlikeness (e.g. how to love God with the will while engaging in fasting).
"But why go through all the trouble" one would ask? Aren't we saved by God's grace already? Yes, we are. But returning to the questions above, I would say that although God's grace has saved us from eternal damnation in hell, if we are passive, we will continue to be harassed, self-destructive, and miserable the rest of our lives on earth, everyday being tormented by the self-destructiveness of the POWER of sin.
Sin is self-destructive. It is very foolish to pat oneself on the back to think "I'm not sinning as much as he/she is in this area." Why is it foolish? Because sin is self-destructive precisely. If one guy's stabbing himself with a swiss-army knife, and is happy that in comparison to the guy standing next to him, who is stabbing himself with a butcher knife, he is not "that bad", he is foolish. Who cares what you're stabbing yourself with? The point is, you're stabbing yourself and causing yourself pain! Another vivid image of how ridiculous this is would be to the analogy of sticking our face deeply in animal feces (which is what sin is like). If I were to think I'm "better" than you because I'm sticking my face in human manure rather than you, who is sticking his face in horse manure and pride myself upon that, how insane would I be? In reality, who cares? The point is we're both disgustingly sticking our faces in fresh manure.
As Dallas Willard once said, one of Satan's tricks is to get us to think how "miserable" die-hard discipleship to Jesus would be like and at the same time get us to forget how miserable we are right now in our present state.
Jesus said he came to give us life to the full, to give it to us abundantly. He said that all who come and "yoke" themselves with him experience the restful, gentle "easy yoke". This is not just empty rhetoric without any concrete effects. Jesus doesn't just throw in pretty words without substance. He was either lying, insane, or he was actually telling the truth.
Let's just take 2 examples to illustrate the kind of life Jesus is talking about here:
1) Worrying. We Christians know in our minds that we shouldn't worry about things outside of our control. We have this "truth" in our heads. However, when we come across a "worrisome" event in our lives (e.g. possibly getting fired from work, possibly arriving late for something important, possibly losing a lot of money etc.), just mechanically reminding ourselves "not to worry about things outside of our control that are in God's hands" is, for all practical purposes, virtually useless. We just keep worrying, it affects our sleep, our well-being, our ability to relaxfully enjoy things we normally enjoy. The bottom line is that the problem is not an ignorance problem, namely a "lack of data". The problem is also not a lack of on-the-spot willpower. The problem is a lack of training. And the perpetual lack of training leads to ever-exacerbating self-destructiveness that spirals messier and messier by the month.
2) Caring about what others think more than what God thinks. We Christians know we shouldn't do this. We have this "truth" in our heads. However, when we come across an incident where we immediately become embarassed, nervous, and care immensely about what others think of us (e.g. being at a social event where we are publicly misunderstood for something "wrong" we did which we know we were really not at fault, being criticized by others whether justly or unjustly, talking to attractive members of the opposite sex) just mechanically reminding ourselves of these truths in our heads is, for all practical purposes, completely useless. Once again, the problem is not an ignorance problem, or a will-power problem. But a lack of training. And like the above example, a perpetual lack of training leads to ever-exacerbating self-destructiveness that also spirals into messier and messier patterns by the month.
I'll say it because someone has to say it. Based on my research, observation, and personal experience the life that is not hardcore in hour-to-hour discipleship to Jesus is a miserable life (in the long run that is). No wonder Jesus labeled that sort of life a life of "weary" and "burden" (Matthew 11:28).
Practically, why is this the case? There are many angles to answer this question. But the one I'll tackle in this entry is the neglect of being aware of and training one's "emotional programming". Emotional programming is the "fixed system of emotional responses to events that have been habituated over a process of established patterns that run regardless of one's immediate conscious consent".
You see, if we don't control our emotional programming, our emotional programming will control us. In order to temporarily enjoy the positive opinion of others, we must "put the opinion of others on the throne of our hearts" aka care about what they think of us. But very quickly and surreptitiously, this originally innocent looking ruler of social opinion turns into an autocratic dictator who refuses to be dethroned off the throne of our hearts whether democratically, or through forceful revolution. It makes our heart care about what others think, without being able to "turn social opinion off" and not care what others think of us during times where we're being looked down upon. And this evil dictator soon takes over the whole regime of structural emotional programming of the system into a totalitarian government that oppresses, destroys, annihilates, leaving everything in disorder.
Our emotional programming will either become conformed to the world's emotional programming or the emotional programming of Jesus Christ.
Just like a professional athlete. If we are strenuous in training/discipline, then during "showtime"/critical moments performance will be easy. But if we go easy on the training/discipline, then during "showtime"/critical moments performance will be strenuous.
If we just spend 1 hour a day in our devotions, while the other 23 hours are spent "letting the animal of our emotions loose" without discipline, then it will definitely conform to the patterns of this destructive world. But if we train ourselves to proactively interpret every situation and circumstance we are in as a God-engineered, ordained, and orchestrated event that is customarily designed to make us more Christlike for our own good by giving us an opportunity to uniquely conform us to Christ-likeness tailored to our personal situation, then we will slowly, indirectly, but surely, bit by bit, conform our emotional programming to the emotional programming of Christ through disciplines such as this. Once we become so accustomed to training in this aspect of Christlikeness, we will eventually be able to react to have the spontaneous emotional reactions to all types of events that Christ had when he encountered similar stuff during his years on earth (he was sound asleep on a boat in the middle of a raging storm that made his disciples scream their heads off [I have not reached this level yet, and am extremely far from it. However, I am closer to it than I was last year])
But if we fail to take charge of our emotional programming and let them destructive programs run at high-speed unchecked (e.g. interpret the majority of our daily events the way an actual atheist does), our naturally destructive emotions will get locked into a fixed unhealthy pattern, much like a train locked into a set path of tracks, headed straight towards collision, mercilessly bulldozing anything that is in its path (e.g. panic on negative outcomes and try to secure acceptable outcomes with our own finitude without God's sovereignty and goodness in the picture and worry whether our efforts are adequate in securing what we self-absorbedly want). Someone's general emotional trajectory is not that hard to predict if one knows how one has been arranging (or neglecting to arrange) the train tracks of one's emotional programming during the "23 hours outside of quiet time" for the average Christians, and I guess the whole 24 hours for the average non-Christian. We will sooner or later encounter a crisis and literally have an emotional train wreck.
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