Confessions of a Bad Christian

I'm not a very good Christian. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure I’m a much better person now than I was when I first came to know the Lord. Some would say I “got saved” when I was a teenager, but I don’t think I really have been completely “saved” yet. In a lot of ways, I’m still the same old me. Everything that was true of me when I was a kid still seems to ring true even today. Oh sure, there are certain controls on my life that simply weren’t there when I was younger. Internally, I have a persisting drive to please God in all I do. I delight in the law of God in my inner man. And externally, I’m surrounded by the Body of Christ, because of which I am submerged and bathed in an experience of Christ that is tangible and authentic.

Having said all that, however, I am daily confronted with the fact that I’ve got all the same strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and predispositions that I’ve had since as long as I can remember. I still don’t follow directions well. I still love sci-fi and pizza. I still fight the compulsion to talk too much. I’m still a red-blooded male bombarded by advertising, television (plus now the internet), and an unavoidable exposure to modern trends in women’s apparel. Sometimes I wish I lived in the Middle East.

Even my pursuit of God is twisted before it begins. There’s no telling how much of my spiritual life stems from my own desire to feel better about myself. The duplicitousness of my own heart (coupled with the clear testimony of the New Testament) convinces me that an overwhelming portion of what believers offer to God originates, not with the Spirit, but with the flesh. Just like Aaron’s sons who became famous for concocting their own fire for the altar of incense, so do we continually offer “our utmost for his highest,” never thinking that our devotion to God is somehow based in self-interest.

There once was a time when I suffered from an inflated sense of my own spirituality, and of my potential importance in the kingdom of God. Like so many others, I nursed grandiose dreams of deep and mighty moves of God due to my own passion and surrender to the Spirit of God. Evangelical Christian culture inspired such delusional thinking. But then I stepped out of the whole thing. I threw in my lot with a bunch of misfits who put their hope solely in the grace of God rather than in their own flesh. I stepped into a place devoid of a performance mentality, devoid of pressure to produce anything that does not grow spontaneously and naturally out of the heart. Then I discovered something rather traumatic to my ego: I am an unspiritual person.

The ironic thing is that no one would have guessed it. I sure had ME fooled! How many times have I declared to those within earshot that the greatest desire in my life is to KNOW GOD. A noble ambition . . . really. But those of us who so passionately proclaim a longing for intimacy with God have no idea what that entails. It means dying. It means watching as all that you are, all your spiritual endeavors, all your righteousness, and all your rewards are stripped away until there is nothing left of you but a pitiful shell of the person you once were. You must drink deeply of this cup wherein you discover that you, too, are a BAD CHRISTIAN.

§

You see, the thing that nobody seems to get is that there is no common ground between the Old Creation and the New. The two are utterly separate spheres of existence. The kid who likes pizza, science fiction, and talking too much has no part in the kingdom that is Christ. He has his terminus at a cross. I don’t think there are any good pithy explanations for what that means in practical experience, largely because of its existential nature. A personal experience of identifying with the death of Christ will vary drastically from one individual to the next. But it’s the necessary stepping stone (or stumbling block) to this grand and enviable ideal of “knowing God.” I can think of no higher goal than knowing the Lord. I think we would do well to drop a great deal of our typical “Christian” pursuits in favor of this one aim. But be careful what you wish for . . . you just might get it!

Don’t get me wrong: The Father’s passion to see the Old Creation replaced with His Son is more than adequate for the task. He who began that “good work” will Himself complete it . . . in you, no less. But as you join yourself to that great stream of God’s “eternal purpose,” count the cost and be aware that nothing will reach the final destination except the One for whom it was created. There can’t be much of you left if He will be the “All in All.” Yet somehow you take part in it. I don’t think I understand how, but you do anyway. In the meantime you can expect to lose all the baggage you’ve picked up over the years listening to sermons and songs telling you what you should become in order to be “pleasing to God.” And you can also expect to witness the death of your own heroic aspirations to “spiritual greatness” (an oxymoron, no doubt).

So please forgive me if I express distaste for the majority of our Christian preoccupations. I don’t mean to be irreverent, nor am I interested in quenching the legitimately divine “fires” that spring up in the midst of so many man-made ones. It’s just that I’ve grown accustomed to encountering so much of the old creation masquerading as the new. And don’t for one second buy into that visceral reaction that says, “God would never allow so many Christians to be misled.” Consider the centuries of spiritual famine during the age of medieval Catholicism. Or consider the recurring gullibility of even Simon Peter whenever the early legalists insisted that righteousness comes from the works of the Law.

Our error now, as it was then, is that we seem convinced that the Christian Life is about improving ourselves before God. Call it spiritual formation, or the pursuit of holiness, or spiritual growth, or whatever. Whether we realize it or not, it’s all about us. Even our passionate cries to know God, to worship God, and to serve God usually come from this same source. Once you remove the usual motivators for piety, like guilt, pride, or rewards, you’ll find it’s like the wind leaving your sails. Or more to the point, it’s like yeast leaving a lump of dough. Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere!

If an honest and perceptive look at ourselves reveals the “schizophrenic” condition of Romans 7, does that mean that we are not individually exactly where we are meant to be? What exactly is God after, anyway? Romans 8 has the answer: He is conforming the Church to the image of Christ. Not you, the individual. The Church. Notice all the plural references in Romans 8 (unfortunately you have to look them up in the Greek to get the force of them). Even better yet, skip the parenthetical chapters 9-11 and find how in chapter 12 Paul enjoins us to a corporate offering of ourselves to God as a part of the body of Christ. It’s not about your own personal spiritual formation. It’s about the collective conforming of the whole Church to the image of Jesus.

So don’t be surprised if your own personal journey resembles mine. I do not seem to be getting much better as time goes on. But I DO find that I am progressively being built as a living stone into a larger dwelling place of God. Larger, that is, than just me.