I had an epiphany during my run this morning, right before an angry motorist tried to kill me while I was crossing the street. This is not a very Christian thing to say, but I loathe Columbus drivers.
And I have four words for that angry motorist who honked his horn and lunged his car at me because I dared to assume I could cross the street while the cross signal was on:
PEDESTRIAN RIGHT OF WAY.
Because I’m a big girl, none of those words started with F. Aren’t you proud of me?
Anyway, here’s my epiphany, and here’s where I got from it, not in that order. Or whatever.
So you guys already know about that Greek word study book I’m cruising through. I’m reading through the Romans part of it now and it’s pretty much just as you’d expect: part dry (but very important) theology where I’m having a hard time staying awake through it, part powerful, life-changing exhortation. That’s just how Romans is. You either get hot or cold in Romans, no in between.
I’m no theologian, but the sense I’ve gotten after reading all this Greek deep-dive stuff is there is no reasonable way you can read Romans without coming to the strong conclusion that everything—literally everything, from the roots of our salvation to the varied outward expressions of Christ in our lives—is about belief (or faith, whichever word you please). It all centers around belief first and foremost. All of it.
Not works: only belief.
It was Romans 1:17 that gave Martin Luther his epiphany about salvation through grace alone, changing the whole world in the wake of it.
This total emphasis on belief in the book of Romans might be a “duh” to some of you. Maybe some of you are Romans scholars. I dunno.
But here’s why this matters practically.
We all have stuff in our lives that we are working through or that we are at least aware of. Dark stuff. Secret sins, or even overt sins. We all have items that we know God would love to purify us from.
And the knee-jerk reaction is to handle that stuff from the outside in. To handle it using activity or boundaries or rules. I don’t go to this or that place. I add this activity or obligation into my life thinking it will help me. If I just change my situation here or there, then I can conquer this.
I’ve had these thoughts, specifically about motherhood, for a long, long time.
“Once the diaper stage ends, I’ll be in a better state emotionally.”
“Once my youngest grows the frontal lobe of his brain a bit more, then there will be more peace around here.”
Or, the one I’m seeing the fruition of right now—my personal favorite: “Once the kids are both in full-time school, then I’ll be able to not dread waking up in the morning.”
So the problem with all those statements is they are both deceptively true and disabusingly false.
They are true because I bless God every day that I don’t have to wipe human excrement off of tiny butts anymore. I bless Him that I really do appreciate hanging out with my kids more as they mature. And, yes, having them in school has been heaven. I feel like a new person—one that isn’t constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown.
But here’s an interesting fact about the kids being in school.
Once they get home, it’s as if I didn’t spend all day away from them, at least as far as my stress level and attitude goes. I get snippy as if I’d been dealing with them all day. I retreat away from them any way I can, just to not be around their stress-inducing intensity.
Having the kids in school has undeniably helped relieve my overall stress load and will therefore probably help me live a longer life, but it hasn’t helped me with my elephant-in-the-room sin issues, like anger, selfishness and striving against God’s obvious will for my life.1
And that’s why this epiphany I had today—the one about belief being the crux of it all, the same one available to anyone and everyone within the warm, instructive bosom of the book of Romans—is so important.
The way humans have always thought to deal with their sin has been to attack it from the outside in. That’s what Adam and Eve were shooting for when they crafted their itchy fig leaf underpants. The Muslim culture attempts to maintain the purity of its men by covering up the beauty of its women. And Cas thinks she won’t be such a powder keg anymore if she simply spends more time away from her kids. All of these are outward attempts to fix inward dysfunction, and none of these tactics have worked or will ever work if we actually want to fix the real problem: that of our sin.
That’s why all it took was one verse in Romans to save Martin Luther, because that one verse, in all its radical glory, elevates belief:
For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith,
as it is written,
‘the righteous shall live by faith.’2
Essentially, if I’m ever going to have victory over the terrible things in my heart, it’s not going to be through the manipulation of my outward circumstances. It will be by grace, not by law. By faith, not by works. By Spirit, not by striving.
BUT, there’s an important nuance to this. If I just leave that above paragraph there as it is, I still feel overwhelmed, just in the opposite sense. My hope of a reasonable, practical answer to the things I’m struggling with evaporates because of the intangible etherealness of it. Sure, yeah, all you need is a complete character overhaul. Get to work. This is your life now. Good luck.
Notice how the second the overwhelm comes, I throw up my hands at the impossible amount of work in the spirit realm that I perceive lies ahead of me. “Great, now I have to do all this invisible soul stuff to help God sanctify me.” We are so human. So works oriented, even when it comes to the things we can’t touch.
Here’s the point: We don’t need more rules to keep us in check or more activities to hide behind. We don’t need law and the Pharisaical tendencies that come with it.
We need belief.
Specifically, belief in the work, love, and intimate closeness of our God. Belief that simply treasuring, interacting with, and consistently yielding to that mysterious intimate closeness—His Spirit—is more than enough to handle the mountain of inward-problems-with-outward-consequences we face.
Don’t get me wrong, changing up one’s outward circumstances has a place. Recovering alcoholics shouldn’t walk into bars and former drug addicts shouldn’t hang out with their druggy friends. Having both my kids in school won’t change me, but at least my cortisol levels are down. These outward things are not without their obvious benefits.
And yes, “faith without works is dead,” as James says. But even the implication of that verse is that real, living faith will naturally produce outward results in our lives. Dead, impotent, wishy-washy faith will not.3
He who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. James 1:6 NKJV
And at some point, despite a series of wise outward changes, we need to ask the alcoholic or the drug addict what it was that they used their substances to escape from in the first place. What was the root of their need to escape reality? At some point, Cas needs to figure out a way to find peace in Christ despite the presence of her children in her life.
And at some point, we need to get to the frustrated place of throwing our hands up and crying, “If a change in circumstance won’t help me, and if muscling through something by my own effort won’t change me, then what will?” So that we can finally realize the answer to that question:
Closeness with God.
Intentional, on-the-ground, all-the-time awareness of the loving Spirit of God and the control over our thoughts, intentions, actions, etc., that he is jealously begging for.4
Trustfully yielding to the life you have today and the convictions and challenges God is sending your way today.
Essentially, saying yes.
Yes is the thing that will save us.
Yes to Jesus. Yes to the Spirit of love, life, and comfort that has merged with yours. Yes to His work, strength, and effort on your behalf and not yours—not even one ounce of yours.
Our battles are won on the inside before they are ever won on the outside. And they aren’t won because we were such good soldiers and ran at them so hard and did such a good job making that victory happen.
They are won when we lay down on that battlefield and die anyway, so that he can live.5
Or, if you please, they are won when we take our weakness as a truth and stop expecting it to be anything else but a check engine light that blinks “LOOK TO JESUS.”
They are won when we stop and He starts. Where we end and He begins. And I’m not necessarily talking about that horrible, exasperated feeling of “coming to the end of yourself.” In Christ, we have permission to come to the end of ourselves at any time. We can surrender to God at any point of the journey and at any point of this day, not just during the worst parts.
You’ll be raised up if you just lie down
Sow your love into [His] fertile ground.6
One of my favorite Bible verses is Isaiah 30:15:
For thus says the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel:
“In returning and rest you shall be saved;
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.”
But you would not
In this chapter in Isaiah, Israel is under the threat of war (again, always), and they decided the best way to handle this was to go ask Egypt for help. Egypt always represents the system of the flesh and the world in scripture—it represents all of life without God. And in this verse, God basically laments that their salvation was right under their noses the whole time, and they missed it. It was in returning to Him, in the massive faith exercise of resting in Him; the quietness and confidence that comes from believing in His love for them. And at the end we have the heartbreaking, “But you would not.”
Israel was so focused on outward help—the easy kind that doesn’t require any faith whatsoever—that they neglected the Presence that set them free from Egypt in the first place.
All they had to do was return and rest. All they had to do was come back to the quietness and confidence of helpless dependence on His love. All they had to do was believe.
Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set His seal on Him.
Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe on Him whom He sent.” -John 6:29, NKJV, emphasis mine
It’s hard to read and/or write about this sort of thing, because there’s absolutely nothing concrete about the advice to rely on an invisible Being for our needs. We are talking about faith here—interactions with the unseen. We are talking about a God who fills every corner of this universe: an unsearchable Being whose ways are past finding out. But when it comes to esoteric subjects like active faith, it helps to remember that God is not interested in giving us the advice we want, but He will always give us the advice we need.
It’s a great mystery how all this actually changes us. But isn’t the development of all fruit and goodness and new life of any variety a mystery?
I leave you with these piercing Galatians verses:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you to live in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel [i.e. “good news”]—which is really no gospel [“good news”] at all. Galatians 1:6-7 NIV
Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit [belief that He is enough to depend on], are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh [works/outward striving]?
…Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard? So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Galatians 3:3, 5-6 NIV, emphasis mine
Ok, so I need to bring an important balance to what you just read.7
I wrote the above post about a month ago and have been sitting on it this whole time due to various time management failures reasons. I’m glad I haven’t sent it out yet because just yesterday I read this amazing portion of one of Wuest’s other Greek word study books (You guys. I’m obsessed.) about the Holy Spirit that I think is an incredibly important element of the above conversation.
This passage is extremely informative but a bit long, so much so that I was almost gonna make it its own post. All that to say, it’s worth your time, for sure, despite the vast quantity of minutes this post has already eaten out of your day.
The passage pretty much speaks for itself so I’m just going to quote it here and let Wuest’s writing do its work. Side note, Wuest was one of the translators who worked on the NASB Bible and spent his whole life writing and teaching about the richness of meaning found in the unique usage of Greek as the original language of New Testament. Dude is legit, as you’ll see in a moment. And yes, I’m presenting this in one huge paragraph because this is exactly how it is represented in the book I got it from. This was written in the early 40’s when people’s attentions spans could handle these long blocks of text LOL.
One cannot say, “Just to realize with joy the Spirit’s passionate longing to control my thoughts, words, and deeds for the glory of the Lord Jesus, and to rest quietly in His energizing and supervising ministry, is all that is necessary.” The Christian life is not a mere “let go and let God” affair. It is a take hold with God business. It is not mere rest in God, an existence somewhat like that of a jelly-fish floating in the warm currents of the Gulf Stream. God is not developing jelly-fish Christians. God wants to develop heroes, Christian men and women of moral stamina and spiritual power. In the physical realm, no one becomes strong by merely eating wholesome food and resting. Exercise is what is needed to change the food-energy into bone and muscle. In like manner, the Christian must exercise himself spiritually if he is to grow strong in the Christian life. That demands the exercise of his free will, the making of choices, the deciding between right and wrong, the saying of a point blank NO to temptation, the constant striving to improve one’s spiritual life, grow in the Christian graces and in Christlikeness. It involves not only the desire to be loving, but the definite endeavor to be loving. It is not merely a trustful rest in the Holy Spirit to make us loving, but a positive exertion of our own will to be loving. It is like bending one’s arm. The strength to bend one’s arm is in that member of the body, but the strength is only potential and not active unless the will power is exerted which will cause that strength to function. Just so, the power of the Holy Spirit is potentially resident in the saint by virtue of His indwelling presence, but it is only operative in that believer when he is yielded to and dependent upon the ministry of the Spirit, and then steps out in faith in the performance of the action contemplated. For instance, when the believer is confronted with a temptation, it is not enough to rest in the Holy Spirit’s ministry to overcome the temptation for us. We must by an act of our own free will say a bold, positive, and fearless NO to it. The instant we move in that direction, the Spirit is there with His wonderful energizing power. Indeed, you will say, that the very start of the step taken in the direction of the act of saying NO to that temptation was motivated by the Spirit. And that is true. Yet it is also true that it is the free action of the believer’s will, and is his responsibility. Right here lies that mysterious, incomprehensible, and not-to-be-understood interaction and mutual response between the free will of man and the sovereign grace of God.
-Untranslatable Riches from that Greek New Testament, by Kenneth S. Wuest, p 111-112, emphasis his.
Even though changes in the outward world are not the answer to our sin issues, they are obviously not without value. For instance, I’m having a bunch of health problems due to the chronic stress of child raising and I absolutely need this change of the kids being in school to heal from these physical problems. But if I think the kids being in school magically takes my fleshy tendencies away, that’s where I would be wrong.
ESV, emphasis mine
Also James 2:22: “You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works.” ESV. Completed, but not begun. It still started with faith all along.
James 4:5
Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations… Ps 46
From a poem by Linford Detweiler (who is in the band “Over The Rhine”) that I read years ago but is no longer on the interwebs
Shout out to my friend, Jen M., who is really gonna appreciate this.