God in Our Souls and Christ in Our Flesh

Shortly before I was ordained, I recall being secretly overtaken with titanic feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy.  It seemed to me that most of my seminary friends had fathers and grandfathers who had been missionaries to China or who had pastored during the blitz or the Crimean war. I had no such noble pastoral lineage.

By contrast, I was, theologically speaking, first-generation, “new money”. And what’s more, as I stood at the precipice of full-time ordained ministry, I was convinced that I should have attained some far greater degree of holiness. I wasn’t sure exactly what that was supposed to look like, but it certainly did not look like what I knew to be the murky and stained interior of my own heart.

So, one night, I brought all of this to the Lord in prayer. As I poured out the depths of my unworthiness, I was struck with a new thought. Perhaps, after all, the Lord has seen in me some truly grand, noble quality that I had overlooked. Perhaps there was some hidden attribute that made me worthy of His calling on my life? So I asked Him: “Lord, when you look deep inside of me, when you push past all the tainted and tawdry nature of my heart, when you cut through all my imperfection and brokenness, what do you see?” With tenderness and, I thought, even a degree of humor, He answered very simply, “A sinner.” 

The point was not lost on me.  “A sinner of thine own redeeming,” as it says in the Book of Common Prayer.  Paul puts it this way: “For all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”  But He goes on to say, “Yet now God in his gracious kindness declares us not guilty. He has done this through Christ Jesus, who has freed us by taking away our sins.’  (Romans 3:23-24)

I would like to say that this was the last time I forgot this most basic truth, but that would not be true. As we go on in the Christian life, despite overcoming numerous spiritual obstacles, it is curious how quickly we can fall back into the same trap. We are in good company. Lloyd Ogilvie notes that before the resurrection Peter built his whole relationship with Jesus on a deep desire to show himself to be up to the job of following Him. Peter’s strength, loyalty and courage were, in his mind, the self-generated assets of his discipleship. Peter’s mistake is too often my own: to fall into the belief that my relationship with Jesus is dependent upon my consistency in producing the qualities that I imagine will earn me His approval. Ogilvie concludes that on this basis, “…our whole understanding of Jesus is quickly reduced to a ‘quid pro quo’ of bartered love.”

In contrast, Francis Schaeffer wrote, “True spirituality consists in living every moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.” Of course, we could take this love as a license to go out and live as recklessly as we like with the “free pass” of continual eternal forgiveness. But if we think this way, we can never really know what it cost the Father to forgive us.   In truth, to miss the cost is to miss the measure of His love.

In Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), the father so loved the son that he was willing to take his son’s guilt and shame upon himself and completely cover his debt. Jesus was teaching that through His coming sacrifice, He would take our guilt and shame upon Himself.  Even more than the father in the parable, who lost at least one quarter of his fortune, Jesus’ sacrifice cost the Father everything.

So, what keeps us striving to find our worthiness in our own deeds and efforts? What stops us from just accepting His sacrifice for our sins?  Perhaps we feel that there will be no mercy left for us?  That we have burned all our bridges? That we are habitual returning prodigals?

At one level, if we really understood God’s grace, we would know that this is exactly who we are. And yet in all our unworthiness, His grace runs to us, embraces us, kisses us and celebrates our return! As we come to realize that Jesus has paid the eternal price for every time we run away, it is His grace that calls us to retrace our steps and recover mercy.  Henri Nouwen observed, “God alone can make forgiveness something glorious to remember.”

Did you notice that the prodigal son never got a chance to finish his prepared speech? Is it remotely possible he just couldn’t get the words out?  That faced with this outpouring of undeserved love and forgiveness, he was finally flooded with the reality and enormity of his sin? That overwhelmed by His Father’s love, he could only say, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son”?

We will never know, but that is not the point. This parable invites us to face the true state of our own fallen nature and letting go of our self-righteousness—as well as the bright lights of cheap grace and the despair of unworthiness—to humbly accept the enormity of God’s grace and mercy, the scale of which we can scarcely imagine and simply don’t deserve. The mercy of God is more than simply the action of God’s forgiveness. To quote Brennan Manning, to accept God’s mercy is to find “…God in our souls and Christ in our flesh.”